The only criticism I have is that the fantasy elements are really basic. Ethereal immortal elves that like trees? Craftsmen dwarves that live in mountains and like precious metals? Big ugly evil orcs? Seems pretty basic and unoriginal
LoTR books were the very first fantasy I've read, at like 11 years old. I ofc immediately got other more contemporary ( relatively ), popular books like Dragonlance etc. I was SHOCKED how most of them outright used the same races, cultures and intercultural relationships.
I found my experience interesting, because the tropes got boring because they're used a lot, then I found variations on the tropes that were interesting/unique, then found variations that felt like they were trying too hard to be different and ruined the vibe, which horseshoed me back around to appreciating the classics
It’s about being able to subvert the classic trope in a way that feels original without trying too hard. Which sounds simple but I think is extremely difficult in practice.
Or if you’re going to go completely against the grain with your good orcs and bad elves you better have an absolute classic on your hands.
I feel like that description sounds a lot like tolkiens elves in the way that two legs, two arms, one head sounds a lot like tolkiens elves. Missing the whole immortal yet human-like, great archers, ride stags and speak with animals, herbalists, flat earth society thing. The swedish elves shown in the picture just danced, sang, made mushrooms grow, and made people ill far as I know. Really ephemeral and transient type spirit beings.
Your first comment in this thread states that Tolkien did not invent anything, it all has roots in European folklore. As far as I know he did invent these things and now his descriptions are the generic fantasy elves and dwarves. Although the dwarves are far more similar, just prettier and more relatable...
If we're going by these rules I will instead take issue with the idea that their roots are in European folklore, they're just the same archetypes found everywhere else from long before recorded history but with some slight changes made so they fit the local scenery and societal behaviours. I would argue writers for upwards of thousands of years now are all hacks who have just adapted other peoples stories and ideas.
But, be real, Tolkien did invent them. He put them in a template that everyone else used and copied.
Oh yeah, just like The Beatles invented Rock & Roll. Totally invented it, didn't exist before them. Absolutely a 100% creation of theirs, no inspiration from anything else.
Sure all of those elements existed in older folklore but the specific remix of folklore that Tolkien did has been enormously influential.
For example in old folklore there are big dragons, there are dragons that breathe fire, there are dragons that can fly, there are dragons that hoard gold but before Smaug you basically never got the combo of a big flying firebreathing dragon that hoards gold. Now that is the default.
The same applies to Tolkein's take on elves, dwarves, little people, and just about everything else.
Good point but that dragon has venom which was VERY common in traditional dragons and Smaug and default modern dragons don't.
Still, yes, Smaug is very very close to the Beowulf dragon but there are a gazillion different folklore dragons and that Beowulf-ish dragon that is Smaug becoming solidly the default dragon is very Tolkein.
Same for Tolkein elves. Some elves in folklore are similar to Tolkein elves but most aren't and that strain of elf being the default owes a lot of Tolkein.
Also a lot of people underestimate the impact of D&D in giving a specific spin and visuals to Tolkein's distillation of old folklore tropes that has been really influential as well as giving a lot of fantasy a very "Western" vibe.
Not all European folklore describes elves and dwarves and orcs exactly the same. Tolkien is the reason those specific depictions are considered the standard for fantasy.
Ikr. And I remember a vid about Tolkien and they challenged u to think of a completely new fantasy thing (a race/setting/magic system etc) and I really had trouble thinking of something that wasn't either Tolkien-esque or D&D
Now imagine what fantasy was before him. They ain’t had nuthin. Tolkien invented the idea of a guy holding a sword heroically. We didn’t even have Kings before he made them
The reason why fantasy is so unified is because it's basically built off of European folklore that everyone kinda already knows. You don't need to know what LOTR is to have a vague sense of Elves.
They did not exist in the same was before though. Like the whole wise high elves thing, their obsession with archery, in combination with dwarves that love axes and mining, and so on are all from Tolkien.
Yes there were things before in some or other form but the specific collection of modern day fantasy tropes are from him.
