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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 920483" data-attributes="member: 3887">No. But perhaps I will create a setting one day that is traditional high fantasy, complete with symbolically-charged mortal races... it would be a change.For me, it wasn't a question of generating variety, it was an attempt to combat the overall narrative laziness that I found to be prevalent in fantasy fiction/gaming. I prefer it when the conflict and the drama arise out of something a little better defined {and a lot more fluid} than noble humans fighting evil orcs. Rathering than adding any depth, metaphysical or otherwise, an over-reliance on the standard fantasy archetypes destroys the sense that the participants in the story can be moral actors. It discourages establishing the reasons for conflict, since, bottom line, the conflicts are metaphyical and don't hinge on individual choices/actions. And frankly, I don't see how playing with the archetypes diminishes the genre at all. How many times do you want to the read the same book, with the same cultures/races depicted, the same struggles which have by now become as ritual as Kabuki theatre, with all the moral weight of a game of chess. I started reading fantasy because it was fantastical, a literature of the imagination, and I really don't see the threat to that posed by some authors who imagine things a little differently from their predeccesors.Also SJ, can I ask you about  this...andDon't these two statements contradict each other? The first says that fantasy/alien race archetypes are just exaggerated, stylized humans, and second says derisively thats what you get if you break with said archetypes??For the record, I don't see anything wrong with elves as "humans with pointy ears", or alien races that are essentially Romans in space. A succesful attempt at creating the truly alien would result in characters that a reader could not identify with at all, which is tough to make use of in fiction. They are some wonderful examples of it working, like Lem's Solaris.</blockquote>

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