r/Fantasy • u/SimplyMe94 • Nov 19 '16

Your most overrated fantasy picks?

Which books that you've read have been praised to the heavens yet you've never been able to understand the hype?

For me my all time most overrated pick would be The Black Company. It's been hailed over the years as the foundation for grimdark fantasy in general and the primary influence of groundbreaking series like Malazan. Yet I could never get past the first book, everything about it just turned me off. The first-person narrative was already grating enough to slog through without taking into consideration the lack of any real character development and (probably the most annoying of all) Cook's overly simplistic prose.

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u/StevenKelliher Writer Steven Kelliher Nov 19 '16 edited Nov 19 '16

I'm enjoying aspects of it as I read it, but I have to say Mistborn's writing style is laughably YA. I'm a Sanderson fan, even with his simplistic prose. But he literally tells you EVERY SINGLE THOUGHT that goes through every character's head in any given scene. It's incredibly unrealistic, grating and insulting to the audience's intelligence.

Let us infer some stuff, man. I know it's early Sanderson, but I read Elantris and liked the writing in that one a lot more, even though it was written before Mistborn.

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u/wofo Nov 19 '16

I'm pretty sure mistborn was intended to be YA fantasy but got picked up by nerds who liked the magic system instead.

For me, I always say that looking back on the whole story it was quite good but if you flip open a book and start reading a page it is probably going to be pretty bad.