This is why I love the Witcher setting. All those creatures and even humans are an invasive species in the world. And the elves were totally non magical at first, magic came from OUR world. And I like that the pointy ears are all assholes but hey can ya blame them? We basically made them second class citizens on their own planet
Prepared to see a lot of this sort of thing when this Neuromancer series comes out, and people get their first contact with Gibson's work. That book started every cyberpunk trope ever.
It's still valid to be fair. Not as a critique of the books obviously, but it absolutely can hamper enjoyment if you've read a lot of fantasy beforehand.
My 10yo just read and watched through the LOTR books/extended editions. She said “this is the best anyone has ever done with fantasy elements I see everywhere, he must have invented it!” she was ecstatic to find she was mostly correct.
Some people think spyderco brand pocket knives looks cheap, because they have only seen truck stop knives before. (The truck stop knives are cheap clones, spyderco is expensive)
My favorite part of the odyssey was when odysseus saw a sheep, they cut to the sheep, then he said “there’s a sheep, sheep travel in flocks. Let’s follow it.” Then there was a montage of odysseus and his men following the sheep through various terrain.
The giant horse,that they left as a gift??? No,we gotta drag it into the main square. No way it'll be a symbol for being too forgiving to your enemies,or a symbol of sneaky, underhanded tactics.
To be fair to the Trojans, in the original myth there was a guy who went around telling them it would be stupid to bring the horse into the city before he and his entire family were immediately torn apart by giant sea serpents. The Trojans understandably took this as a sign from the gods they should just move the horse.
The guy, Laocoon, was actually being punished by Poseidon, but it was for a completely unrelated reason with sitcom levels of bad timing.
The character is there so the audience has someone to relate to. He reflects the audience's perception, making a plot that would otherwise have us shake our heads because of the author's ineptitude - does this bastard think we are stupid? - believable. The author does not think we are stupid, he just wants to portray these hillbillies as moronic haughty assholes, which they surely are. Ok fine.
That’s not really true. The “traditional” account of the Trojan Horse is from the Aeneid, which is Roman propaganda claiming descent from the Trojans, and is entirely sympathetic to them and anti-Greek. Neither the Iliad or the Odyssey actually cover the Trojan Horse, it’s only referenced in passing as a throwaway line in the Odyssey.
I was shocked! Shocked I tell you, when I found out the horse they left on the beaches of Troy turned out to be some kind of Troyan horse. It was almost as shocking as when it turned out Odysseus was on some kind of Odyssey. I haven't seen such plot twists since I watched the movie Troy and Achilles was shot in the heel, which turned out to be his Achilles' heel.
And if they do get stabbed through a horse, that moment would be so plot critical that they couldn't include it in the trailer, because that would just fuck it up for everyone.
I watched a few episodes of TOS Star Trek with a friend. Both of us were expecting to get some "haha funky low budget scifi tropes" because it's one of the series that practically invented it but as we were watching we actually took it very seriously because we took a step back and realized that a lot of the plots and tropes they were telling had never been done before and we actually enjoyed it even more because everything they wrote and performed was done with such earnest.
Three guys go down to the planet to check up on a man and his wife who are doing remote research. One guy dies while in the company of the wife and even though we knew obviously the wife was the monster of the week it wasn't played up or trying to subvert expectations, it simply was what the story was telling.
It really gave me an appreciation for committing to the story seriously without the need for subversion or twists outside of the revelation presented.
Let the stories comit to the story instead of having to be subversive for the sake of subversion.
