"I waited 7 years to read this book. 7 years. And I am not going to finish it."

I'm going to blow your minds here. All fantasy is trash, and all for the same reasons, which go back all the way to the grandfather of the genre, Lord of the Rings.

1. All fantasy novels try to tell an epic story involving multiple groups of people working toward a common goal. You think this sounds ok if all you read is sci fi or fantasy, or you don't ordinarily read at all, so you want your books to resemble your favorite TV series. For visual media, or anything episodic, it's necessary to have a cast of characters doing different things, and to switch between points of view to keep the audience engaged, but it isn't nearly as common in fiction, where your audience should be expected to have the attention span to follow a single point of view for a few hundred pages. Even great TV shows like Twin Peaks suffer from their multiple points of view by having at least one group of people who are clearly the show's B-squad (Donna and her idiot motorcycle boyfriend in the case of Twin Peaks). Every single fantasy novel ever written (even Lord of the Rings) has huge swaths of pages where you start asking yourself "why am I reading about this butthole? where is the main character?". It's the number one crime of all fantasy as a genre.

2. Fantasy novels love extraneous characters. A sane author of fiction will not name a character unless this serves a purpose, either because their name is significant to the plot or because they're going to appear multiple times throughout the story. It's along the same lines as that rule that you shouldn't show a gun in a movie unless it's going to be fired at some point. Why are you telling me that the waiter's name at the local tavern is Bradigar or whatever? Who the frick cares? Fantasy authors think you need to know everyone's name because they are all neurodivergent and they think more irrelevant things to memorize makes the world deeper and more three dimensional. They are confused and believe an abundance of pointless details is what makes a story complex, instead of characterizing only important people through their thoughts and dialogue like a real author.

3. Fantasy authors think they can rely on all the tropes created before them, copying every single one of them, yet somehow they're going to do it better. Let's be fair and leave out the stuff that is lifted from LOTR, which was published like 80 years ago. How about fantasy battles among armies, a key component of just about every fantasy novel, and not something Tolkien spent a lot of time on. Pick up a history book and read about how Alexander the Great and/or Julius Caesar fought battles, and if you haven't done so before, a light bulb should go off over your head as you notice that every single battle fought in any fantasy novel is based on like 4 or 5 battles those two fought in real life.

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