3 things everyone hates in fantasy books.

In my previous post, I discussed the reasons why fantasy books are great. In this one, let me list some issues I find in fantasy books that are really irritating. By that, I mean issues that can get me annoyed as hell and make me skip whole paragraphs of my reading. We love them, they transport us away, and they will always be in our hearts, but reading fantasy books has some major disadvantages:

  1.I don't need to know every single character in the book. This is a common issue even among the classics. Why do I need to know the name of the farmer who looks angry or the name of every single village/town the heroes pass through or every silly detail about characters that don't have an important input to the story?

  This is irritating because: a) I'm not going to remember either the name or the characteristics given that I only meet them once, b) it takes my mind away from the protagonists, c) it causes me to struggle to keep my focus on the story's mainstay, and d) my day has already tired me a lot - I don't want a book that adds more tiredness to me.

2. The whole pattern is tiringly repetitive sometimes. For that, I blame the latest trends of fantasy TV series. Let me explain: back in the days when fantasy TV series didn't exist, reading stories about dragons and sorcerers was cool, mostly because you couldn't see it anywhere, and it offered you a way to escape from your miserable and meaningless life. So you wanted it.

  Today though, after the projection of the aforementioned series/movies on my laptop's screen, I don't like reading yet another story of dragons, elves, magicians, and good or bad kings/queens that the people want or not, but the protagonists have to step on, etc. I'm so bored by it simply because the fact that you need to use a dragon - which is such a repetitive and seen-again figure - in order to save the story of a book tells me that the mainstay is so uninteresting that you have to have a rescue board.

Let me put this the other way around: if Game of Thrones had no dragons, would it still be interesting? Not so much. Although we shouldn't compare films with books as they both rely on different aspects of the story's production, I think it's fair to say that the less someone uses fantastic figures in a fantasy book, the more interesting the book becomes. I think they call it reverse psychology (not sure, though).

  3.The names. I think most of you would agree with that. Names like Bombadill, Zeddicus Zu'l Zorander, Nynaeve al'Meara, Korodullin, etc. The list goes on and on. You can check out a dialogue that I read on Reddit about it here (if you want to bore yourself to death). All in all, what's with the complicated names in fantasy books? I know, I know, we're going to love them anyway. But still...

  That's all for now. I can't wait to hear your opinions on the matter. I hope you're doing fine, and that my article was not too much of a disappointment for you.