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One of my favorite female badass, Misaki from The Sword of Kaigen. Probably the epitome of female badasses as she was a great fighter and fought through marriage difficulties and tragedy. (Don't want to give out spoilers)
I recently finished "Mother of the Fallen: A Reforged Story," currently in the SPFBOX competition run by Mark Lawrence. The protagonist is a badass female detective in her thirties, and she encounters the most horrendous situations I’ve ever read. Think a combination of "Dante's Inferno" the video game, "Constantine," and a dash of "Se7en." This urban fantasy, infused with horror elements, led me to explore J.R. Manga's other book, which blend sci-fi, horror, and fantasy. His unique style, inspired by the darker aspects of manga it seems, is a refreshing take on the genre. Definitely an indie author to watch!
Honestly in my personal experience and opinion, the best way to read these books is to just let it all soak in without questioning anything, just pure experience in the process of being just as lost and confused as the characters themselves. Stop trying to understand til you’ve had the totality of the story left it’s impression on you. If you try to pick it apart before you reach the next chapter you more than likely will find yourself looking for a handout with solid grounding rather than your imagination to fill in the blanks and use prescience to see how events might unfold. Nothing less than pure immersion as if you were experiencing it all alongside every group is required. Bias out the window 🎉experience is the best hands on learning experience. Your approach to reading is fundamentally challenged in these books.
I also want more dark fantasy (which by definition is fantasy+horror and very different from grimdark fantasy). I love Dark Tower, but it's super unorthodox as a fantasy. I wish there were more dark fantasy series that are also epic fantasy (e.g. Mistborn, Stormlight, Wheel of Time, A Song of Ice and Fire). As far as I know one of the most fitting epic dark fantasy series is Demon Cycle by Peter V. Brett, but haven't tried it yet because people say it falls off a lot after each sequel and it's just not good after book 3, but they are only 5, so I might try them - all 5 are above 4/5 rating in Goodreads. Do you know Percepliquis (Riyria's Revelations 6) by Michael J. Sullivan? I love love love this book, it's one of my favorite fantasy endings of all time. There's a lot of potential for horror there (not saying the author should've gone for the spooks). Imagine Percepliquis but with more traditional horror writing style - it has exploring cavings (like the movie The Descent), scary creatures who live there for a thousand of years and people who went exploring died, there's a nearby village that people say is haunted, etc. I think the book is perfect as it is, I'm just brainstorming "what if we have epic fantasy like Riyria but when people are exploring caves the horror elements are elevated and it gets super spooky, super gory with a lot of buildup from urban legends, e.g. backstory of people who died there exploring, high tension, maybe some psychological horror element with the characters, etc." I would love to read a high quality epic dark fantasy. Imagine the classic characters quest - going on an expedition, or to defeat the dark lord, but the villages they go through on their journey get more messed up every time - from destroyed to massacred to haunted with massacred, so the journey is intense from beginning to end and the reader never knows what evil lurks in the shadows. I liked First Law Book 2's adventure, there was a lot of "WTF is happening on this part of the world" both with the journey to the end of the world and the Gurkhul chapters.
Lol, you had me laughing along with you on the "pulp fantasy" comment. I could see this being kinda fun though... something heavily stylized, reminiscent of things like Sin City, but in a fantasy world, with some grimdark elements. But besides that, I can agree with many of the other wants. And I know there is a LOT already out there, but it can be hard to find them. As far as "mainstream" fantasy goes, does seem like these are rarer finds.
Are you bored with 19y old heroes JOHAN? I am, especially in ANIME. Why do people do anime and books with people at 18-20y old heroes? Why not at 25-40y old heroes? Same heroes journey? We are many people at 25-30-+ years readers, it should be more compelling to write shouldn’t it?
40+ heroine I can get behind and I loved Michael Sullivan's Legends of the First Empire where one of the characters we follow is a 40+ heroine and deals with romance, and how romance might be different at that age than when she was younger.
