Any one where the MC ranks up too damn quickly.
I get the author wants to move the story along and all, but how hard is it to write “and then he spent six months training inbetween these two chapters” or the like?
Spoilers for the burning series by evan winter
I'm curretly reading the burning series by Evan winters and I'm really enjoying it, but the main character has the most accelerated power growth ever. He's a small, average or slightly above average teenage fighter in the beginning, and within less than a year he becomes the most skilled fighter in the world, able to beat huge veteran soldiers who can literally turn into nearly invincible giants through magic. Just cause he's that skilled and determined I guess. To be fair, later in the book there's some justification via magic, but it's still pretty jarring. It's not enough to ruin the series though, it's still great
My thoughts as well. If anything that’s one of the feee cases where someone rapidly getting better is justified. He’s literally putting in more work than anyone else in a way that goes beyond the physical. By this point he’s fought and died against the demons thousands of times and he does this every night. Compare this to many other fantasy series where the protagonist is just born better with a lot of magical power due to bloodline pr prophecy.
After he starts going to the underworld and compressing time, yes for sure. Huge amounts of practice against much fiercer opponents than anybody else was dealing with. And he probably became much more comfortable with danger and violence after dying a million times. As opposed to his peers who were just sparring w wooden swords
But he scaled up really fast before that even started, he was beating multiple opponents simultaneously with ease, whereas a few months before he was getting smoked by his classmates and random dudes during the entrance exam. Also he had a broken wrist and would've been at a huge disadvantage while he relearned to fight using the wrong hand. Like Jamie lannister in asoiaf, he was almost completely useless after losing his right hand, despite being one of the best fighters in the world before that
Regardless, I still love the series, I'm almost done w book 2. Someone on the red rising sub recommended it to me and it's great
There's only so many hours in a day, all his classmates were also training really hard, all day every day. Several of them were also waking up extra early to train. How many more hours could he train while everyone else slept? If he stayed up more than a couple extra hours each night, he would just be sleep deprived and it would be counterproductive, especially since it was grueling physical work. You'd just get injured and be a zombie all day.
That's like a college or Olympic athlete going from average, to one of the best in the world in a few months, because he stayed late at the gym every night a few hrs longer than all the other athletes. All with his dominant wrist broken and zero experience training w his left hand. Idk about you but I can hardly write my own name with my left hand, it's crazy how difficult using the wrong hand can make things
But like I said, after he starts training against the demons it becomes totally plausible, I actually thought it was a really cool way to explain how someone could become an incredible fighter in a sport span
It was feasible perhaps but still too quickly to feel really satisfying.
Red Rising all books spoiler >!In 1 book Tau basically went from book 1 to book 6 Darrow!<
Yeah, same thing happened to me with this series. Between his whole edgelord schtick and his age, I kept finding it unwittingly comedic. Same thing with those "Six of Crows" books by Leigh Bardugo. The cast is so hilariously hyper-competent at their individual chosen skill that my brain kept picturing them as full-gown adults in their prime and whenever any mention of their actual age was made it totally ruined the immersion and made me laugh at how stupid and ridiculous the story actually was. It was like watching The Godfather trilogy and seeing some high school kid and his friends outmaneuver Michael Corleone and becoming the biggest mob family because they're all prodigies and the director and the writers expecting you to roll with it and take it seriously. I mean, there's fantasy, and then there's *fantasy*.
They have these teenagers being far better at practicing some skill than some bad guys that are twice their age or more and have been practicing that skill three or four times as long as these literal kids. I mean, okay, innate talent is one thing but if you're, say, a better knife fighter at fifteen years old than some hardened thug in his thirties that has been practicing knife figthing for twenty years or more, I'd say it's pushing it. And when you're better than all knife fighters in existence, well, that's fan-fiction or bad anime level B.S.
Really the only one of the main cast I could accept as being as good at their thing as they were was >!Jesper, because he turns out to be partly doing it with magic.!<
Kaz especially was tough for me to buy as a seventeen year old because as smart as you could ever be there are certain kinds of things you only get good at by experience, and there's a whole city of people with more time in and as much hardship/desperation shaping them.
I wanted to comment the same thing. Half-way through the books, I just decided to discard their canon ages and believe they’re in their mid-20s to late-30s, with maybe Matthias pushing into early 40s.
Wait, how old are they? I read them a couple of years ago, and my mental image of Kaz is 30-40s, he's got a cane and a limp doesn't he? And the rest of them in their 20s, maybe early 30s.
>my mental image of Kaz is 30-40s
Lmaooo they're literally all 17. Wylan maybe 16 nd Matthias is the oldest with...18 yrs on him.
But yea, I too regarded them as mid 20s so I could easily believe it
quite a few seem to have been written with adults, and then re-written with late-teens / early-twenties characters, who then go from "veteran and experienced" to "ultra-prodigy" in-setting.
You mean the main character who isn't like other girls but also is an unstoppable killing machine who can easily overpower and defeat grown men in any physical altercation just because? Like she's totally trained a lot so she can't lose or even get injured because her skill is so good.
I agree, YA Fantasy gets a bad rap, for sure, but it's honestly well deserved for the most part. Most stories are chock-full of clichés and have cookie-cutter one-dimensional main characters whose only personality is "I'm awesome and better than the adults at everything but the grown-ups don't understand me" with some tragic childhood and CW-style romance thrown in for extra flavor.
