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Looking for good fantasy recommendations. Problem is I can't stand most of the genre tropes :marseycontemplatesuicide:

I want some good fantasy recommendations, but so much of the genre is unbearable. I've identified two main reasons why, though I'm sure there are also many others.

  • YA desperately written for a movie deal and/or teenaged foids :marseyradfem: by older foids :marseywall: Can't stand this garbage and I doubt I need to explain why.

  • Conversely I can't get through a lot of "standard" fantasy written by moids who don't see the difference between a novel and a DnD campaign. :marseydovahkiin: Characters and plot usually take a backseat to pointless wiki lore and unending exposition. I'd say I like worldbuilding but it should be done more naturally than vomiting paragraphs. The plot shouldn't stop because the author needs us to know every detail about the temple or whatever we just passed by. The majority of these settings will also be shameless ripoffs of Tolkien and/or DnD with nothing new to offer.

I need some fantasy recs that avoid these pitfalls. I'm interested in finding any of the following

  • Unique main characters. Examples of anything that made a particular protagonist stand out above the genre.

  • Same with settings. Any that stood out (ideally right from the get-go, and not just because you'd gotten used to it after eight books)

  • Stories that were concise while still being good. I'm not against wordier entries, but I think a lot of fantasy authors have trouble with brevity. I'm wondering if anyone knows of exceptions who still managed to pull off something creative.
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I like the broken empire series, before they are hanged, The Blade Itself, Last argument of kings

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You've got to be realistic, @Civilization_IV. It's a fun series because it does cut the cruft and indulges in action scenes. On my second :marseyreading:, I still enjoyed it.

:marseythumbsup: x5

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It's a fun series because it does cut the cruft and indulges in action scenes.

My fav part was the jailbreak back story in prince of thorns. No drawn out "he falt this, he felt that, the prison thought more" just "The boy unbolted the door and the prison brutally set upon his captors, beating them to death with the hot iron they had intended to use on him"

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Broken Empire was fun because most every other "grimdark" series still makes the protagonists heroes. Jorg was a piece of shit through and through and it never felt like the author was trying to justify or redeem him/his actions.

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Holy shit The Blade Itself is such garbage. OP don't listen to this guy unless you want to read edgy shit where all the characters talk and swear like millennials on top of the bad writing.

This is the problem with the genre, even the "good" authors are usually mediocre af.

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I theoretically like the genre of fantasy, as I play and run D&D, yet find reading most fantasy novels insufferable.

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Same :marseyropewithme:

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The answer is simple... join my D&D group! When it comes to D&D, we currently have a homebrew B/X and an Eberron 3.5e game going. I'm a serviceable great writer!

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I dunno how to play :marseyclueless:

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Good. You're uncorrupted. We're all burgers, usually play at 7 EST on whatever day is most convenient that week.

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>3.5 E d&d players on rdrama

:#bigeyes:

Tfw never got to run a real psionic character

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Are you willing to show up to infrequent sessions on random days of the week at random times announced at most a week in advance?

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It's been awhile since I read it but I really enjoyed The Black Company. I only read the first book and it's pretty old, but I liked it.

More modern I really loved The Lies of Locke Lamora. Really strong characters in that.

The first Malazan book was good to but nothing after that. Story goes off the fricking rails and I hate it

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I'll look into them.

I did try the first Malazan book, Gardens of the Moon I think? At first glance it seemed to have the problems I mentioned. It didn't grab me :marseyshrug:

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Yeah gardens of the moon. I liked it, but it wasn't mind blowing. The rest of the series just goes down hill

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The first Malazan book was good to but nothing after that. Story goes off the fricking rails and I hate it

I made the mistake of consulting reddit for good fantasy, and its name always came up. I couldn't finish the first book because it felt so typical, like a D&D campaign. Very flat.

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Yeah you can't ever ask Reddit for good fantasy :soysnoo:

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like a D&D campaign.

It actually is a DnD campaign. The author took his campaign and made it into the series. Which maybe why it makes no sense and goes so off the rails

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I think i made it like halfway through the third book? People said it was tough to get through but very rewarding, but i pushed that far and said no sir, not 7 more books of this shit.

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Part of why I hate discussing media with redditors.

Noo it's good you just need to sit through seven books/seasons/movies. You didn't finish it? Then you're not allowed to criticize! :marseysoyseethe:

It didn't grab me :marseygigachad:

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You cant even bother with them at this point, too much of their personalities are tied into the media they consume. They take it as a personal insult if you dont like what they like, marvel meltdowns are always fun :marseydisintegrate:

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I only read the title of your post but House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski was really good imho. Very unconventional and trippy. A classic sort of scifi might be A Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is a must mention. The Jaunt by Steven King is a good short story, but a bit of a bummer.

