I have a few:

  • Chosen ones, fate, destiny, &c. When you get down to it, a story with these themes is one where a single person or handful of people is ontologically, cosmically better and more important than everyone else. It's eerily similar to that right-wing meme about how "most people are just NPCs" (though I disliked the trope before that meme ever took off).
  • Way too much importance being given to bloodlines by the narrative (note, this is different from them being given importance by characters or societies in the story).
  • All of the good characters are handsome and beautiful, while all of the evil characters are ugly and disfigured (with the possible exception of a femme fatale or two).
  • Races that are inherently, unchangeably evil down to the last individual regardless of upbringing, society, or material circumstances.
  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    5 months ago

    -the taller a mecha is, the longer it's range of combat should be.

    You'd love the FORCE:Ground multipurpose assault rifle in Hyperion Cantos. It has a low-lethality setting for CQC in built up urban areas. It also has a setting for shooting down ships in low orbit. It's the standard infantry rifle at the beggining of the stories.

    i don't like when magic in fantasy requires overly specific material components, like DnD's insect legs and feathers etc. this kind of thing almost works for slower paced rituals or magical crafting, but a mage during combat whipping out a spider leg to break while they chant and dance just to summon a fireball seems all around less convenient and efficient than making a primitive grenade/petard or rifle/cannon. magic in fantasy or sci fi should upend one's understanding of reality, it shouldn't just be a cheat code activated by arranging garbage and trinkets. a wizard casting a fireball is old hat, passe, boring, a true master of metaphysical arts should make the need to cast fireball irrelevant, locking the enemy in warped spacetime architecture or turning them inside out with a glance and a gesture or instantly transmuting their brain into gold. i want less of the simplistic 'its a weapon attack that uses unique ammo' style of magic attack and more 'my sword has become an incomprehensible fractal of steel and folded spacetime as i try to stab the wizard' or 'the master of secret arts has plucked a beam of sunlight from the sky to use as a blade'.

    This runs in to a serious problem where the weirder and more esoteric your magic gets, the harder it is to meaningfully describe to a reader what's happening, what the stakes are, how "powerful" an attack is. You can see a lot of it in Elder Scrolls. If you read the books the Big Stompy Robot/Anumidium is powered by weaponized atheism is a world where the gods are very manifestly real and it's engaged in a battle at all points in time against the most powerful Altmer mages to conquer summerset isle and always will be.

    It drives me bonkers in my writing because I want to have everything be extremely weird and esoteric, but half the ideas I'm working with come from Crowley bullshit, cultural ideas most people won't encounter if they're not reading anthropology texts, and the subjective experience of mental illness so trying to put it in to language that makes any kind of sense is hard. Call it conservation of comprehension or something. There's a ratio between how comprehensible a magic system is and how cool it is, and you have to obey that ratio or you're going to leave your audience totally bewildered.

    But I totally feel you. Especially in video games where magic could be represented in cool ways, but what you get is fireballs.

    Come to think of it, The Chronicles of the Black Company do an okay job with this, where the protagonists are very competent at murdering people, and even have their own sorcerer, but they're hopelessly outmatched when they come up against really powerful wizards and the bizarre things they can pull off.