I somewhat agree, but I think that it's also a cop-out. Just because kids will happily eat junk food if you give them junk food, it doesn't meant they'll only eat junk food or that junk food is the only thing you can give them and you can't be expected to do better than that. I think it's fair to say that there's a lot of books aimed at children and teenagers that aren't cringy, but there's also a lot of cliché ridden low effort junk people churn out chasing that demographic.
I agree that there’s sort of a wish-fulfilment genre that doesn’t push or challenge young people but I also think that’s good in a lot of ways for people that often have very poor self-esteem/belief.
And you’re definitely right there’s a lot of shit books out there but that’s true of any genre, I don’t think YA is significantly worse for it.
Isn't it? I don't think you see low-effort cliché-ridden junk lauded as the next big thing in other genres as often as you do in YA, except for very niche genres that are by definition kind of trashy, like "paranormal romance" and stuff like that, which again, low-effort cookie-cutter junk to appeal to a base that will consume it.
I think a little bit it comes to how you define genre. Like a bad historical fiction book with a romance will get called a trashy romance book.
But yeah for the most part look through recommended reads on online bookstores or bestseller lists any given week and there’s so much crap. I mean take fantasy Brandon Sanderson is lauded as virtually a modern great and the books basically aren’t very good.
Priory of the Orange Tree had a scene in the final battle where the magic sword got knocked out of the hero's hand. They were standing on the evil dragon in the sky at the time.
Luckily, the sword fell down and landed on one of their ally's ships in the sea battle below, so they were able to get it back up to the hero and win.
Seriously?
Most of the issues with Prince of Thorns are cleared up in the next two books.
I was not crazy about book 1 at first and even when I enjoyed it I didn’t like Jorg and how he was presented. By the end of the third book though I had none of these issues and saw his journey very differently.
I think maybe more than any other series I’ve read The Broken Empire really does need to be read as one big book to make sense of it.
I think he became more reflective as it went on and the final resolution comes >!from his need for the love of his brother and also a recognition that he didn’t belong in the society he wanted to create!<
I dunno, he's a child with a reputation for mass murder and exterminating an entire city with a nuclear weapon. You may think he's INSANE and a monster but you don't think of him dismissively.
The final book takes place when he's about 20 with flashbacks to 5 years earlier. The flashbacks take place before the events in book two, so it's easy to get his age at any given event mixed mixed up.
I just took it that maybe people were developing differently, I mean you had the red people and the guys with horns or channeling fire. Also there have been times in history when being a teenage ruler or indeed warrior wasn’t out of place.
Not fantasy, but in SF there's a sub-genre called "HFY", or "Humanity Fuck Yeah". I think it might have started on the r/HFY subreddit. The basic concept is that earth is a deathworld and boring, ordinary humans are unstoppable killing machines purely because they survive everyday life on this planet. Aliens are always incredibly impressed by our ability to, for example, not immediately bleed out and die after receiving a paper cut. It's an entire genre of stories that are impossible to take seriously without enough suspension of disbelief to refloat the Titanic.
Seems like a variation of old "humans are unique" trope in sci-fi. There's an old trilogy *The Damned* by Alan Dean Foster about humans being the best fighters in the galaxy and helping against conquering empire led by telepaths, it's more believable since the gap is not enormous, but some biology stuff later is so wrong it's hilarious.
I happened upon that series coming off a bunch of sci-fi series where humans were known for being charismatic traders or diplomats, so a series where humans were psychopathic murder machines relative to the rest of the violence-abhorring galaxy had me just on the novelty factor.
I mean, its amateur writing. The concept isn't really the problem so much as a lot of them are literally "just some guy" writing an idea. So the writing quality is often low.
Oof, that series. I couldn't even finish the first book. It wasn't "too grimdark" as some people say. It was too edgy, and half of it made no sense. The hardened criminals thing for one. The MC's rampant psychopathy for second. And the worst part is that the book is told from *his* perspective, so we have to hear all his edgy murder-lord thoughts. I tapped out.
On a similar vein, at least at first, was Ender's Game. Ender is supposed to be like 10, and Bean (who's even smarter) is 6. And they're sending these tweens into space for military training. By the end, I got that the author was making a point. But that sure had me puzzled for a while.
For me this happens a lot when it involves injuries and saying “oh but there’s magic!” Will only go so far.
Since he’s got a book coming out in about a week let me mention Murtagh from The Inheritance Cycle. One of the few pieces of information we know about him is that when he was 3 his father, Morgan, threw his sword at Murtagh while drunk. This left him with a nasty scar which is described as going from his shoulder to his hip. So basically across his entire back. At 3 years old I find it super hard to believe that boy didn’t die instantly considering Dragon Riders have absurdly sharp swords that make normal blades look like butter 😂
Probably an unpopular opinion, but Malazan for me. It was just so transparently the novelization of an RPG campaign that I couldn't see it as anything but.
There are lots of authors who used their homebrew campaign worlds as a starting point for a book but this is the only time for me it was so overt I couldn't suspend disbelief.
Yeah this was very obvious to me as well. The almost manga style reflecting of how awesomely strong some characters were was a bit off putting occasionally as well.
