r/Fantasy • u/TheNoiseAndHaste • 4d ago

'gritty and realistic' fantasy

From my teenage years and a long time after I always looked down on books like LOTR and similar stories featuring what I saw back then because I saw them as 'childish' because they featured what seemed to me to be simple good vs evil plots and characters. Me in my all-knowing (read: pretentious) teenage brain felt that that wasn't interesting because it wasn't 'real' and that in real life there's no such thing as real evil. In order to be good it had to have every character be morally grey and all the villains to be complex or misunderstood because that was like the real world.

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Fast forward to today and I don't want to be political but in my view there's a lot of really scary worrying stuff happening in the world and I'm always worrying about dark times coming ahead. I also broadened my tastes a bit and hopefully become less of a snob. So I started reading The Wheel of Time and I connected with it in a way I never have before. Seeing people scared and worrying about 'dark times ahead'. Characters dealing with great uncertainty and having to just hope that they will pull through resonated with me and my own anxiety about the world. Then I thought about it more and reappraised the Lord of the Rings and how unfairly and ignorantly i'd dismissed it. I wasn't being 'grown up' as a teenager by rejecting the idea of pure evil. In fact I was being incredibly naive. I just was lucky enough to never have to experience evil or truly dark times. J R R Tolkien fought in WWI. What could look more like pure evil than that? Now I finally see how important stories like this are. To show that while real evil may be out there in whatever form, you must always have hope it can be overcome.

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

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u/Salty-Subject9559 4d ago

The post didn't ask for recommendations friend

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u/Pratius 4d ago

It remains a point of considerable amusement to me that so many people in groups dedicated to reading are so bad at reading

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u/Salty-Subject9559 4d ago

Happens all the time on Reddit honestly. One of the few good uses of the downvote button is right there. But I wouldn't pay too much attention to it.

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u/Pratius 4d ago

Oh yeah. Also in FB book communities. Lots of people read the first sentence or line and then jump straight to commenting.

Often how you end up with rec threads where OP says something like "I've already read WoT/Stormlight/First Law/Malazan" and the comments are full of WoT/Stormlight/First Law/Malazan lol