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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4787178" data-attributes="member: 40961">Music these days is just noise, too. Your argument is strong on generalities and overblown prose, which serves well to make a demagogical point, but short on specifics or indeed actual reasoning, making your argument largely incomprehensible to anyone not predisposed to agree with you on aesthetic grounds and general suspicion of the new. Frankly, your argument boils down to the following. 1. I define "fantasy" as fiction containing X.2. Modern "fantasy" doesn't contain enough X.3. Therefore it sucks. Are you familiar with the term "boundary policing?"  Its what academics do sometimes when they don't have anything more important to do instead, where they complain that this or that scholarly work isn't REAL *fill in academic discipline here.*  This is rhetorically a strong thing to argue in front of people who believe that the academic discipline in question is some sort of abstract good, but of course it totally sidesteps the more important question, which is whether the scholarly work being critiqued is true, useful, correct, or insightful.  Its the swift substitution for "one of us" in place of "valuable." So lets try to set that aside. Take the Elemental Logic series.  Pretty light on blood.  Downright pacifist, in fact- the greatest victory in the novels takes place when an unarmed woman knocks down a castle with a ballpeen hammer, ordering that no stone of its walls shall ever rest atop one another.  The rocks spread out and roll for miles until not a single one is touching another, and generations later children still play with them, stacking them so they can watch them unstack themselves.  So... not a ton of violence.  And yet damn good books.  Or what of The Sharing Knife series?  They invoke a light sense of wonder, to be sure, but they're mostly about the interpersonal relations of the characters, prejudice, tradition, and loss.  They would totally fail your criteria for "good fantasy," I'm sure, since what violence happens in them takes place largely off camera and entire novels go by with almost nothing but people just being people to one another.  And yet they're great novels. So lets call them Schmantasy, since you want the term "Fantasy" all for yourself.  Ok, now that they're Schmantasy, they don't have to fulfill your arbitrary criteria for what makes good fantasy novels.  So... what now?  What explanatory use is your argument if we just change the name, and demand to be judged not on your allegedly ancient criteria for good fantasy writing, but rather on good writing in the abstract?</blockquote>

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