more bitchery time
2005-11-22

I'm tired of bitching about only one genre. So, although it's been done, here goes with all the horrific elements of... fantasy. Christ, I have bad taste.
1. Bad guy = pervert. In fact, bad girl = pervert, since that seems to happen more often than not. Usually the male baddie is a pedo, and the female baddie commits willful incest/has frequent sex/um, had sex. This is certainly threatening, if you think that "Darling Nikki" is a description of the darkest possible point of human civilization through song. Thank you for thinking up creative ways to confront the problem of evil, fantasy authors. I'm just going to go back and read Swordspoint again...
2. And on the other hand... the perfect protagonist. I'm not talking about the "Mary Sue," with the silver hair and the purple eyes or whatever. I'm talking about the character who is the center of the entire universe, its black hole, so to say. Every single action revolves around the health and well-being of this character - to the point where entire subplots are devoted to punishing minor characters who denied the protagonist a lollipop or in some other way ignored his or her mighty specialness. A good example of this is when the protagonist is gay in a gay-tolerant society until suddenly the lone gaybasher shows up, of course so he can be shown up by the protagonist, or killed. Either one, though the first is more likely. Death sentences are usually reserved for family members who didn't recognize little Jazeen's immense magical powers of lyrical dance.
I have a feeling that these authors would stop writing if somebody finally bought them a pony.
2. The complete and utter lack of plot. Most genre novels, no matter how utterly crappy they may be, adhere to a certain structure that guarantees that you will get some level of satisfaction out of the book. Romance novels have an emotional relationship that develops to a satisfying point (and sex, of course). Mystery novels have an event that needs explanation, usually a murder, so somebody can be righteously punished (and, depending on what kind of mystery you are reading, there may be a lot of gory detail thrown in as well). Fantasy seems to be described as basically "a story with funny words thrown in." Don't get me wrong, I love that the genre allows a level of exploration that isn't available in, say, a spy thriller. But a lot of fantasy novels try to get away with "Oh, J'kurn and his telepathic werecat are looking for this ring, and then they're running around, OH LOOK A FLYING SHIP!" Are you writing to any purpose? Which brings me to...
3. Bloat. Even if a writer seems to be going somewhere, they take an eternity with it. I'm not talking about just any slow-moving plot, I'm talking about plots so slow that they take up to 10(!) or more books to get to the ending. Other genres may have series which follow the fortunes of a certain character or even a family (witness romance families which all seem to be convieniently gigantic), but these books are generally understandable even if you don't start with the very first published book. Not so the fantasy novel. In order to "get" what's going on, you have to plow through every single book, all of which are at least 600 pages long and cost ten million bajillion dollars in hardback. Which is probably why fantasy dribbles on like this, because people will buy these huge tomes as if they were magazine serials.
But even if you sensibly get these books from the library, there's no reward in reading them - after said 600 pages, oooh, Sir Gawinge has moved his horses across the mountains and Lady Arweena has taken a bath.And even if the plot does move along at a decent clip, this bloat leads to the "cast of thousands!" syndrome, where every so often about five new characters are introduced. The list grows exponentially, and after a while it's hard to tell Lady Arweena apart from her step-aunt's lover's lady-in-waiting (although that would imply that the step-aunt is a lesbian, right? PERVERT).
Guy Gavriel Kay is able to do a decent fantasy in one book. So is Ursula LeGuin (although she might be classified more as scifi). The aforementioned Swordspoint was magnificent on its own (of course, they're doing sequels...) Even "Lord of the Rings" was only 3 books, well, 4 with The Hobbit added on. There is no law that says that your story MUST BE three books or more.
A frightening example: Tolkien spent his entire life writing the materials that make up the Silmarillion, which is basically the "Bible" of the "Lord of the Rings" universe. A nice hardcover copy is 416 pages.
Meanwhile, the fourth volume of George R.R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" series is 784 pages long. And readers are complaining - because the story's been split in half. That's right. Dude wanted to do a fourth volume that was about 2000 pages long but those meanies at Spectra wouldn't let him.
If this doesn't scare you, nothing will.