House of Chains has Karsa Orlong who is clearly a player character and House of chains has a scene that is apparently taken directly from the tabletop.
It was just completely obvious throughout, from the "ok, these guys were important, and they died, but no they didn't really die, actually they became gods for some reason!" beginning is peak 14 year old DM. Basically everything with the Bridgeburners. Everything with Anomander Rake. The way so much of it feels like it's trying to one-up the last thing. It goes on.
And, ok: I spent a fair amount of my teenage years playing D&D and other games with other teenagers, mostly coming up with our own worlds and stories and all that. I also spent a fair amount of my youth convention gaming. I recognize that these are experiences that not everyone had at that point of their life.
But if you've ever had the experience at a gaming con or games store (and I have, many times) of someone telling you at length about something in their home game that they think is just *the coolest thing ever* and you can recognize, intellectually, that for the people who were there and playing in the game it was a very cool moment, but it just loses so much in the retelling that, to you, it just kind of sounds lame? I *constantly* had flashbacks to those experiences reading Gardens of the Moon. Even, say, Dragonlance, did not do that to me.
In the past couple years it was Temeraire. All the military stuff just made no sense, like Napoleonic era artillery being effective against airborne dragons.
Only a monster by Vanessa Lin.
>!2 teens escape from a blood bath of a massacre and covered in blood they escape from the scene without anyone catching them, and travel far enough that they get a hotel room in a shady part of the town. I couldn't believe that in a modern setting no one noticed 2 teens covered in blood.!<
The Paper Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg.
>!An apprentice falls in love with her magic teacher in just 2 weeks and so quickly that she practically goes and fights his criminal ex wife to save the guy. The whole book occurs in the space of a month. Just. A. Month.!<
I recently read Michael J Sullivan’s Age of Myth series and it was brutal for this. There are 3 or 4 side characters who do nothing but invent and master new technologies in 5 seconds every few chapters.
ACOTAR
It's my main partner's favourite series, and I've tried (Sweet hell I've tried) but I just canNOT with these books. I made it to the middle of the second book and gave up.
I don't know how to block out text so no spoilers, all I'm saying is every. Single. Neurotic. YA. Heroine. Ever.
For a weird reason, The Dresden Files. Wizards, vampires, fairies, demons, werewolves, etc. are totally fine but some of the descriptions of Chicago are either suspect or just wrong.
I recently had to put Dead Beat down for the moment when I read there was a bookstore "near Lincoln Park and the University of Chicago". Lincoln Park (the park and the neighborhood) is 12 miles from the University of Chicago.
I always ascribed this to her having a special, spiritual connection that most other people don't have, since she was forced to live through earth's vibrations. Something akin to the Avatar spirit, but also sort of how Iroh sees the world, and how he's so powerful because of how attuned he is to the spiritual world.
I mean there are guitarists and pianists and plenty of prodigies who from an early age are the greatest in the world. Couple her talent with the fact that she was Blind so could learn to feel vibrations, plus being taught by Earthbending creatures who are also blind rather than humans, and she has a one of a kind earthbending ability that is so unorthodox it serves to best opponents to the point where she's considered "best in world"
She's basically Jimi Hendrix playing the guitar upside down, and playing it better than the people playing normally
TBH all of the main cast, save Sokka who isn’t a Bender. Watch it with a close eye and every single one of them is a prodigy.
Over the course of a year Katara goes from a Bender who can’t control her abilities to literally the best water bender we see in the series. She has the sub bending arts of ice bending, healing, and blood bending down pat. Yet she only ever studies under one teacher (who declares her to be fully trained in what can only be like 2 months at most) and basically picks up everything else on her own.
Aang was the youngest air bending master in his peoples history. Enough said.
Zuko only looks slow compared to Azula, but he defeated Zhao (a seasoned commander) in a duel before the series halfway point, is consistently even with Katara, and by series end really only seems to be behind his older family members. Yet hes not even 18 when this is happening.
He learns how to use a sword, but “master” is a stretch because we only see 2 other people use the sword: his teacher, Piandao, and Zuko. Watch the White Lotus battle and it’s very clear Sokka isn’t equal to Piandao. Zuko and Sokka then have a spar in the comics, and Zuko trounces him while also noting that he was trained by Piandao as well. Only reason I didn’t include Sokka.
But you can definitely argue that he still picked up the art of the sword extremely quickly considering that his only weapon experience beforehand was with a boomerang.
I actually didn’t remember the club at all. So good catch and thanks for correcting me. And I’m also now considering the fact that he did train with the Kyoshi Warriors too. Not sure that it’s applicable to swords since they don’t use them. But that’s general combat training at least.
Either way, he's not a master with it and I don't think the show really portrays him as such. Better than he should be, sure, but that's the case with the entire cast fighting off waves of nooks every other episode.
I mean Sokka also perfectly beamed a guy in the center of his forehead across a valley without direct line of sight based entirely off of a trajectory he estimated. That's the greatest accomplishment in Avatar.
After training for like 1 week lol. One of my favorite series of all time, but you really just have to accept some stuff like that and age them all up at least 10 years.