Tolkien is timeless because his story is universal and is based on archetypes that have always existed, his story was not propaganda of any kind, it was a sincere story about virtue and hope. It is undoubtedly an interesting analysis that shows us that many times his work is not correctly valued. but to say that he was progressive,... was quite the opposite, he was VERY traditionalist, so much so that his values were more aligned with a man from the 15th century than one of his time, he was against industrialization, he was pro-monarchy, he supported a dictator Spanish traditionalist Catholic (Franco), who has not been anti-Semitic or especially racist, supports his deep traditionalism more, people seem to forget that in mythology (from which Tolkien draws a lot) and history there are many women wars, from Joan of Arc to the Greek Amazons or Atalanta, and some of these leave Eowyn as incredibly “decaffeinated,” especially when the message of the story is that the “weak and insignificant” can contribute or be the heroes in the end and Eowyn is ultimately mentally destroyed by the war and resumes its translational role. Being against the Nazis was quite common at the time, and anti-Semitism in its racial sense was not very common. The Middle Ages were kinder to women than the Victorian era and anti-Semitism is much rarer than is often believed historically, people used to discriminate more based on culture or lineage than anything else. The evolution of values is not linear and obviously Tolkien did not have these ideas because he thought in the same way as a progressive until his time, THE USSR legalized abortion and discouraged female work years before TLoTR.
I want more books with pace like tad Williams or Hobb or even abercrombie,just many pages of us soaking in the world and the characters And next would be long novels,like planned out huge series like malazan or wheel of time
I haven't tried it yet, but The Wars of Light and Shadow by Janny Wurts might fall under those two categories. It has the beautiful prose and slow pace of Hobb's and Williams' work, with the complexity and depth of Malazan.
I would say for Fantasy books that have civilizations that aren't clearly inspired by a particular culture The Storm Light Archive is a good one. While yes you have some inspiration taken for big picture stuff, when Sanderson gets in to the nitty gritty of the customs of these places it gets really interesting to me :)
I want more mature characters, generally. People who have life experience, connections to others (family, friend groups, professional/political connections). Also, more settings that aren't basically medieval Europe, or Victorian Europe, or modern Europe/America. Conflicts that don't rely on people being stupid. It's so much more interesting when a smart character makes good decisions, but it's still not enough to overcome until they learn more and/or connect with the right people.
Most readers complaining about these kind of things should check out a wider range of authors writing fantasy there's something for everyone regardless of preferences.
The Threadlight series by Zack Argyle (Voice of War is book 1) has a married couple as two of the main characters-. There is also an older female character as a prominent/main character.
I don’t agree with you. Making someone genuinely good can be realistic. There are men and women I know in real life who fit firmly into that category. Does that mean they don’t have weaknesses or flaws? No! But they consistently strive to do what is right, and fix mistakes they make when they can. More heroes and heroines who take the high road in fiction would be refreshing for sure!
While it's a short story/novella, "Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell" by Brandon Sanderson would check off two boxes addressed: it's got a middle aged female protagonist and has strong horror elements. It was my favorite story in the Arcanum Unbounded anthology.
If you want good heroes and bad villians, check out my books: THE REVENANT AND THE TOMB, THE WIZARD'S STONE, and THE REVENANT AND THE CULT, BOOK 1. They wlso contain a slight livectaftian horror vibe
World without humans, sounds like a intriguing concept but would work well with fantasy. Yes, I do think we need more female criminals or antagonists. It's true that romance in fantasy is generic and feels somewhat childish. I'm hoping to see more of married couples or very matured couples in the story. For some reasons, age is also a huge factor in it since the audience is mainly young. Most authors probably feels compelled to include a fresh and young romance which is not necessary. Even it applies to protagonists. I try to imagine a old lady as a hero, and I think it arises many different possibilities from what "young heroes" do. As for s*xual content, I agree with you and I don't really care for such stuffs but at the same time, I also think it'd be nice to have a positive s*xual content that's emotionally mature and intimate without making it feeling like a cringe-y moment, forced encounter or violence.
