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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 1698137" data-attributes="member: 5171">Exactly.  That's a great way of putting it.  I don't really enjoy romance novels as a general rule -- my wife does, and I don't intellectually think that a good romance novel is in any way worse than a good fantasy or mystery novel -- but it's not what I choose to read.  So when a story starts off as a fantasy novel, talking about a magical kingdom and spells and such, and then turns into a magnanimously cheesy romance novel with a few fantasy trappings, that breaks the contract.  (And this is coming from someone who tries to write stuff that crosses genres -- I try to make something work in both genres, not start in one and then change into another halfway through teh book.  I don't always succeed, either.)On the Feist-irk, Macros' speech (and subsequent revision thereof) broke the Mentor's Story trope -- if an ancient and mysterious figure who has taken on a mentorshop role for the heroes finally tells his life story, and it's longer than a page or two, you should be able to trust that.Anderson, I think, breaks the contract by changing the rules and tropes the other authors (Lucas included) established.  He tosses in a few flavor-bits that show he's watched the movies, but nothing that shows any of the sense of wonder of Lucas or even Zahn (who often made the Force a bit more rational and reasonable, but who nevertheless kept it deliberately mysterious in a few areas).In the Spelljammer series -- the one with, erm, Teldin Moore? -- I felt that the contract got broken in enough small ways over the course of the books that I ended up giving up.  I think I got through book three or four -- the one where some elves turned into monsters because of gems in their heads or something.  All I really remember is looking at the author's section and realizing that the books had been written by different people, and they apparently didn't want to play nice together.  The hero's friends at the end of one book would have simply decided to leave at the beginning of the next book, and I think I recall powers that worked in the last book would mysteriously fail in the next book.  It felt disjointed -- possibly not a major break in any way, but enough tiny breaks that it never established a consistent feel or any consistent characters except for the protagonist...</blockquote>

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