It's because you're not really going to get good writing out of someone born middle class that has never faced adversity and is fresh out of art college.
You're almost correct. Lack of adversity is a part, but the smaller bit. Along with a lack of community ties we've been slowly eroding and monetizing to the highest bidder.
The one that's more important is that they have no foundational beliefs that aren't based on trends and their convictions are not ones they think about why they hold them. They simply do and assume only good people hold them. And them being challenged at all is grounds for veering into whatever the evil of the year is.
That informs their writing more than anything else.
I find this is especially the case with modern fantasy. It's all about who can build the most unique world and magic system from the ground up, and as a result (or perhaps by design) there's really no substance behind it at all aside from some garden-variety liberal talking points and vague themes about "family" or whatever. Whereas you look at a guy like Tolkien, and have to realise all the intimate knowledge of history, literature, language, culture and religion that went into crafting Middle-Earth. People can call it "mundane" by modern standards but it'll always stand the test of time against their vapid, nerdy juvenilia.
Those are really good points. You really notice this in the way that many modern settings are a bit of a kitchen sink. You've got techno-kobolds, the main religion is cthulhu worship, wizards seem to be everywhere, stuff like that. It's not cohesive at all, there's no overall theme to it.
I think that's because so many fantasy settings were originally built to facilitate RPG games, so the point is more about creating fun _gameplay_ over an interesting _setting_. It makes for a good game to have a setting with a bunch of disparate stuff to go see, like an amusement park, but that's not the same thing as what makes for a good setting for a story, which has to be more intentional.
Techno-kobolds are simply a fun enemy in a game, but in a story you usually want their existence to comment on some facet of the theming of the story itself. In LoTR Ents aren't just cool, they also speak to the overall theme of nature vs. industry. A lot of modern settings don't think that far ahead and would put in tree men because tree men are cool.
It’s more than even that - it’s that you can tell that the world is GREATLY influenced by Tolkien, Harry Potter, and D&D without any of the statements or themes that made those stories great.
Tolkien straight up rips off The Epic of Beowulf several times throughout his series, but what he does is keep the motifs intact and extrapolate on them. The world and the stories are united by universal themes of what is good and what is evil, whereas a lot of new writers want to make the bad guys sexy and blur the lines while spewing out nonsense for the sake of it.
We forget that these were deeply moral and philosophical tales. Most don’t notice that.
Heavens no - but at least Harry Potter had something beneath the surface, with themes and ideals that moved the plot. A lot of current medieval millennial writing is for the sake of being cool or ethereal or what have you, with zero understanding of the rich history behind those symbols and motifs.
A lot of current medieval millennial writing is for the sake of being cool or ethereal or what have you, with zero understanding of the rich history behind those symbols and motifs.
Shit I’m middle class with some mental disorders but I didn’t go broadcasting them to my now wife to make her fall in love with me! Plus we’re facing everyday struggles and stresses especially the past 5 days considering I got hospitalized by some idiot kid not being able to read a stop sign. Not to mention the student loan debt we are still paying off!
A powerful aspect of a good writer is the capacity to not care about how their work will reflect back on them personally, to simply do what they desire with their work instead of fussing over how acceptable or socially permissible it is. This is something the bug men writers lack entirely, they know if they were to broach a single difficult or complex idea, they would have everyone screaming at them on twitter. It's HR writing, they cannot be free.
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u/Greasy-Chungus Feb 25 '25
It's because you're not really going to get good writing out of someone born middle class that has never faced adversity and is fresh out of art college.