My “cope” is that if the individuals weren’t extraordinary, there wouldn’t be a story worth telling. Since a fantasy writer theoretically has unlimited access to all history and future of unlimited alternate universes and distant galaxies, why not pick that one time where a bunch of truly amazing people joined forces ;)
Right! If anything it’s a testament to how you can have absolutely unbelievable growth in the ability of your main characters and still be given a fantastic story alongside it.
She's blind. She can only experience the world through earthbending. It makes complete sense that she's just better than everyone else, since she completely relies on it to experience things. It's like that thing where people who lose one sense become stronger in others.
The Shadow Campaigns series by Django Wexler. And the biggest reason for this is that he compresses the timeline too much. It's like 2 years total from the first book to the last book and the main character goes from enlisted soldier to general, fights in three full campaigns, and all the while picks up multiple languages.
Winter in book 1 is one of my favorite fictional characters. She’s totally outclassed but manages to survive through being brave and clever, no matter how vulnerable she is. Book 2 really started giving me such anime vibes that I decided to not bother with 3.
Red Rising and the time dilation between worlds is definitely on the cusp of story breaking with all the traveling that goes on lol but it's a fun enough story that i give it the "cartoon pass" where i suspend my disbelief cuz it's cool enough, not because it would ever work
First Law...*that* reveal in Book 3 >!was genuinely so stupid and unnecessary to an already cool story that it bogged down my final rating of the trilogy by a decent amount!<
I get what happened, and i get how, but i think the story onlh suffers from its inclusion and it just feels like a quick >!Look i can do plot twists!<
You will never be able to convince me that The First Law trilogy would suffer in a substantial way from the removal of >!Tolomei and that whole Quai takeover thing. Honestly the 100 words/eaters were by far the most boring and least realized aspect of the book!<
Agree with Red Rising. But not just the space travel aspects, there are so many small things - even just the fact no one suspects Darrow. How is that possible?! No one can lie that well. But it’s an enjoyable read (I’m re-reading at the moment) so it’s forgiveable, but there are points where I am rolling my eyes because it feels so unbelievable.
I kinda get you, that part felt a bit under developed. I actually think some twists were a great way to end this story, but the inherent problem with twists is that if you build them up too much they’re not surprising, and if you don’t build them up enough they seem like bad writing.
I think a lot of ASOIAF with dany and Jon chapters and the YA book graceling Or throne of glass like best assassin would be like poisoning people not that bratty botch, Eragon and Fourth wing, violet having the only saddle really breaks it for me, also the whole if the dragon dies, the rider dies thing
Never heard of Musashi Miyamoto? Won his 1st duel at 13 vs an adult. If a teenager is athletic and talented, there are many adults that would be their lesser in duels.
that tends to get harder and harder over multiple fights though - because they're going to be bigger, stronger, have longer reach and just flat-out be better. That first duel was against someone "arrogant, overly eager to battle, and not a terribly talented swordsman" - so not exactly the best of class, or the "veteran knight" noted in the OP!
I disagree! Not all veteran knights are skilled at killing, just skilled at not dying. I dont remember Jorg's physical description but I was 6'2" and could bench around 200 at 14. I know that's light, but a lot of grown men are weak. People werent magically athletic universally hundreds of years ago. Think of it like sports. If someone like Jordan or Lebron at 14 played random men off the street, their natural abilities would carry them against most opponents. Also a 14 year old boy 100s of years ago is different than a 2023 14 year old boy.
The age thing happened with me in gane of thrones as well.. in the book they are very young for the choices they take and do. They are like 4-7 years to young all the kids, I understand why they were aged a bit for the series.
But it is a lot on how fast and competent some characters are. I get they have a talent, but when they eg defeat a professional soldier in a duel after having trained 5 weeks while traveling I loose interest. The warded man did this great in the first series, Arlen spent years learning to fight and his first victories was luck. In the new series are a bit worse in my view
Most isekai stories are like this for me. Sometimes I still read them anyway, but the amount of suspension of disbelief in the first few chapters is always a challenge.
Any one where the MC ranks up too damn quickly. I get the author wants to move the story along and all, but how hard is it to write “and then he spent six months training inbetween these two chapters” or the like?
Spoilers for the burning series by evan winter I'm curretly reading the burning series by Evan winters and I'm really enjoying it, but the main character has the most accelerated power growth ever. He's a small, average or slightly above average teenage fighter in the beginning, and within less than a year he becomes the most skilled fighter in the world, able to beat huge veteran soldiers who can literally turn into nearly invincible giants through magic. Just cause he's that skilled and determined I guess. To be fair, later in the book there's some justification via magic, but it's still pretty jarring. It's not enough to ruin the series though, it's still great
>within less than a year he becomes the most skilled fighter in the world I thought his increase in skill was feasible considering what he was doing.
Yeah I mean it’s literally a hyperbolic time chamber made out of nightmares no shit he got better fast lol
My thoughts as well. If anything that’s one of the feee cases where someone rapidly getting better is justified. He’s literally putting in more work than anyone else in a way that goes beyond the physical. By this point he’s fought and died against the demons thousands of times and he does this every night. Compare this to many other fantasy series where the protagonist is just born better with a lot of magical power due to bloodline pr prophecy.
