somnambulist
Member
- Joined
- Jul 5, 2012
- Messages
- 15
Many fantasy books seem to do a particularly bad job at accurately portraying the complexity of human motivation and behaviors.
The main example of this failure being in the writing of woman. It’s either a weak *I need to be rescued, I am entirely defined by relationship with a male character* mary sue plot device. Or it’s this *I am entirely defined by my interactions with male characters but I’m really strong and independent you know, and men are idiots and feminism and stuff yeah?*
Sure there are many examples of excellent, skilfully written females but these don’t seem to be the praised ones. Instead people gush over the ‘strong woman’ extreme, when this is in fact just as shallow and unrealistic as love interest prop device. I’m just noticing a trend of this polarisation in fantasy books, and it’s representative of a larger problem – that in general fantasy authors struggle with (or chose not to), write convincingly subtle human interactions.
It started with Tolkien, whose strict good versus evil, boy scout adventure did this deliberately - it was part of the poetic and artistic feeling to his world, built from the heroic poetry he studied. But in successive books the artistic poignancy was dropped, and the unreal characterisation remained.
On the opposite end of the spectrum to the school of Tolkien, you have ‘gritty’. ‘Fantasy with the edges left on’. Except it again fails in more or less the same way, particular in terms of woman. Instead of portraying people with the unsavory realities left in, we have this hyper grimness. Where the characters are again absurd caricatures, but this time in the opposite way.
No other genre suffers like this to the same extent. Sure there are bad books in all genres. And that isn’t to say simply because the characters are unrealistic that the book is bad – sometimes a deliberate device. And sure there are there are many ‘grey’ fantasy books: GRRM here doing an outstanding job in appreciating human subtlety, but even he slips into bizarre extremes. When authors get what I would consider it to be ‘right’, it seems this was simply part and parcel of good writing, and in these cases brought from influences outside of fantasy. For example: China Mieville, because despite having crazy plot, setting and non-human entities, the interactions between characters and their behavior never descends into this trite falseness I find widespread across the genre.
Fantasy has something of a reputation for childishness, seen widely as being second-rate to other genres. Maybe this is the reason? Or is it only limited to a minority of bad examples? Or maybe it’s a defining feature of fantasy that people appreciate for some reason, and therefore not a bad thing at all?
The main example of this failure being in the writing of woman. It’s either a weak *I need to be rescued, I am entirely defined by relationship with a male character* mary sue plot device. Or it’s this *I am entirely defined by my interactions with male characters but I’m really strong and independent you know, and men are idiots and feminism and stuff yeah?*
Sure there are many examples of excellent, skilfully written females but these don’t seem to be the praised ones. Instead people gush over the ‘strong woman’ extreme, when this is in fact just as shallow and unrealistic as love interest prop device. I’m just noticing a trend of this polarisation in fantasy books, and it’s representative of a larger problem – that in general fantasy authors struggle with (or chose not to), write convincingly subtle human interactions.
It started with Tolkien, whose strict good versus evil, boy scout adventure did this deliberately - it was part of the poetic and artistic feeling to his world, built from the heroic poetry he studied. But in successive books the artistic poignancy was dropped, and the unreal characterisation remained.
On the opposite end of the spectrum to the school of Tolkien, you have ‘gritty’. ‘Fantasy with the edges left on’. Except it again fails in more or less the same way, particular in terms of woman. Instead of portraying people with the unsavory realities left in, we have this hyper grimness. Where the characters are again absurd caricatures, but this time in the opposite way.
No other genre suffers like this to the same extent. Sure there are bad books in all genres. And that isn’t to say simply because the characters are unrealistic that the book is bad – sometimes a deliberate device. And sure there are there are many ‘grey’ fantasy books: GRRM here doing an outstanding job in appreciating human subtlety, but even he slips into bizarre extremes. When authors get what I would consider it to be ‘right’, it seems this was simply part and parcel of good writing, and in these cases brought from influences outside of fantasy. For example: China Mieville, because despite having crazy plot, setting and non-human entities, the interactions between characters and their behavior never descends into this trite falseness I find widespread across the genre.
Fantasy has something of a reputation for childishness, seen widely as being second-rate to other genres. Maybe this is the reason? Or is it only limited to a minority of bad examples? Or maybe it’s a defining feature of fantasy that people appreciate for some reason, and therefore not a bad thing at all?
