Monday, June 15, 2009

Funny Things About the Fantasy Genre

  1. The #1 most time consuming meal in most Fantasy world is stew because it takes so long to cook. This makes it a bad choice for a meal when you are trying to get quickly from one place to another for obvious reasons. What is the #2 most common meal that fantasy characters eat when they are trying to get from place to place? Stew.
  2. It is a fact that beer is made from barley, which takes time to grow in temperate regions. So would someone please tell me why the infinite number of blond barbarians, who populate the modern excuses for fantasy literature like chiggers on a Texas riverbank, and who continually roam the frigid North that is covered in ice and snow much of the time, why why why do they drink more beer in one evening than I drink water in one day?
  3. Why do all-powerful dictators who rule their people with an iron hand, and who feel perfectly fine killing innumerable peasants for little reason, all of a sudden feel the need to engage in careful secrecy about the murder of the orphaned farm boy who happens to be the hero?
  4. Why do the bad guys always outnumber the good guys by about a billion to one?
  5. I have to admit this is NOT funny, but weired, the parents of heroes have a 98.9% casualty rate in Fantasy stories. The parents of Heroines have a slightly better casualty rate, only 87.6%. What makes this worse is the fact that most of these stories are written by parents, not teenagers.
  6. After considering #5 for a moment, I have discovered why most Fantasy worlds are stuck with middle ages type technology for thousands of years. Parents pass on their knowledge to their children, right? Well, in these fantasy worlds, about once every hundred years or so, a massive war erupts through the most advanced kingdoms. This of course requires heroes since the bad guys out number the good guys by some outrageous number. The heroes are all either orphans who are separated from their mentors/foster parents/ guardians around the age of sixteen or they are teenagers who's parents just got killed. In other words, everytime a civilization gets near deveopling something like gunpowder for instance, all the smart people get killed off and their libraries get burned and power gets handed to the people who have Zero life experiance, so after the war is over, scientific knowledge is back a square one, and the writer has another hundred years or so to drum up another war so he can keep writing fantasy novels instead of sci-fi novels.
  7. Why are 90% of heroes teenagers? I mean, I know teenagers can be good soldiers, but when you put together a whole bunch of them and kill off Brom, Ormis, Dumbldore, or whoever else you have directing them, they shouldn't become suddenly smarter than their former guardians. Check out history, how many teenagers saved their city, let alone their nation vs. how many non teenagers did the same thing.
  8. Why is it that the female character in most fantasy stories with a romantic plot thread have to be the one with selfcontrol, the one who says "no we can't get married right now"? Probably has something to do with the teenaged hero and the fact that his love is a hundred billion years old or something.
  9. Why do some Christian have to hate Fantasy so much?
  10. Why does the heroe vs. Villian duel alway happen in a vaccum? I mean there's got to be some observant bowman or swords man who would notice "Hey! there's the person who got us all into this mess" Then twang or eee* and Bingo! End of fight. (for those of you who did not grow up with little brothers, "eee" is the sound made when you stab someone).

3 comments:

  1. That is hilarious - and true. I would like to see where you got your stats from on life expectancy of parents, however I just realised that the parents in my fantasy stories are universally dead or despised. Thanks for a fantastic post.

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  2. The Stats are aproximations of what I've read. The reason for all the parents and mentors getting killed, imprisoned, or kidnapped is so that the inexperiance hero or heroine will have to solve their problems themselves, creating a much longer story than if the parents or mentors had fixed the problems themselves.

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  3. "...blond barbarians, who populate the modern excuses for fantasy literature like chiggers on a Texas riverbank"

    HAHAHA!! You kill me, Evan. Seriously. Great post.

    And now I'm off to catch up with Ardenhail ... which I haven't read in forever and a half. :)

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