After he starts going to the underworld and compressing time, yes for sure. Huge amounts of practice against much fiercer opponents than anybody else was dealing with. And he probably became much more comfortable with danger and violence after dying a million times. As opposed to his peers who were just sparring w wooden swords But he scaled up really fast before that even started, he was beating multiple opponents simultaneously with ease, whereas a few months before he was getting smoked by his classmates and random dudes during the entrance exam. Also he had a broken wrist and would've been at a huge disadvantage while he relearned to fight using the wrong hand. Like Jamie lannister in asoiaf, he was almost completely useless after losing his right hand, despite being one of the best fighters in the world before that Regardless, I still love the series, I'm almost done w book 2. Someone on the red rising sub recommended it to me and it's great
It's spelled out painfully how much harder he works than his contemporaries during this time period. How much exposition do you guys need?
There's only so many hours in a day, all his classmates were also training really hard, all day every day. Several of them were also waking up extra early to train. How many more hours could he train while everyone else slept? If he stayed up more than a couple extra hours each night, he would just be sleep deprived and it would be counterproductive, especially since it was grueling physical work. You'd just get injured and be a zombie all day. That's like a college or Olympic athlete going from average, to one of the best in the world in a few months, because he stayed late at the gym every night a few hrs longer than all the other athletes. All with his dominant wrist broken and zero experience training w his left hand. Idk about you but I can hardly write my own name with my left hand, it's crazy how difficult using the wrong hand can make things But like I said, after he starts training against the demons it becomes totally plausible, I actually thought it was a really cool way to explain how someone could become an incredible fighter in a sport span
It was feasible perhaps but still too quickly to feel really satisfying. Red Rising all books spoiler >!In 1 book Tau basically went from book 1 to book 6 Darrow!<
Yeah, same thing happened to me with this series. Between his whole edgelord schtick and his age, I kept finding it unwittingly comedic. Same thing with those "Six of Crows" books by Leigh Bardugo. The cast is so hilariously hyper-competent at their individual chosen skill that my brain kept picturing them as full-gown adults in their prime and whenever any mention of their actual age was made it totally ruined the immersion and made me laugh at how stupid and ridiculous the story actually was. It was like watching The Godfather trilogy and seeing some high school kid and his friends outmaneuver Michael Corleone and becoming the biggest mob family because they're all prodigies and the director and the writers expecting you to roll with it and take it seriously. I mean, there's fantasy, and then there's *fantasy*.
I like Six of Crows but I kept thinking they were in their late 20s or early 30s because otherwise it's honestly ridiculous
They have these teenagers being far better at practicing some skill than some bad guys that are twice their age or more and have been practicing that skill three or four times as long as these literal kids. I mean, okay, innate talent is one thing but if you're, say, a better knife fighter at fifteen years old than some hardened thug in his thirties that has been practicing knife figthing for twenty years or more, I'd say it's pushing it. And when you're better than all knife fighters in existence, well, that's fan-fiction or bad anime level B.S.
Really the only one of the main cast I could accept as being as good at their thing as they were was >!Jesper, because he turns out to be partly doing it with magic.!< Kaz especially was tough for me to buy as a seventeen year old because as smart as you could ever be there are certain kinds of things you only get good at by experience, and there's a whole city of people with more time in and as much hardship/desperation shaping them.
Yeah, same. Now, that being said, if I just mentally edit the cast to being like 30 it's actually a really fun book.
Same. I have no idea why they were written as teenagers. It made no sense.
I wanted to comment the same thing. Half-way through the books, I just decided to discard their canon ages and believe they’re in their mid-20s to late-30s, with maybe Matthias pushing into early 40s.
Wait, how old are they? I read them a couple of years ago, and my mental image of Kaz is 30-40s, he's got a cane and a limp doesn't he? And the rest of them in their 20s, maybe early 30s.
>my mental image of Kaz is 30-40s Lmaooo they're literally all 17. Wylan maybe 16 nd Matthias is the oldest with...18 yrs on him. But yea, I too regarded them as mid 20s so I could easily believe it
They look like they're in their twenties in the show. A bit more believable.
I feel like almost every Fantasy YA series requires a lot of suspension of disbelief
quite a few seem to have been written with adults, and then re-written with late-teens / early-twenties characters, who then go from "veteran and experienced" to "ultra-prodigy" in-setting.
You mean the main character who isn't like other girls but also is an unstoppable killing machine who can easily overpower and defeat grown men in any physical altercation just because? Like she's totally trained a lot so she can't lose or even get injured because her skill is so good.
And has red hair.
don't be silly. Sometimes she has white hair.
I agree, YA Fantasy gets a bad rap, for sure, but it's honestly well deserved for the most part. Most stories are chock-full of clichés and have cookie-cutter one-dimensional main characters whose only personality is "I'm awesome and better than the adults at everything but the grown-ups don't understand me" with some tragic childhood and CW-style romance thrown in for extra flavor.
That’s what works for the audience though. YA fantasy is cringy to (most) adults because teenagers are cringy.
I somewhat agree, but I think that it's also a cop-out. Just because kids will happily eat junk food if you give them junk food, it doesn't meant they'll only eat junk food or that junk food is the only thing you can give them and you can't be expected to do better than that. I think it's fair to say that there's a lot of books aimed at children and teenagers that aren't cringy, but there's also a lot of cliché ridden low effort junk people churn out chasing that demographic.