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I'll check it out.

Hitchhiker's Guide is great :marseythumbsup:

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Have you read any of Gene Wolfe's work?

He's got his own brand of fantasy style autism, but he's definitely one of the more well regarded fantasy authors, and he doesn't fall into the typical pitfalls of the more modern works that you seem to have grown tired of. His best known work, his Book of the New Sun series, is only 4 books long which is pretty short compared to many others.

Another one worth looking into if you haven't heard of them would be Ursula K. Le Guin, best known for her Earthsea series and also some of her other Sci Fi works.

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Is gene wolf high fantasy? I can't stand dragons and swordplay that fantasy seems to be mired in but i wouldnt mind a good fantasy story if it were unique enough.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Don't read Left Hand of Darkness, it's awful.

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It's hard to say too much without spoilers, but his work is certainly unique, if nothing else. It has a veneer of high fantasy tropes, but there's a lot more going on under the surface and that's kind of the point.

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How's the writing?

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I'd say well above average for Fantasy/Scifi genre fiction.

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I'll look into it. It might honestly be that older stuff is better suited for what I want.

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It might honestly be that older stuff is better suited for what I want.

It's your best bet, imo. The state of modern Fantasy/Scifi is pretty bleak. What's left of the genre that hasn't been sucked up into the YA pulp factory has pretty much stagnated into a bunch of hacks rehashing the worst excesses of Tolkien/Robert Jordan with very low quality writing. World building autism is practically all that's left, and for that you're probably better off with video games or DnD anyway.

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China Miéville's Bas-Lag books? Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council

World with magic but also late 19th century steampunk type tech (written before steampunk was played out). Innovative fantasy species and polities. The preeminent setting is New Crobuzon, Bas-Lag's hustling and bustling NYC/London/Singapore equivalent.

I think he pretty much set out to avoid the fantasy tropes. Himself he's some kind of old-school full communist. In the first two books this flavors the writing slightly without detracting from the quality, but the third book does go full commie and suffers for it. Still found it worth the read.

EDIT: I forget the best part, these are NOT A TRILOGY, that's right, this science fiction or fantasy author somehow managed to write multiple independent books with their own complete stories.

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>english author

>named China Miéville

>sister named Jemima

What? :marseyxd:

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Jemima

:#marseysoutherner:

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Space fantasy, enders game

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I did love Ender's Game :marseythumbsup: The sequels get a little weird though

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Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake. It's about the massive gothic fortress Gormenghast isolated in the middle of nowhere barely inhabited by It's crazy noble family.

@Civilization_IV

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Have you read Roadside Picnic? Short, unique setting though it's technically sci fi, there's little actual science.

Lamia and also Hyperion by Keates, though those are technically just long poems

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Have you read Lord of the Rings? I see you mentioned ripoffs but not if you tried the books themselves. They do have the :marseylongpostglow: thing you mentioned, but are still pretty good to me. I also second Book of the New Sun, close enough to fantasy. Tbh i have not had much success with the genre myself either. Maybe The First Law series? Those were OK i thought but didnt quite do it for me in a way id recommend confidently. They do seem to fit your criteria though.

People shit on it all the time but i really enjoyed The Name of the Wind, the second one is pure autism though and the author doesnt seem too keen to ever finish the trilogy (probably because the second book is the equivalent of a tire neurodivergentally squeeling stuck in mud), but i would still read the 3rd if it came out because I liked the first one so much and still want to see where it goes.

ASOIAF has great characters but probably wont ever end. Also pretty easy to read, almost like they were made for TV. Pretty basic suggestion but didnt see you mention it either. Also pretty long series I guess.

I liked the movie Stardust, maybe you will like the book. I think it helped me get laid once too.

Cant think of anything else, tried a few like sanderson and didnt like at all.

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I admit I have not read LotR. Someday :marseyshy: One thing I do admire about Tolkien is that he was big into history and looked to real mythology for his fantasy inspirations. There's still plenty of room for other authors to do that with other mythologies, but they'd rather just copy from existing fantasy rather than inspire anything new. Obviously I'm not criticizing Tolkien for that.

I read the first GoT book and liked it, but I'll probably never read the sequels. It was really just on the upper end of "okay", and medieval politics between Houses in a Kingdom isn't interesting to me. I'd prefer settings with several different civilizations, or alternatively one civilization that's more centralized and organized.

