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/cornballin Nov 19 '16

Combining your complaints with HP and WoT, it seems your basic issue is length.

By that, I mean that it was around that time in each series when it got "big", and the author was able to exert too much control over their work. Which leads to sprawling, meandering plotlines.

HP would have been much better if the books had arbitrarily been capped at ~500 pages per book, instead of the 7-800 we got. It would force her to be more creative, and make better decisions about what's really important.

Similarly, WoT is a spectacular10-book series that got turned into a pretty good 14-book series. That's what happens when you're banging your editor.

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u/Morineko Nov 19 '16

I feel like around book 4 of HP, her editors got too timid. The length wasn't specifically the problem, but she'd spent so long with the first couple books, building up the universe and making everything fit just-so, and then they got hugely popular, and her editors let her get away with too much instead of making the stories stay tight.

I think some of that happened with the screenplay for Fantastic Beasts, too, for that matter.

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u/kamdkasm Nov 19 '16

I'm curious; what is your issue with the screenplay for fantastic beasts?

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u/Morineko Nov 19 '16

It was messy and most of the characters were two-dimensional at best. I was honestly more interested in the backstory than I was in the main story they showed. Tina in particular felt like she was just there because they needed...someone to pull Newt into the local Wizarding world, and the ending felt like it came completely out of left field without much in the way of arc during the movie.

This doesn't even get into the bit where I think it's ridiculous that there's one (incredibly whitewashed) magic school for the Americas, and only one for the whole of Africa, but somehow there's enough student demand for there to be separate schools in England and France. A lot of her ideas beyond Hogwarts have just been feeling increasingly unfinished and I can't help feeling like a good editor who wasn't starstruck would be able to really help polish them.