Rhapsody's 7 Deadly Sins Continue

So I'm ready to round this out now I think. Here we go.

4) Be more creative with your setting.

Fantasy books are all, typically, set in a poorly disguised romanticized version of Europe during the middle ages. Or possibly Europe during the Renaissance. Usually an author setting a fantasy in a more Renaissance-type time period will get heaps of praise from idiots like the guy from the New York Times book review for being "incredibly inventive" or some such other totally ignorant phrase.

Rhapsody is especially guilty of this. There's the same kind of lord-peasant relationship going on (though it's a highly romanticized version, of course), and by the point of The Assassin King the "goodly" people of the British, French, and Italian styled countries are going to war with - can you guess it? - the people of the desert countries to the east of them! Where have we seen this before? I don't know.

This. Is. Boring.

Please, Fantasy writers. I'm begging you. Set a fantasy novel somewhere that's not a poorly disguised version of Europe during the middle ages. Please God, don't just emulate the same conflicts of the time period. That means nothing that too closely resembles The Crusades, Elizabeth Haydon, and no incredibly bad attempts to copycat The Black Death, R. A. Salvatore.

But why do I even bother ask? This is fantasy authors we're talking about. Having them actually be inventive for once? Now there's a laugh.

5)There is no pure "Good" vs. "Evil".

Yet again, we find we have Tolkien to thank for this. His books were interesting in their own way, sure, and his bad guys certainly seemed pretty bad, and even kinda scary at times. However, if you sit back and look at it, you can draw only one motivation for them: They're evil for the sake of being evil.

But you know something? Tolkien did that for a reason. Because the evil characters of Tolkien's book were humans, or ruled by humans, and they were motivated by one primal factor: Greed. The message is there, even if it's simple. Humans are bad and they do bad things for the simple fact that they're human.

Other fantasy writers don't make the "mistake" of giving their stories any special kind of message or meaning. And by mistake I mean they're not good enough to give it meaning.

No, instead we find that there are races that are purely "good," which includes but is not necessarily limited to: Humans. Many try to add the Tolkien list of goodly races: Elves, Dwarves, and Halflings, but any of those races could easily be on the evil list. And the Evil list almost always includes: Orcs, Goblins, and pretty much anything that isn't human. Demons will often appear, and some people even invented gods that are pure evil just so we can keep from having humans being evil.

Because if humans are evil, it's not because they're actually evil themselves. Oh no, humans are always members of the goodly races who can never do anything wrong (Wow, no wonder these people write fantasy. They're already living in a fantasy world). If they're evil, it's because they're being led on by a Demon, or Spirit, or Goblin/Orc/Creature, or even a purely evil "god" or demigod just to make sure that there's no real stain on the clean, pure slate of man.

This conflict may be slightly interesting for children's books, but for those of us over the age of 10 it's such a hackneyed, played-out, overused, trite story set-up that it's almost impossible to care about anymore. Why are the evil races always purely evil? Why are the good races always purely good (unless possessed by an evil...thing)? Why can't every race be somewhere in between good and evil, just like it would most likely be in real life?

Here's just a little food for thought: Just because something, say, a dragon, prays on a farmer's sheep, doesn't mean that the dragon absolutely has to be evil. We tend to demonize anything that preys on smaller, weaker creatures than it, but this isn't the way of reality. Because if it was, than humans are the biggest demons to have ever walked the Earth. No other creature, and I mean none, has ever preyed on more species of plant or animal - even bacteria! - than humans. So if we always end up as this "absolutely" goodly race in every fantasy novel, well, what does that make everything else?

And when you start thinking about this, you start seeing fantasy novels in a whole new light. All of the sudden all the "evil atrocities" that you read that some goblin supposedly committed began to sound like desperate attempts for it to save it's own race against the self-righteous, evil, endlessly destructive humans. You read a fantasy novel in this light where you are supposed to sympathize with the humans, but by the end the only ones you're feeling sorry for are the "evil" races, who within the book likely didn't do anything wrong but were nearly wiped off the face of the Earth anyway.

Looking at things this way, it's hard to find any fantasy authors who don't just seem like a total joke.

6) Interspecies sex actually isn't cool.