I'll look into your other recommendations :marseythumbsup:

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The Hobbit is in my opinion the perfect fiction novel, read that if you haven't. Lord of the Rings gets lost in the weeds with lore sometimes but the Hobbit's pacing is perfect, it's an absolute gem. Also somehow ends up with atypical main characters for fantasy. Tolkien's narrative voice is so consistent and so charming in that book it puts him up there with the English greats imo.

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Wish i had more. I enjoy fantasy books but the genre is flooded with nonsense and its impossible to sift through all the shit.

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I wish I could just go to a book store, pick something out, and have a good time.

But I'd end up with 90% YA if I did that :marseydepressed:

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😴😴😴

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U do not belong on lit longpostbot. Begone from here

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Promising literary challenge: Write the best story you can without triggering longpostbot

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Never sold: Chuck's.

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The Belgariad series

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Too much of Fantasy is YA.

A Song of Ice and Fire is quality fantasy, but I doubt the series ever gets finished.

Sci-Fi is just a better genre. Read some classics like Phillip K Peepee (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which Blade Runner is loosely based off), The Man In the High Castle, Minority Report), Heinlein (Stranger in A Strange Land, Starship Troopers, Moon is a Harsh Mistress) or Nivens/Pournelle (Ringworld, Mote in Gods Eye, The Gripping Hand)

If you liked Enders Game but thought the sequels were too out there, read the Enders Shadow Saga which is much more grounded. Bean is arguably cooler than Ender.

Anne McCaffrey’s Dragon Riders of Pern has some good entries for Fantasy if you’re into a unique dragonshit world, but straddles that YA boundary.

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Discworld, LotR, Dune, the Odyssey & Iliad, Game of Thrones (haven't read this), His Dark Materials (Golden Compass movie is from this but the books are long), The Dark Tower (also haven't read this)

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OP i also think you might like The First Law (big surprise) because there’s basically zero worldbuilding. lots of writing is done about who’s currently in what army, which fights against the other army for this country, what happens in the battle, etc, but there’s no neurodivergent attention to fake centuries of historical detail. magic exists but there’s no hyper specific system that you have to know the rules of, it shows up rarely and when it does it’s akin to illiterate peasants experiencing a nuke going off and goes completely unexplained in the text. it’s a wholly character driven story.

also i really like the way the author plays with genres, especially in the standalones. each book is very distinct and fresh compared to the previous.

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Low Town was unique and a decent setting. Kind of a noir-fantasy. Follows a drug dealer in the shittiest part of a fantasy city, doesn't focus too much on magic and reads more like a detective/mystery.

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Maybe the Earthsea books? They're short, and the unique archipelago setting is vividly described but used in service of telling stories. The main protagonist is a wizard who spends most of his time on interesting magic based quests and almost no time fighting regular bad guys. The role of "wizard" is treated as a unique social role and way of life, rather than being a glorified RPG function. The books have a neat mythological vibe and touch on psychoanalytic themes. They also have actual endings instead of sequel baiting, so you can stop whenever you want. (I've only read the original trilogy).

The books were originally marketed as YA, but the only real artifact of this is that the viewpoint characters are young (the original protagonist appears in the whole trilogy and develops into an older mentor figure). There's no relationship drama or other common YA bs. I reread them recently as an adult and I think they hold up for all ages.

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Honestly, most fantasy novels are low tier trash, it sucks.

Seaon Russel has some interesting takes on what magic would look like in like 18th and 19th centuries. In "Beneath the Vaulted Hills" and "The Compass of the Soul" Them "Moontide and Magic Rise"

Wheel of Time is good, but its a lore wiki and exposition book. On the other hand it was one of the first for it.

First four books of Terry Goodkind's "Sword Of Truth" Series, after that it just becomes lolbert saves the day against commies. Like literally, he defeats communism by thinking about capitalism really hard in book 7.

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I saw a bunch of Booktubers seething about Goodkind and it got me interested in his books lol I'll have to check one out.

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They hate him because he is a lolbert who likes objectivism. The first four books are solid and not too bad with that, but after it starts getting wonky.

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She's insecure. The only reason why she would put such a repulsive image on her Tinder is to stand out. It's the same in bed too, she probably grunts like a bison to make herself seem special even though she is most likely devoid of an ounce of personality. Better to just swipe right. Or left, I don't really know, whichever direction is the one that makes you ignore someone. I don't use Tinder because it's misleading - people shouldn't use an application as a substitute to real life talk. Stats show that around 0.78% people actually hook up with their Tinder match. 99% of them are either "catfish" or bots. What a God darn time waste. I'm pretty sure most people only use it to farm karma points, I doubt anyone expects to find an actual girl there. It's just Redditors talking to Redditors and Redditors talking to bots programmed to sound like engaging women.

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