When a fellow writer told me "you have to write your book more like a movie" i remember looking him dead in the eye and saying "that might be the worst piece of advice anyone has ever tried to give me" because i really like the moments of characters just interacting with each other or the settings, or taking a moment to reflect -- and you don't get that in movies
Definitely adding this to my TBR after watching this video. In a way your description of this book reminds me a bit of the Silmarillion (describing the long-scale history of a region rather than focusing on the development of individual characters). I loved the Silmarillion, and this book sounds right up my alley. Also Liu's analysis of governments sounds a bit like classical Burkean conservatism.
for fantasy horror, i think my favorite to recommend has to be Gunmetal Gods by Zamil Akhtar. it's a self-pub book that i felt was just better in every way than a lot of traditionally published books I've read.
Always amuses me when everyone reading the same tiny fraction of fantasy books complain about the deficits of the genre, while refusing to step out of bubble of said fraction to find the ones that are actually doing all the things they claim to want. Also, I run a channel where I cover a lot of fantasy doing a lot of the things the people in these comments claim to want, and I have the channel stats to prove almost no one cares about those books 😂 I can think of a number of different picks that match most of these asks offhand - they're just backlist books and hence not of interest to most readers.
As for 40+ Female Main Characters, I can recommend “The Bloodsworn Saga” by John Gwynne, where the character of Orka is one of the three main POVs. Also, while not the main POV, Signe the ruler of Arbonne is a POV in Guy Gavriel Kay’s “A Song For Arbonne”!
He literally mentions this in his video. You should actually watch the video first before commenting instead of trying to get attention by commenting quickly
@@Belkerlos Indeed he does, though I also wanted to mention “A Song for Arbonne”, where Signe’s POV is short but very poignant. Another example that came to my mind is Tenar, the Main Character of Ursula LeGuin’s “Tehanu” (Earthsea #4). All the best! 😊
I'd say that Murderbot is absolutely distopyan, under the funny jokes, the future it paints its really distopyan if you stop and think about the world in which Murderbot exists.
idk if its me but a few series on this list i thought sucked ass lmao idk if its me but a few series on this list i thought sucked ass lmao. Also scott lynch, patrick rothfus, george rr martin etc are authors that i will never ever read a single page of because of scummy things all 3 have done in their personal lives not to mention going decades between books
I struggled through this book and did manage to finish it. Overhyped? In my opinion, Yes! Waaay too long and not that interesting. I’m a big reader of fantasy for decades now and was hoping that this book would wow me. Oh well, plenty of other fantasy series out there for me to explore.
I... really didn't like this trilogy. it envoked quite the intense emotional response, but each time it did it just felt so much like a backhanded slap to the readers. Maybe the farseer trilogy truly is supposed to just be a setup for the rest of the books, but I just absolutely could not stand reading through 1952 pages of sheer injustice and tragedy. Even in very downer stories, there's typically some happiness somewhere in between, but not in these three books. It doesn't just feel slow, it feels like Hobb had no direction while writing it. I know that's probably not true, but I really cant see how people can stick with it. Especially when the ending leaves you wanting so much more.
It's simple, it's because Rothfuss has no respect for anybody. And if you don't like being constantly lied to, jerked around and taken advantage of, you are just a hater and a terrible person. He doesn't owe his fans anything as he constantly reminds them.
I find this amusing because the literature kids were the nerds and the si-fi fantasy crowd were talking books in the smoking area, and taking the AP-lit kids' lunch money when I came up.
While I agree with the conclusion, there's a point academics and critics bring up that wasn't mentioned here directly. I actually had a professor who explained one of the biggest issues to me in clear concise language. Fantasy allows for victories and spectacle that are too easy to generate and contrive. Need tension? Add a dragon. Need spectacle? Cast a spell or have said dragon flame. He was right. This is a pitfall of fantasy. What is Lord of the Rings without the ring? Well, we would have to think of real things to temp characters besides the magic jewelry. That might actually strengthen the narrative, though it would also curve it and twist it into something different. However, a lot of the dramatic moments in the series still work if it were historical fiction instead. It is a well written novel. The point is, I believe the best of fantasy is just as good if you took the fantastic out. Everything Sanderson said, for example, still holds for books that are not fantastic. When they payoffs could theoretically be earned whether there were magic or not.
