I agree that it easily becomes a loop instead. Another genre that I think suffers from the same type of problems as the fantasy genre is the thriller genre. During the 1980's in Europe, the thriller genre was viewed as doomed, as stuck in it's own cliches. Nobody wanted to write thrillers, and no editors were interested in publishing thrillers. Then, during the 1990's, a new generation of mostly female thriller writers turned up, portraying women as detectives rather than men. Out went the old cliche of a male police officer or private eye solving murders, instead the new murder solvers were female doctors, journalists or other professionals. Good - but over the past 10 years a new cliche has been established instead, the one of the tough, professional female who solves murders with her intellectual abilites.Originally posted by Aegis
You make a lot fo references to Sterotypes stories, anc characters. Now, I do agree, but my question is, how would one break free of those sterotypes? In essence, the second you deny one sterotype, they are just becoming another. The way I see it now, it's one big loop.
I don't read much thrillers for the same reasons that I don't read much fantasy, the genre has limited itself in repeating stereotypes. But I do think the development in the thriller genre demostrated some good examples of how such stereoypes can be broken - for instance, there is nowadays a tendency to abandon the classical murder mysteries and instead, the crime can be about rapists, child abuse, threats or other kind of crimes. They can also be written from a different perspective, so that the main person or the narrator is not the person/s who solves the crime, instead it's the victim or somebody close to the victim.
I think such tricks applies also to the fanasty genre. Fable has already posted some really good advice how to break stereotypes, I can't really add to that but in general, I think working with deep characters making their goals and motives nuances as well as working with the environment and the setting of a story can go a long way. Or, if one is writing in a familiar surrounding ie some preset AD&D world, an unusual plot can be used to force people to make non-stereotypic choices and actions. Personally, I think change due to circumstances is a good way to break both stereotypes and predictability. You seem to use this yourself in your story here - Aenarion is a mightly elven warrior, a noble hero who have many times saved the elves from the evil orcs. But it's obvious that something is happening to him - you describe states of hate and bloodthirst that is far from noble. So there you use his inner events to break a stereotype, and the reader (at least me) gets interested and curious in what is happening to Aenarion and why.
@Humanflyz: Shakespeare uses a lot of stereotypes in his work, but as Aegis points out, Shakespeare was limited to the much stricter writing forms that were used during his time. A tragedy wasn't only a sad story, there was a set of highly specific rules for how a tragedy should be written. A chronicle was an even stricter form of writing. The modern novel wasn't yet invented, free prose as we know it today didn't exist. Modern writers don't have those limits, the entry of modernism made literature structures almost limitless. So it's not really valid to compare antique classical or renaissance works to modern works, I think.
Also, we have to remember that some stereoypes weren't stereotypes when they first appeared. To me it's a vast difference to read Homer's standing eptihomes than to see Tolkien use a similar trick 2000 years later.
Yep, I agree with this. Also, I'd like to stress that everything in a literary work must not be free from stereotypes, my objection to mainstream fantasy is that most aspects are stereotypical and predictable. Environment, plot, people, action - all the major components of the story. Only one of these need to be changed for the story to become 1000 times more interesting.posted by Fable
Note, I agree with your conclusion, though: that nearly all literary work, reduced to it essence, is cliched. It isn't the plot, so much as the treatment, the language, and/or the characterization, that sells the work.
