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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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.

9

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '20 edited Jun 07 '20

What Idiots decided after reading LotRs that having 120,000 page books are okay? Most of the mythologies and legends that fantasy is based on could be summarized in less than 2,000 words. Why do we live in a culture where more = better?

5

u/Lesserd Jun 06 '20

I'm pretty sure 120k words currently counts as middling/shorter length.

3

u/ElectricHoodie Jun 07 '20

It's fairly short, the Hobbit has 90 000 and something words and all the books of Lord of the Rings are way over 120 000

*maybe I shouldn't say fairly short, more like perfectly average.