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
by older foids 
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.
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.
.webp?h=8 "Merry Fistmas!")
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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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I'll look into it. It might honestly be that older stuff is better suited for what I want.
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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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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.
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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