I’ve never been able to endure that.
You are talking with someone who would always choose mage/magic knight if given the chance. I just have the impression that it’s becoming overused. But then again, maybe it’s my fault for taking the terms to abroad (I was counting also soft urban fantasy)
Mind Blind gets a pass, because being normal is the ‘problem’, but Mind Blind is the only one I’ve seen do the concept in a way that was interesting enough to immediately stand out to me. As a general rule, I’d prefer to have my main character be as interesting as the rest of the cast. I feel if the rest of the cast is more interesting, maybe it’s time to shift perspective to another cast member and make them the central character?
In Russian literature there is a concept of “маленький человек”, “small person” if you were to translate it. The concept came from realism works of 18th century and dedicated itself to showcasing the life of an average man. Not particularly strong, small in social weight and stature, not exactly standing out in terms of character or any innate ability, but still human and still portrayed sympathetically.
It is something you can call a humanitarian writing concept, yet when I see games with tagline “you are a normal, average person” it isn’t really focused on relationship with the world, on commonality of men, on humanity that unites us, on something, well… small, smaller than we’re used to. Small and normal man, unassuming and weak, can be a main and focal character, but it requires different kind of writing and different focus, something I don’t really see often in games like that. It isn’t really the same thing as works using concept of “small person”.
@Rinnegato
I think it’s more of stale, not overused. Sanderson left a very annoying trail behind him that many people try to emulate - no, magic must have elaborate and complicated system, everyone must dedicate themselves to writing one to the detriment of other things, magic must be infodumped in horrible amounts.
It can be simplified and streamlined, honestly, and it would not harm it one bit. Write something your magic can’t do and don’t stray from it. Write limits for it. You’re golden.
I always think following the general rule of “If it isn’t directly relevant, don’t bring it up” is valuable. But I think its hard for some writers to resist the temptation to lore dump out of excitement for all the information they have spent time thinking about, not recognizing for a reader it might be alienating since it feels so disconnected from the experience of the character in that moment.
[For example, and I’m calling myself out for this, using a bunch of terms completely irrelevant to the reader to describe clothing garments because I was excited. I need to go back now in my own demo and remove them because it was excessive and distracting for some readers.]
61 posts were split to a new topic: Soft and Hard Magic Systems
Hold that thought - I’m just shuffling the magic system discussion to a new topic 
Edit: and done.
I really hate it when there is like a montage or whatever of some character fighting through loads of enemies alone with 0 effort. Unless it’s been previously established that they have some supernatural power, or some other reason that justifies the insane power gap.
But when it’s like one person with a sword or gun going through a bunch of people? That is not some cool badass moment for me, it’s just a moment that just makes their enemies look incompetent at best. And makes the writing feel lazy at worst.
That’s actually happened a couple of time in history: once in the very early days of the ancient Rome republic and once in the medieval England, where in both case a single warrior hold his position on a bridge.
That lone warrior probably didn’t do it with 0 effort though.
I’ve FINALLY gone around to watching Foundation, and it has a trope that automatically makes any story about a million times less interesting to me: the Protagonist has a Special Power 
, and that Special Power is the reason they can succeed.
Gaal Dornick is no longer a skilled mathematician that managed to solve a huge mathematical conundrum by hard work and the application of math, and Salvor Hardin is no longer a tactically-minded individual who wins by taking smart precautions against eventualities and training hard: they do it by seeing the goddamn future.
They both used the narrow space at their advantage: the Viking died when a soldier hopped in a barrel in the river and killed him with a spear while under the bridge. I don’t remember how it’s ended for the Roman aside that his comrades menaged to destroy the bridge before the enemy pass on the other side (the warrior purpose was just hold off until the destruction).
I hate it when a character is the chosen one, and the people around them raising them were fully aware of this. Like, fully aware that their destiny is to partake in some grand conflict against some force of evil by the time they’re 25 or whatever.
And how did they prepare the character? Combat training? Trained them to be a deadly battlemage perhaps? No, just gave them some vaguely normal childhood. Didn’t even sign them up for martial arts classes. It’s like they don’t give a shit about this conflict, or about the character’s chances of success / survival.
I mean, why would they bother? If someone is prophesied to be destined to bring down a great evil, either:
Like, either things are predestined, and it doesn’t really matter what you do, or they’re not, in which case you might as well train somebody else more appropriate for the task (which is never the chosen one, who is always the most incapable person for the job).
True to some extent, it just seems fairly obvious to me that with proper training, casualties and other collateral damage will be kept to a minimum.
It just says they’ll bring it down, not how. For all you know how good they were trained in battle is exactly why they could win to begin with and thus have a prophecy about them.
A prophecy just tells you the future, it doesn’t control it.
Or they could bring them down by finding an error in their tax forms and siccing the wrath of the realm’s legal system on them. Who’s to say?
If it can tell you the future, then the future is fixed (otherwise, it couldn’t tell you); if the future is fixed, then it can’t be altered; if it can’t be altered, then training the chosen one is irrelevant, because they’ll bring the big evil down regardless. You might as well move to a tropical climate and enjoy mojitos on the beach. And you can bring the chosen one along, because it doesn’t matter where they are, they’ll still bring down the evil. The alternative is that prophecies don’t work.
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Yes and? That’s basically just living in a universe where causality is a thing, if anything a prophecy is the actual change since it can affect temporal decision making. The Future is just ‘what will happen’, any future is ‘fixed’.
Those two don’t follow each other at all. There’s no logical connection there.
No? The alternative is that training is part of the process to bring down the evil, the fact that the future is fixed or not has no bearings on the content of said future or what lead there, if anything it would just mean training would happen regardless.
I miiiight have been projecting one of my characters (a supervillain whose most frightening threat is, despite him being fully capable of bringing forth the end of the world as they know it (again), is “I’ll sue you!” and who, incidentally, would mostly belong in the magic system discussion).
If training would happen regardless, you don’t have to care about training the chosen one, in the same way that I don’t have to care about finding a way to make the Sun rise every morning. It just happens. For all you know, NOT training the chosen one is what leads to them bringing down the evil.
Maybe the training happens. Maybe it doesn’t. Either way, you don’t have to care about preparing the chosen one to bring down the evil, because they will anyway.