I particularly liked:
4. Create a Wise but Useless Guide.
The Guide is wise adviser who knows all about the Quest, but never fully reveals it. He also appears to have immense powers but will not use them when they are most required.
(See Part 7: "Make it Long.")
quote:
They are strong, noble, loyal, brave, high-bred and usually die in the end – well what else are we going to with them? They’re too scary to marry, and no one in Epic Fantasy Novels ever has sex.
But Epic Fantasy where you have neither sex nor virginal marriages that are remarkably fecund nonetheless are rare. And if the pure-hearted maiden perishes, she usually does so well before the end of the book. Most of the other items were laughably common errors, but I've never seen any significant examples of this one.
I did realize recently that the D&D role playing system has no contingency for using sex appeal. This does work in other systems but when I tried to make a slutish man-using "men should be like kleenex..." sort of woman I found myself having to simulate what she does with other skills. My husband said it was because people who play D&D don't uaully have sex. Hmmm....
So now I'm wondering, are there just certain staples that must be there, that others can make fun of but still must be there, or do I just suck?
These stories are the reason I prefer scifi to fantasy at the bookstore, although I prefer fantasy to scifi when I write. My fantasy is almost always contemporary, however, rather than the pseudo-medieval sort of fairy-tale land. (I wrote one short story that used these elements...my first sale, actually...but the heroine started in the real worl.) Anyway, this is fantasy at its most steretypical and in my estimation, least interesting.
I read Tolkien. I read Terry Brooks and Goodkind and Pratchett (ok, he's amusing...what's up with all the Terry's, though?) I read Robert Jordan. I've read random fantasies that all blue together in my mind that were written by authors I'll never remember even if they managed to give me a few hours of amusement while I watched their characters roll dice and progress through a D&D world. To be honest, I don't want to read it anymore. Give me magic. Give me adventure. Give me truth and justice. But can you please give it to me in a different way? We've got this huge modern world to explore and so few people exploring it. And my personal favorite...FUTURE fantasy.
Now, let's talk about those elements without trying to laugh. The loser is an important element. Actually, not so much a loser as your average joe...the kind of person that almost every reader can relate to. I don't find anything wrong with this, although it is steretypical. It gives your reader a sense of purpose, power, and gives them something and someone to relate to. It also carries forward the theme that anyone can change the world.
As for the wise but useless guy....make the hand of God come down and smite him! Oh my God, talk about my LEAST favorite part of any fantasy! Ugh Ugh Ugh...I have a bad taste in my mouth ugh!
Here's the thing...magic has to be reasonable and limited, but artificial and stupid limitsations are, well...artificial and stupid. Make spellcasters exhausted, make them need priceless jewels, make them have to make a blood sacrifice, but don't make them wise and cryptic.
Seriously, though, all of these things started out as tropes in high fantasy but have now crossed into the realm of cliche. On the other hand, there are puh-lenty of readers who seek out these same tropes/cliches in their high epic fantasies...the stuff still sells.
So what does that tell us, as writers? Should we stick with what sells because it's marketable? Or should we take different routes, counting on untapped markets of readers who have moved beyond the same old, same old?
In Tolkien books I never saw Gandalf having much magic. He could make fireworks and talk to animals but he did not have any great resource of sorcery.
I much preferred the approach to magic used in Nix's "Lirial".
That said, I find myself more often gravitating to the fresh Fantasy of today, rather than typical High Fantasy. I enjoy unique themes, new races, less romance, more focus on character or politics, etc. The story I am writing hopefully has all of that along with some of the elements that must be there for it to be a Fantasy. I think, as writers, we have to decide first, why we are writing. If we are writing simply to sell a book then obviously we have to write what will sell most. If we have a story burning inside us that must be told then we should write that and there will be readers, perhaps not as many but some, that will enjoy it. I think if we try too hard to be different that we have every chance of falling into the same pitfalls as Christine listed for typical Fantasy; it becomes contrived and artificial. So I think there is a balance of “tried and true” and “new and fresh.”
So, save me a trip to the bookstore to settle this debate and give me your opinion.
Even if it were true, however, it's got nothing to do with anything. Women don't like looking at barely-dressed men nearly as much as men like looking at barely-dressed women. We're not as visual as they are and besides, the female body is more attractive and artistic than the male body. Women are turne don by the words on the pages not by the cover art.
The biggest thing that jumped out at me when I was reading this (hilarious) analysis of epic fantasy is that characters are often underdeveloped in epic fantasy. It's the curse of Tolkien... the only characters he really developed were Sam, Frodo and Smeagol/Gollum. Well, and Aragorn to a lesser degree. It frustrates me that the epics I read tend to do the same.
That said, I love reading fantasy, especially if it doesn't focus on any "we must save the world" kind of quest. I like quests that are more down-to-earth, like "how do we pay our taxes this year?" or "how do we escape from this immediate threat?" or "is it possible to find out if fairies exist without bringing down their everlasting wrath and living under a curse of eternal darkness for decades?"
I still read epic fantasy, but it has to be very well-written with well-developed characters.
My thoughts.
Other times it is just pointing out something that is obviously an error. "Contrary to reality", "incompetent", "easy to write", and similar terms highlight these.
But I'm still stuck on that one about women "so powerful and pure they make Joan of Arc look like Pamela Anderson." Especially the part where they usually die in the the end. I mean, having someone like that die in the beginning (where you only asserted her legendary power and purity) could be a cliche error. But if she gets all the way to the end of the book and we still think she's that amazing, that's some great writing. And then, to successfully kill her off in the end, that would be pure genius. I mean, could you even bring yourself to do that if you had any option?
Would the readers contain their outrage if you couldn't convince them to their bones that her death was absolutely necessary?
I wish I were that good a writer.
On a side note. I got some spam from what must be an epic fantasy hero. "Subtle G. Artery" I kid you not. I love the name and am now trying to think of a way I can use it.
I think this is the right link
R
I think the problem is writers of so-called epic fantasy take the wrong elements from the writers they copy. An example being, they take bushy eyebrows and a wiry beard, etc. and they have the equivalent of Gandalph (Or, furry feet, a loner in dark attire, etc.). They do not take actual time to create and fill in their own colorful characters they just steal the frame of someone else’s and say “Tadah!”.
Perhaps instead they should have considered Tolkien’s combination of both a character and plot driven story to make a good epic. So I would disagree with Keeley (sorry), and say that it is the stereotypes that are casting a shadow back on Tolkien rather than the other way around—lazy writers wanting a quick sale. I knew the end when I finally read all the Lord of the Rings books, but what kept me going through the detailed pages on walking through swamplands, etc. was because I cared about and wanted to see more of the development and interaction of his endearing characters. When the story ended, I was very happy to have the appendices to read what really became of them all. But obviously for many the story itself is the draw.
I think what makes an epic good is that it has this storytelling panorama of character, plot, setting, etc. rather than focusing on one above the other. So you should end with a sweeping and compelling landscape of battles and intrigues and politics which revolve around characters of interest. Maybe different aspects surface above others for segments, but then become intertwined again as the book moves forward. Not that I have read any like this among the newly written “epics” of the day. Actually, I confess I didn’t think people wrote epics anymore…I never considered that these new works were meant to be epic fantasy. Shows what I know. 
Oh, and one more thing, they truly ought to be very, very long …
[This message has been edited by catnep (edited February 28, 2005).]