NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8275236" data-attributes="member: 18">If you look at people that age reading the core Dragonlance books, and how they react to them (on the fantasy book reddit and stuff), you'll quickly see that, whilst fantasy doesn't all age as quickly, DL absolutely has aged too much to work for people today. The characters and their attitudes really smack of a very specific era, a sort of late '70s vibe is extremely strong with it (even though it was written in the mid '80s it seems pre-'80s), and it doesn't have a lot of style. Nor does it come across as "classic" or "timeless" in the way Tolkien, for example does.And from my own perspective, I'd say it's likely a lot of late teens and early twenties readers today would find the writing made them feel like it was targeted at a younger audience, and not in an okay Harry Potter kind of way. I certainly kind of felt uncomfortable with how almost-juvenile a lot of the stuff in them was when I was 14 even (in 1992). Not so much I wouldn't read them but if I'd been 20? After having read a lot of other fantasy? I'd definitely have dropped them partway through the first book.Now that's the main books. The related novels and the books by other authors in the same universe vary widely. I absolutely loved some of the spin-off books, even ones by the main authors - they had much better energy (even if a couple were even more kid-aimed-feeling, Galen Beknighted for example, which I read when I was 12 or 13).But essentially we're talking about books about a bunch of straight white people, with underlying morals that aren't entirely compatible with modern morality (a bit too judge-y on some things, not enough on others), at least a significant whiff of sexism, more than a whiff of racism, and a really vanilla setting that, if you've been reading fantasy up to age, say, 16 or 18, is going to stand out as shockingly vanilla.I think what's weird is, if they'd been a series of movies in the 1980s, we'd forgive and revise all of this, and they'd be regarded really well, but books are different experience, and it's clear from people's reactions I've seen that younger people are not really liking them today. Nor would does it make sense to expect them to - your average half-decent YA fantasy is significantly better-written and exciting than the original DL books, welcomes a more diverse audience (so more likely kids see themselves in it), and even has more engaging fantasy ideas. Something like the Ember in the Ashes series by Sabaa Tahir, for example, which you might not even have heard of, but like, has been so influential in YA fantasy that other successful YA fantasy series exist because of it (according to their authors).</blockquote>

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