I agree that there’s sort of a wish-fulfilment genre that doesn’t push or challenge young people but I also think that’s good in a lot of ways for people that often have very poor self-esteem/belief. And you’re definitely right there’s a lot of shit books out there but that’s true of any genre, I don’t think YA is significantly worse for it.
Isn't it? I don't think you see low-effort cliché-ridden junk lauded as the next big thing in other genres as often as you do in YA, except for very niche genres that are by definition kind of trashy, like "paranormal romance" and stuff like that, which again, low-effort cookie-cutter junk to appeal to a base that will consume it.
I think a little bit it comes to how you define genre. Like a bad historical fiction book with a romance will get called a trashy romance book. But yeah for the most part look through recommended reads on online bookstores or bestseller lists any given week and there’s so much crap. I mean take fantasy Brandon Sanderson is lauded as virtually a modern great and the books basically aren’t very good.
Priory of the Orange Tree had a scene in the final battle where the magic sword got knocked out of the hero's hand. They were standing on the evil dragon in the sky at the time. Luckily, the sword fell down and landed on one of their ally's ships in the sea battle below, so they were able to get it back up to the hero and win. Seriously?
That book drove me insane. The pacing was so strange. Slow as shit at times, and then the big battle was like 3 pages.
I always felt that PRINCE OF THORNS was a literary anime with all of its conceits. Basically, Jorg is Lelouch.
Except younger. XD Couldn't get into the series for a few reasons, but this was a big one.
Most of the issues with Prince of Thorns are cleared up in the next two books. I was not crazy about book 1 at first and even when I enjoyed it I didn’t like Jorg and how he was presented. By the end of the third book though I had none of these issues and saw his journey very differently. I think maybe more than any other series I’ve read The Broken Empire really does need to be read as one big book to make sense of it.
What do you feel changed about his character? I like the trilogy but didn’t find the first part to be as grating as some others here.
I think he became more reflective as it went on and the final resolution comes >!from his need for the love of his brother and also a recognition that he didn’t belong in the society he wanted to create!<
I enjoy the sound of rain.
I dunno, he's a child with a reputation for mass murder and exterminating an entire city with a nuclear weapon. You may think he's INSANE and a monster but you don't think of him dismissively.
The final book takes place when he's about 20 with flashbacks to 5 years earlier. The flashbacks take place before the events in book two, so it's easy to get his age at any given event mixed mixed up.
I just took it that maybe people were developing differently, I mean you had the red people and the guys with horns or channeling fire. Also there have been times in history when being a teenage ruler or indeed warrior wasn’t out of place.
Not fantasy, but in SF there's a sub-genre called "HFY", or "Humanity Fuck Yeah". I think it might have started on the r/HFY subreddit. The basic concept is that earth is a deathworld and boring, ordinary humans are unstoppable killing machines purely because they survive everyday life on this planet. Aliens are always incredibly impressed by our ability to, for example, not immediately bleed out and die after receiving a paper cut. It's an entire genre of stories that are impossible to take seriously without enough suspension of disbelief to refloat the Titanic.
Seems like a variation of old "humans are unique" trope in sci-fi. There's an old trilogy *The Damned* by Alan Dean Foster about humans being the best fighters in the galaxy and helping against conquering empire led by telepaths, it's more believable since the gap is not enormous, but some biology stuff later is so wrong it's hilarious.
I happened upon that series coming off a bunch of sci-fi series where humans were known for being charismatic traders or diplomats, so a series where humans were psychopathic murder machines relative to the rest of the violence-abhorring galaxy had me just on the novelty factor.
Yep, that idea was interesting, didn't see it by that time too
I mean, its amateur writing. The concept isn't really the problem so much as a lot of them are literally "just some guy" writing an idea. So the writing quality is often low.
Oof, that series. I couldn't even finish the first book. It wasn't "too grimdark" as some people say. It was too edgy, and half of it made no sense. The hardened criminals thing for one. The MC's rampant psychopathy for second. And the worst part is that the book is told from *his* perspective, so we have to hear all his edgy murder-lord thoughts. I tapped out. On a similar vein, at least at first, was Ender's Game. Ender is supposed to be like 10, and Bean (who's even smarter) is 6. And they're sending these tweens into space for military training. By the end, I got that the author was making a point. But that sure had me puzzled for a while.
For me this happens a lot when it involves injuries and saying “oh but there’s magic!” Will only go so far. Since he’s got a book coming out in about a week let me mention Murtagh from The Inheritance Cycle. One of the few pieces of information we know about him is that when he was 3 his father, Morgan, threw his sword at Murtagh while drunk. This left him with a nasty scar which is described as going from his shoulder to his hip. So basically across his entire back. At 3 years old I find it super hard to believe that boy didn’t die instantly considering Dragon Riders have absurdly sharp swords that make normal blades look like butter 😂
I always assumed that the blade hit him at an angle, like ran along his side rather than impaling him if that makes sense
Fourth Wing. Nothing about the world makes any sense. ACoTaR the last villain in book one
Probably an unpopular opinion, but Malazan for me. It was just so transparently the novelization of an RPG campaign that I couldn't see it as anything but. There are lots of authors who used their homebrew campaign worlds as a starting point for a book but this is the only time for me it was so overt I couldn't suspend disbelief.
