Recently, I came to a sad conclusion. I no longer feel interested in fantasy.
I was an avid reader of the genre, started my reading days with it, actually.
My favorites stories, in the beginning, were “realistic” stories. I dove into magic ridden worlds, but that didn’t have such a “naive” feeling into it.
That’s what 15-year-old me liked. It was a classic good versus evil, but with little seasoning. Books like Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time and Harry Potter never appealed to me.
Then time passed, and even those worlds lost it wonder to me. I cherished more a book with a good “lore” than a whole new world, one of the reasons IT by Stephen King hit me so hard when I first read it.
But my world changed with two stories. I like to say they made me fall out of love of fantasy, but not in a bad way, but they got so deep into things I didn’t even know I liked - no, loved! - yet that everything else paled in comparison. Those stories were A Song of Ice and Fire and, the one that got me the most and changed everything I thought I knew about my love for fantasy, Berserk.
I ate those stories up! Couldn’t stop reading it, searching about it, thinking over it. When I was done with it all, I started to look for similar stories. Tried Malazan Book of The Fallen, Prince of Nothing (this one is almost there, though) and even some Brandon Sanderson books I hadn’t read yet.
Every time I see some magic being used - and I say magic as in classic magic, such as making fire out of nothing, lighting coming from nowhere, LOTR type of magic - or some non-human race come up I lose interest completely. Tried The Bound and The Broken series but couldn’t even finish chapter 1, the second an elf appeared all other sentences felt heavy and I dropped out.
My solution, for now, has been to read historical fiction. I really like the medieval setting, so decided to read about our own. I’m diving into War of the Roses by Conn Iggulden, The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell, and I am waiting for The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet to arrive. And I am also rereading Berserk.
Have any of you had this to happen? Things that used to be held so dear becoming sour and all that love getting thinner and thinner over time.
I think some of the old stuff was good because it had a spark. It wasn’t that it had elves, it was that it was something genuinely unique that the author was driven to create regardless of anything else.
A lot of current-day fantasy is just elves. There’s no spark. Even Harry Potter to me is, basically, just some pretty competently written fiction with magic in it. It’s not the real deal.
I don’t really know you, but to me it’s possible that you want the real deal. If that’s true you might want to check out:
They may or may not have fantasy elements, although most of them aren’t set in the real world. But they have the real deal.