Post by spidershinobi on Jul 1, 2016 14:37:53 GMT
This being a forum centered around videogames and the show CGR, I assume most of you enjoy fantasy themed media. There is a lot to talk about when it comes to fantasy themes and products, but here we talk about our pet peeves. Yes! There is no way you look at every single part of a fantasy work and say "everything is perfect here", there's gotta be something off-putting somewhere, from an overused "rescue the damsel" trope to a an unsettling plot point.
Eh!... I guess this video best describes what will go down in this topic...
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So, I'll go first.
Now, being above 20 years old, enjoying fantasy works, you just go piling up pet peeves related to them, and several of mine are related to setting. Here's one:
- Fantastical dangers superseding human troubles
This is something that happens more often in the high fantasy subgenre, way too often, actually.
Whenever a world is built around the notion that humans have their city walls protecting them from monster parties, and specially when the protagonists' motivation is to save the world from an evil lord or whatever, there's a big chance that human politics are often favorable, with rivals uniting for the greater good and honest men generally being nice to honest men from other nations/clans; and since this is often a part of the high fantasy settings it often comes together with the notion that large amounts of people can use magic, or even having magic as a form of technology, or another form of life-improvement.
See, that's the core of what annoys me: you write me a world filled with danger, monsters raining on the road ahead of me as I struggle to get to grandma's, and yet the amount of life improvements that came along with those monsters simply overcompensate their presence! The problem I have with this approach to world building is that fantasy elements which would mess up our lives for real if they came to exist - such as goblins groups showing up on roads or a gryphon suddenly dropping by right in front of you in a sunny day - end up as regular, almost harmless annoyances, and considering the life improvements too these worlds are simply better than our own, even considering the occasional world-threatening villain. That's specially worse for me in videogames, because my personal motivation to save a world going that well can't be very strong then, can it?
In that sense, I must thank fictional works such as most of the Shin Megami Tensei, for introducing worlds in which the fantastic elements come only to heighten human troubles.
Eh!... I guess this video best describes what will go down in this topic...
---
So, I'll go first.
Now, being above 20 years old, enjoying fantasy works, you just go piling up pet peeves related to them, and several of mine are related to setting. Here's one:
- Fantastical dangers superseding human troubles
This is something that happens more often in the high fantasy subgenre, way too often, actually.
Whenever a world is built around the notion that humans have their city walls protecting them from monster parties, and specially when the protagonists' motivation is to save the world from an evil lord or whatever, there's a big chance that human politics are often favorable, with rivals uniting for the greater good and honest men generally being nice to honest men from other nations/clans; and since this is often a part of the high fantasy settings it often comes together with the notion that large amounts of people can use magic, or even having magic as a form of technology, or another form of life-improvement.
See, that's the core of what annoys me: you write me a world filled with danger, monsters raining on the road ahead of me as I struggle to get to grandma's, and yet the amount of life improvements that came along with those monsters simply overcompensate their presence! The problem I have with this approach to world building is that fantasy elements which would mess up our lives for real if they came to exist - such as goblins groups showing up on roads or a gryphon suddenly dropping by right in front of you in a sunny day - end up as regular, almost harmless annoyances, and considering the life improvements too these worlds are simply better than our own, even considering the occasional world-threatening villain. That's specially worse for me in videogames, because my personal motivation to save a world going that well can't be very strong then, can it?
In that sense, I must thank fictional works such as most of the Shin Megami Tensei, for introducing worlds in which the fantastic elements come only to heighten human troubles.