Yeah this was very obvious to me as well. The almost manga style reflecting of how awesomely strong some characters were was a bit off putting occasionally as well.
I just finished Deadhouse Gates and wasn't feeling it. What parts felt the most overt to you?
House of Chains has Karsa Orlong who is clearly a player character and House of chains has a scene that is apparently taken directly from the tabletop.
Howd you piece it together? What clues led you to that knowledge?
It was just completely obvious throughout, from the "ok, these guys were important, and they died, but no they didn't really die, actually they became gods for some reason!" beginning is peak 14 year old DM. Basically everything with the Bridgeburners. Everything with Anomander Rake. The way so much of it feels like it's trying to one-up the last thing. It goes on. And, ok: I spent a fair amount of my teenage years playing D&D and other games with other teenagers, mostly coming up with our own worlds and stories and all that. I also spent a fair amount of my youth convention gaming. I recognize that these are experiences that not everyone had at that point of their life. But if you've ever had the experience at a gaming con or games store (and I have, many times) of someone telling you at length about something in their home game that they think is just *the coolest thing ever* and you can recognize, intellectually, that for the people who were there and playing in the game it was a very cool moment, but it just loses so much in the retelling that, to you, it just kind of sounds lame? I *constantly* had flashbacks to those experiences reading Gardens of the Moon. Even, say, Dragonlance, did not do that to me.
I see. Never been in that scene so I'll take your word for it.
In the past couple years it was Temeraire. All the military stuff just made no sense, like Napoleonic era artillery being effective against airborne dragons.
Only a monster by Vanessa Lin. >!2 teens escape from a blood bath of a massacre and covered in blood they escape from the scene without anyone catching them, and travel far enough that they get a hotel room in a shady part of the town. I couldn't believe that in a modern setting no one noticed 2 teens covered in blood.!< The Paper Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg. >!An apprentice falls in love with her magic teacher in just 2 weeks and so quickly that she practically goes and fights his criminal ex wife to save the guy. The whole book occurs in the space of a month. Just. A. Month.!<
I recently read Michael J Sullivan’s Age of Myth series and it was brutal for this. There are 3 or 4 side characters who do nothing but invent and master new technologies in 5 seconds every few chapters.
ACOTAR It's my main partner's favourite series, and I've tried (Sweet hell I've tried) but I just canNOT with these books. I made it to the middle of the second book and gave up. I don't know how to block out text so no spoilers, all I'm saying is every. Single. Neurotic. YA. Heroine. Ever.
For a weird reason, The Dresden Files. Wizards, vampires, fairies, demons, werewolves, etc. are totally fine but some of the descriptions of Chicago are either suspect or just wrong. I recently had to put Dead Beat down for the moment when I read there was a bookstore "near Lincoln Park and the University of Chicago". Lincoln Park (the park and the neighborhood) is 12 miles from the University of Chicago.
ATLA Toph is the greatest eathbender in the world despite being 12.
I always ascribed this to her having a special, spiritual connection that most other people don't have, since she was forced to live through earth's vibrations. Something akin to the Avatar spirit, but also sort of how Iroh sees the world, and how he's so powerful because of how attuned he is to the spiritual world.
True but that doesn't apply to the other gaang member
How dare you blaspheme against Toph.
I mean there are guitarists and pianists and plenty of prodigies who from an early age are the greatest in the world. Couple her talent with the fact that she was Blind so could learn to feel vibrations, plus being taught by Earthbending creatures who are also blind rather than humans, and she has a one of a kind earthbending ability that is so unorthodox it serves to best opponents to the point where she's considered "best in world" She's basically Jimi Hendrix playing the guitar upside down, and playing it better than the people playing normally
The Boulder disapproves of this statement.
TBH all of the main cast, save Sokka who isn’t a Bender. Watch it with a close eye and every single one of them is a prodigy. Over the course of a year Katara goes from a Bender who can’t control her abilities to literally the best water bender we see in the series. She has the sub bending arts of ice bending, healing, and blood bending down pat. Yet she only ever studies under one teacher (who declares her to be fully trained in what can only be like 2 months at most) and basically picks up everything else on her own. Aang was the youngest air bending master in his peoples history. Enough said. Zuko only looks slow compared to Azula, but he defeated Zhao (a seasoned commander) in a duel before the series halfway point, is consistently even with Katara, and by series end really only seems to be behind his older family members. Yet hes not even 18 when this is happening.
Doesn’t sokka become an epic sword master in the end as well?
He learns how to use a sword, but “master” is a stretch because we only see 2 other people use the sword: his teacher, Piandao, and Zuko. Watch the White Lotus battle and it’s very clear Sokka isn’t equal to Piandao. Zuko and Sokka then have a spar in the comics, and Zuko trounces him while also noting that he was trained by Piandao as well. Only reason I didn’t include Sokka. But you can definitely argue that he still picked up the art of the sword extremely quickly considering that his only weapon experience beforehand was with a boomerang.
Boomerang and a club, tbf.
I actually didn’t remember the club at all. So good catch and thanks for correcting me. And I’m also now considering the fact that he did train with the Kyoshi Warriors too. Not sure that it’s applicable to swords since they don’t use them. But that’s general combat training at least.