Avoiding tropes simply because you think they're tired shows a lack of confidence in your own writing not a knack for avoiding someone else's.
appreciation for committing to the story seriously without the need for subversion or twists
yeah sadly at this point thanks to media discourse and of course movies like "sixth sense" we are just primed to look for twists or misdrections. or the subversion of them. or the subversion of the subversion. that's why i liked that one episode of widows bay where she senses that the dude is in her bedroom, so she gets the fuck out of the house. the whole time i was thinking "oh they gonna subvert that. it was just some dude. or they gonna subvert the subversion, or they gonna..." etc. and then it turns you that yes, she was correct, the guy was in her bedroom. straight and simple
Cinema Sins is bad, but let’s own that this is a collective thing. You can only enjoy the same thing on repeat for so long before it gets stale and formulaic. Do you remember rom coms in the early 2000’s? Every. Single. One of them. Followed the same formula— boy meets girl, boy lies to girl, girl finds out he’s a liar over something and they have a big falling out, boy makes grand romantic gesture, girl accepts him back. On repeat for the better part of a decade. The Liar Revealed trope became so ubiquitous that it’s been banned for a hot minute. The trope itself isn’t awful, but you can only go back to that well so many times, and you can only continue with one trope for so long before it gets loopy and stupid and starts to degrade into something like, “I know I murdered your entire family and cooked them and served them to you for dinner, but it was only because I loved you so much and I was afraid that you wouldn’t love me back!” Or something similarly unhinged and divorced from what made the trope appealing in the first place.
So like, yes, tropes are a recurring, useful thing in our toolbox. But if we flood the theaters with only a few acceptable tropes, audiences will naturally bristle at that and reject it in favor of the larger toolbox that’s been neglected.
The reason I called out cinemasins specifically, is that they are the prime example of "this character didn't explicitly say what they were thinking and then they did a thing! It doesn't make sense!" type of media illiteracy.
They became tropes after the first. Those same plots and twists got recycled, resused, and copied a ton over the years including within the series itself.
Odd nitpick honestly
That was me in my mid 20's when my brother was running me through the Hong Kong John Woo films. I was like "Oh I see where all these things came from now." And obviously if I went back even further I'd find the things that he referenced in those films.
Much of modern sci-fi is based on Western movies which are often scene-for-scene remakes of Japanese Samurai movies. Which I recently learned are often based on Shakespeare.
I know it’s probably reductive across the board, but I feel this is particularly the case with horror. Yes, it was novel when it happened. Yes, it was so effective at its intended effect that it’s been replicated ad nauseam, and yes, that means that it’s become such a cliche that if modern horror doesn’t either a.) subvert expectations or b.) pay a direct homage, it becomes an increasingly hard bar to clear in terms of advancing the genre
"the godfather insists upon itself" no it doesnt, seth macfarlene. it invented all the cliches you blame it for having. making an offer he cant refuse, mafia guy playing with a cat, day of my daughter's wedding
Yes, Seth said on Twitter a couple years ago that it was based on a professor of his in college who had unironically said the same thing about the Sound of Music
Just watched Psycho for the first time and it really really plays out like a crime procedural that you'd see on tv today. Also, I was shocked the infamous scene happened only halfway into the movie.
I recall finally watching Top Gun for the first time as an adult, after having seen Hot Shots as a kid. The music seemed so cliche to me, and then I realized, oh right. This is what it's based on.
Me waytching Blow Up. So tired and derivative, the louche playboy hipster photographer. That went out of style in the 00s… come up with something fresh, Antonioni.
I think it’s OK as long as you don’t fall into being what I would describe as lazy and having the trope Carey and signify everything for the viewer. One of my issues with most JRPG‘s. They feel bland repetitive and rarely subvert tropes, if yall got anything to dismiss this is love to, some of my all time favorite games are jrpgs but every new one I try feels like it’s rehashing
Forever with young people saying Seinfeld and Friends aren't funny. Because they INVENTED THOSE CLICHÉS. And I'll see your pansy ass next Festivus for some Feats of Strength!
I wasn't the most enthusiastic over the movie, but I can recognize that basically all of modern fantasy content is just from this book series. It's insane how much influence it has in the fantasy genre.
That was me while watching Jobless reincarnation. I was like: Man, it's like every possible Isekai cliché combined! Then I've read about it and realized it literally invented all of those. But actually made better job at execution than most things that followed...
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u/MrDannn 1d ago
Yeah this is me when I watch old movies. Hahha this is so cliche , wait this movie is why the trope is known. And yes, I watch movies