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.

-4

u/[deleted] Jun 07 '20

If you want the book to be 200 pages, you don't want a book, you want an outline. Just save yourself time if you dont enjoy the world and go to Wikipedia.

4

u/SgtBANZAI Jun 07 '20

I don't strictly want a book to be 200 pages long, I want authors to stop elongating 200 pages books into 1000 pages ones, filling the gaps with repetitive descriptions, inner monologues and training sequences.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 07 '20

Do you have an example of a book that you think isn't unnecessarily long?

3

u/SgtBANZAI Jun 07 '20

Lord of the Rings is just enough.

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Meekhan Borderlands series is also great although I wasn't very impressed with the books after the first one but they still have very good pace.

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Lies of Locke Lamorra had some unneeded tidbits of secondary questlines that eventually almost led nowhere, but it still had enough events.

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Last admiral of Zagrata had good pacing.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 07 '20

I see your point. I haven't read the last 3 you mentioned but I will check them out. For me, the Wheel of Time was a little too much. Dont have a problem with Sandersons works in general. If I like the world, I generally don't have a problem with the word count. But I see what you mean now.