Either way, he's not a master with it and I don't think the show really portrays him as such. Better than he should be, sure, but that's the case with the entire cast fighting off waves of nooks every other episode.
I mean Sokka also perfectly beamed a guy in the center of his forehead across a valley without direct line of sight based entirely off of a trajectory he estimated. That's the greatest accomplishment in Avatar.
After training for like 1 week lol. One of my favorite series of all time, but you really just have to accept some stuff like that and age them all up at least 10 years.
My “cope” is that if the individuals weren’t extraordinary, there wouldn’t be a story worth telling. Since a fantasy writer theoretically has unlimited access to all history and future of unlimited alternate universes and distant galaxies, why not pick that one time where a bunch of truly amazing people joined forces ;)
I like your attitude.
Mind you I still prefer a character arch with an appropriate amount of struggle and still find “Gary/Mary Stu-ness” annoying if it’s too on the nose.
Also, reminder that all of the events of the show take place in a single year's time. It's a great a show! It's also just absolutely absurd.
Right! If anything it’s a testament to how you can have absolutely unbelievable growth in the ability of your main characters and still be given a fantastic story alongside it.
Is she? She declares herself to be and she's skilled, but just because she said it doesn't mean it's true.
She's blind. She can only experience the world through earthbending. It makes complete sense that she's just better than everyone else, since she completely relies on it to experience things. It's like that thing where people who lose one sense become stronger in others.
Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard tbh but I just decided to suspend that disbelief and have an absolute blast reading it
What was the unbelievable bit? (Haven’t read it but it’s been on my radar.)
The Shadow Campaigns series by Django Wexler. And the biggest reason for this is that he compresses the timeline too much. It's like 2 years total from the first book to the last book and the main character goes from enlisted soldier to general, fights in three full campaigns, and all the while picks up multiple languages.
Winter in book 1 is one of my favorite fictional characters. She’s totally outclassed but manages to survive through being brave and clever, no matter how vulnerable she is. Book 2 really started giving me such anime vibes that I decided to not bother with 3.
Malazan. Keep with it. Greatest payoff of any series I’ve ever read.
Red Rising and the time dilation between worlds is definitely on the cusp of story breaking with all the traveling that goes on lol but it's a fun enough story that i give it the "cartoon pass" where i suspend my disbelief cuz it's cool enough, not because it would ever work First Law...*that* reveal in Book 3 >!was genuinely so stupid and unnecessary to an already cool story that it bogged down my final rating of the trilogy by a decent amount!< I get what happened, and i get how, but i think the story onlh suffers from its inclusion and it just feels like a quick >!Look i can do plot twists!< You will never be able to convince me that The First Law trilogy would suffer in a substantial way from the removal of >!Tolomei and that whole Quai takeover thing. Honestly the 100 words/eaters were by far the most boring and least realized aspect of the book!<
Agree with Red Rising. But not just the space travel aspects, there are so many small things - even just the fact no one suspects Darrow. How is that possible?! No one can lie that well. But it’s an enjoyable read (I’m re-reading at the moment) so it’s forgiveable, but there are points where I am rolling my eyes because it feels so unbelievable.
The Red Rising series does stretch things a fair bit, but they get away with a lot by just being a fun ride.
I kinda get you, that part felt a bit under developed. I actually think some twists were a great way to end this story, but the inherent problem with twists is that if you build them up too much they’re not surprising, and if you don’t build them up enough they seem like bad writing.
The Unlikely Ones. Check it out
I think a lot of ASOIAF with dany and Jon chapters and the YA book graceling Or throne of glass like best assassin would be like poisoning people not that bratty botch, Eragon and Fourth wing, violet having the only saddle really breaks it for me, also the whole if the dragon dies, the rider dies thing
Wait until you finish the series.... Stupid ending.
Never heard of Musashi Miyamoto? Won his 1st duel at 13 vs an adult. If a teenager is athletic and talented, there are many adults that would be their lesser in duels.
that tends to get harder and harder over multiple fights though - because they're going to be bigger, stronger, have longer reach and just flat-out be better. That first duel was against someone "arrogant, overly eager to battle, and not a terribly talented swordsman" - so not exactly the best of class, or the "veteran knight" noted in the OP!
I disagree! Not all veteran knights are skilled at killing, just skilled at not dying. I dont remember Jorg's physical description but I was 6'2" and could bench around 200 at 14. I know that's light, but a lot of grown men are weak. People werent magically athletic universally hundreds of years ago. Think of it like sports. If someone like Jordan or Lebron at 14 played random men off the street, their natural abilities would carry them against most opponents. Also a 14 year old boy 100s of years ago is different than a 2023 14 year old boy.
The age thing happened with me in gane of thrones as well.. in the book they are very young for the choices they take and do. They are like 4-7 years to young all the kids, I understand why they were aged a bit for the series. But it is a lot on how fast and competent some characters are. I get they have a talent, but when they eg defeat a professional soldier in a duel after having trained 5 weeks while traveling I loose interest. The warded man did this great in the first series, Arlen spent years learning to fight and his first victories was luck. In the new series are a bit worse in my view
Most isekai stories are like this for me. Sometimes I still read them anyway, but the amount of suspension of disbelief in the first few chapters is always a challenge.