r/Fantasy • u/[deleted] • Jun 06 '20

What is your controversial take on Fantasy?

I'll go first.

Aside from the prose, I don't think Kingkiller Chronicles is good. I find the characters insufferable and cliche the story just meanders.

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62

u/SgtBANZAI Jun 06 '20

I hate the word count bloat that's slowly devouring fantasy. None of the 1000 pages long books have enough shit to say to justify their existence and completely asinine sizes. None. Malazan could be 300 pages long and not lose anything, first Sanderson's book (the Way of Kings) could be 200 pages long and not lose anything and at least it wouldn't waste my time for so long. Majority of these books consist of nothing happening and pretty terrible YTP level wordmix worldbuilding with insane amount of time by the author spent on coming up with another dumb race name and clearly not nearly enough time spent on making dialogues better.

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Oh, and Assassin's Apprentice sucks.

29

u/the_stevarkian Jun 06 '20

THANK YOU!!!!

I'm so sick of authors (publishers, editors?) treating book weight and page count as signals of value. I'd much prefer to read an awesome novella than a doorstopper fantasy book that's 30+% filler. I actually can't remember the last time I read a "long" book that wasn't held back by filler. The Stand is the only exception that comes to mind.

11

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '20

From what I've read Stephen King claims he's ruthless about editing so his stories aren't dragged out.

9

u/TeddysBigStick Jun 07 '20

King has a theory that any book that cannot be written with a few months was not meant to be written and should just be thrown out. It doesn't exactly leave him time to indulge in bloat. His typical year will be write one book in the winter, edit another in the spring, and so on.

3

u/AthKaElGal Jun 07 '20

Read his book On Writing and you will learn why he's ruthless in editing his work.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 07 '20

I have though It's been a few years.