Clichés of any sort can be an annoyance, but fantasy clichés are particularly grating. No idea why. Maybe it’s because you can only have so many wand-waving wizards before you want to rip their beards out and snap their brittle elbows over your knee, just to show them who is boss.

Side note: Whenever anyone mentions wizards, I always envision Merlin from Disney’s animated The Sword in the Stone. Am I the only one?

Back to fantasy clichés. So here I am, working on my book two, and I arrive at this amazing idea for one of my characters. It’s like I have rainbows exploding from my eyes, frantically pounding the keyboard with enough rapidity that the idea doesn’t dissipate. Halfway through the chapter, I realize that I’m just twisting a fantasy cliché, which is how I arrived at this topic.

Boom! Background. *Cheers from the crowd*

Nothing wrong with fantasy clichés, provided you put a bit of your own twist on them or just execute them really well. There’s a damn good reason that fantasy clichés even exist – the original idea was good enough to copy. Right?

After a time, though, even the best-executed fantasy clichés wear out their welcome. The rug mat is caked with mud, the dishes are scraping the ceiling, and you had to pass out on the couch last night because you came home and found them sleeping in your bed.

It’s time for them to go.

Fantasy clichés come in two sizes: big and small. These are my top five, along with why I think they need to hibernate. Who knows? If we stay away from them long enough, one day they’ll be fresh and new all over again.

Prophecy, Especially THE Prophecy:

First of all, prophecy of any sort is a sticky bitch. You have to contend with free will, then hammer out all the small details, and even then, it’s practically guaranteed that some rebellious loophole of logic will cram its round way through a square hole and make it to the other side unscathed. If discovered, your efforts at assembling a coherent system of prophetic undertakings will come crashing down like a castle of Legos meeting a wrecking ball.

Objection: There are ways to (mostly) get around the problems of prophecy while still retaining it within your book. Plus, if well-done, it can be a ripe sort of fun to watch a hero ram himself headfirst against a prophecy in an attempt to undo it. However, these exceptions are few and far-between, and since prophecy normally revolves around the Chosen One, that leads me to my next fantasy cliché.

Chosen Ones Are Good Only For Chosen Deaths:

Let’s get one thing straight. Or, rather, less crooked. Chosen ones are about as exciting as a bowl of moldy eggs (if you’re curious as to where I got that breathtaking analogy, I just ate a bowl of scrambled eggs). We all know their story, not only the beginning, but their end as well. Therein lies the problem. I want something fresh. Exciting. Not someone getting “chosen” or having his birth foretold, because 89% of the time, I can tell you how that story goes.

Boy is naïve but possessed of great intangibles like bravery and honesty.

Boy discovers he is the Chosen One.

Boy is mentored by someone who gets him up to speed, granting him sword and weaponry skills that realistically should take decades to master.

Boy fights Evil.

Boy defeats Evil.

The boy might see a few bumps in the road, but this fantasy cliché has been played out more times than I can count. I, for one, would like to see it hit the road.

Objection: Sometimes (see Harry Potter), clichés work for the betterment of the story. Plus, it can warm the nonexistent cockolds of my heart to see someone pathetic grow up to be a badass, but the author has to have a fantastic story to tell in order for this to work. The Magicians trilogy is a good example of this.

Ridiculously Supercharged, Over-the Top, Illogical Fight Scenes

Badass heroes are badass. Duh. So if your hero can go three-on-one and win handily, all the while munching on a jelly-filled doughnut, wouldn’t it be more badass to up the enemies to eleven and throw in a footlong Subway sandwich?

The answer, obviously, is no. It’s past the point of believability. Unless, of course, you’re a wizard, which theoretically means you could kill five at once. But, to make up for that, you’re going to need to have your magic drastically decrease or some such consequence. Add in mitigating factors. It’s the same thing in real-life battles. A tank can absolutely squash fifteen people, but it’ll have a tough time doing basically anything else. It isn’t all-powerful, and your fight scenes should reflect that.

Objection: Sometimes it’s just awesome to show a hero (or even a villain) taking names and wrecking shop. If the book’s writing is done well enough, I might not even notice because my adrenaline is pumping so hard. Those instances, though, are about as few and far between as a puppy who doesn’t eat other dogs’ shit (which, conveniently, my puppy did yesterday. FML).

Boring-Ass Black-And-White Characters

This is my number one fantasy cliché, but I’m going to leave it at number four because I’m a lazy SOB. It aggravates the living fuckkkkkkkkk out of me when I read books that do this. To the point that I’ll rage like a child and throw my book across the room and hit an actual child. Get sued. Wind up straitjacketed and talking to Jack Nicholson. Don’t worry, though. I’ve heard wonders about that electroshock therapy stuff.

Fantasy needs to mirror reality in some major ways so as to make things believable. If you have a character who is evil for no other reason than to be evil, that does two things: A) it makes writing that character much easier for the author in question and B) it deadens the interest I have in the character.

Real people do bad things all the time for what they perceive to be good reasons. That’s what makes them interesting. If you dilute all of that into “Evil is his calling,” then what is there to make me want to read about him? I already know all there is to know. This dude is over here squishing babies because he wants to be the next Sauron. Now, if this guy is over here squishing babies because he honestly believes that he’s saving the world from the next Hitler, that’s a different story. I would love to read about a guy who does that sort of thing. Hypothetically, of course. Babies are already messy enough.

Objection: Unlike the other fantasy clichés, I can’t really figure out many instances where this is an okay one to include. I loathe it every time it happens, including classics like LOTR. I guess, if I was realllly stretching, I can see how it would be interesting to see a person doing evil for the sake of evil because he believes that evil needs to exist to balance good, so he thinks it’s his duty to provide that equilibrium, which would technically make him less of a villain and more of a hero, in a way, but that’s a stretch.

Really Stupid Names:

Ask me to name more than five people from Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time. Go ahead, ask. Now wait while I take the next seventeen minutes trying to remember where the apostrophe goes so that I can do the pronunciation justice.

I can’t handle that shit. Truly. Now, I get it, names are subjective. I’ve had people tell me the names I’ve chosen for my series are ill-fitting. *Shrugs* That’s why I’m putting this at number five. But there is a point where the outlandishness of your names becomes off-putting to the reader, and when I find myself only recognizing characters by the first few letters of their names, we have a problem on our hands.

Objection: Outlandish names give fantasy a ring of authenticity which, as a fantasy novel, it needs. A hero named Joe just might not work for you. I can take that, but there is such a thing as diminishing returns, and when you have three apostrophes in one name and three Z’s, I think you’ve crossed that line.

Here’s a nice little link on talking about this usage.

And that’s that! I’m off. Totally thinking about adopting another puppy this afternoon to give Blue some company, so I may have some sweet pup pictures for you guys later.

Jonathan

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