I know there's those of you out there that actually have a thing for "interspecies erotica", but that doesn't really mean it needs to boil over into endless fantasy novels.

Rhapsody treads a very thin line on this. She has characters that are essentially part human, part dragon. And while I'm not sure that at any point in the series it actually describes any of the liaisons between the dragons and humans that created these offspring, I wouldn't be surprised if it did. And Elizabeth Haydon seems pretty damn adamant about reminding you over and over about this mixed blood. I guess this is a means to tickle your inner, taboo for humans having sex with things that aren't human without blatantly throwing it in your face.

To be fair, for the majority of fantasy, this isn't really a problem. It mostly only occurs in vampire hunting novels, and those have only relatively recently been bundled into the Fantasy section of store shelves.

Despite this fact, however, this little hinting at such interspecies affairs is still danced around quite a bit in fantasy novels. Typically, fantasy novels attempt to be more "romantic" about such things. And by romantic I mean more of the thinking, not romance novel trash - that's what vampire hunting books are. So by being "romantic" they're attempting to only mention these things, rather than straight up describe them. And as "cool" as the theoretical idea of someone being half human and half dragon may seem to you, its just disturbing to be reading a book from an author that actually seems to think it would be really awesome if a human stuck their naughty bits in a dragon and something came out.

I guess the best thing about this, if their has to be a best thing, is that it's not a Tolkien emulation. Instead, we go much further back in time to the mythological tales (that inspired Tolkien), and to ancient Greek myths about Zeus and other such people who would frequently mate with non-humans to produce hideous offspring. You want to know the important difference? In ancient Greece, these stories were a lesson that, you know, it's really not all right to have sex with non-human animals (actually a frequent lesson in many ancient religions) because the results can be atrocious. In fantasy novels, these stories are latent, disturbing sexual desires.

And I do hope I'm not alone in not wanting to read that.

7) Turning your table-top D&D games into books is actually not interesting at all.

For this last one, I go to a sin Rhapsody has actually not committed. It's the one sin on this list I can pretty positively say Elizabeth Haydon is not guilty of. I'm pretty sure she's guilty of all the rest.

But since I'm doing the 7 Deadly Sins of Fantasy, I'll come to this one too.

Sure, for many of us, when we first picked up a Forgotten Realms or Dragon Lance book, it was pretty cool. The response probably went something along the lines of: "Woah! It's like a game of D&D only without all the rolling of dice and in book form!" But when you step back and think about that for a moment, it becomes instead: "Oh, wow, this is like a game of D&D only without the dice and in book form. How sad."

Not only are these books that are intended as purely entertainment with no specific message (though as I pointed out earlier you're left with the message that humans are purely good and such forth and so on), these are books that are actually intended as masturbatory entertainment to people who are just that in love with dungeons and dragons.

So most of the time not only is the writing bad, the characterization terrible (if existant), the dialogue flat, the action dull, and the events nonsensical, but you generally don't even have an actual story going on. Just some tale someone who thinks they're actually a really clever dungeon master composed on their mother's kitchen table and may have been interesting at that one point when you rolled a 2 so it didn't kill the dragon and you nearly died but then your friend rolled a 20 and saved the day, but isn't interesting to anybody else.

Yet despite this, these books have at various times elevated to the most popular form of fantasy available on the market.

The world is a frightening place.

CONCLUSION: The end of Sin

I would love to say that by not committing these 7 heinous acts that I have outlined for you here you are going to be hailed as the greatest fantasy writer of all time, but I can't guarantee that. What I can guarantee is that if you manage to commit all 7 sins in a single novel then you could be the worst writer on the planet Earth and your book will still soar to the top of best-seller lists across the nation.

So I leave the choice to you: Join Elizabeth Haydon, Laurell K. Hamilton, Kim Harrison, Ed Greenwood, R.A. Salvatore, Terry Goodkind, Robert Jordan, Terry Brooks, and an endless stream of others and write incredibly bad fiction that still somehow manages to sell disturbingly well, or Attempt to save us from this seemingly endless stream of tired crap they keep hurling at us and risk falling flat on your face by writing something new, different, and original.

There's at least one person who will have respect for you. He's sitting right here.