Submitted by butterweedstrover t3_10hdumt in books
It's very difficult to make such a declarative statement about a category of literature especially since judgment in the artistic sphere is typically prone to subjectivity.
So in a way, this is my subjective opinion: Epic Fantasy as a sub-genre is fundamentally flawed, and books written from this standpoint cannot function as a good representation of storytelling in anyway without undermining their own claim to being classified as such.
Listing all the epic fantasy I think is bad would be pointless. I can (and do) consider the major epic fantasy series produced so far to be "bad" but focusing on individual examples will not do because I am making a broad statement here:
Not only is epic fantasy bad, but as a genre it can never be good.
ASIDE (feel free to skip)
To explain my reasoning let us be clear what the point of the "epic" was. The epics, like the Odyssey (Greek), the Aeneid (Latin), the Vinland Sagas (Norse), as well as major epic poetry like Paradise Lost or the Divine Comedy were not just narratives for the sake of narrative.
They were encyclopedias of information used when standardized information wasn't available to the public. They recorded historical details, philosophical debates, religious origins, and were political and economic in how they established a national background or mapped out geographic details of the surrounding countryside or sea lanes.
It wasn't done only as an artistic endeavor, in fact the artistic aspect was secondary in most cases. Most of the "epics" Tolkien alludes to where written by different people over an incredible stretch of time with numerous asides for lyrical composition and detailing of specific trade knowledge.
ASIDE over
That is all to say it is not meant for use in structuring a narrative. Tolkien made up fake history, and as an academic exercise it might have been interesting, but that doesn't serve any purpose when it comes to conflict, plot, or setting as regards emotional exploration.
What is the feature that define the subgenre?
- Extraneous details irrelevant to the main narrative
That single bullet point encompasses everything about this approach to story telling. These stories are neither meant for fun or for literary depth.
Their scale is too large to be a simple work of escapism. Rather they are textbooks of (fictive) scientific details that serve no narrative end but to expand the scope of the world for further entries.
It takes an exhaustive amount of energy to read through this information which serves no practical purpose in the real world all so that one could memorize names, places, and other quantities with no emotional catharsis or epiphany at the end.
An author like Sanderson will often times stake their claims on being "escapist" authors or books meant as pure "entertainment" but due to their incredible overload of passive and dry statistics which have no real versatility their actual narrative content (if you can find it under the heaps of exposition and advertisement for future entries) rather than being "low-brow" and appealing to the general audience will inevitable become musings on intense political and social controversy.
Ignore the perception that epic fantasy is just trying to be escapist and you will find that among the major titles (ex: The Wheel of Time, Stormlight Archive, The Kingkiller Chronicles, A Song of Ice and Fire, etc.) the issues tackled include subjects like:
- Slavery
- Starvation
- Rape/Sexual abuse
- War crimes
- Depression
- Greed
- Suicide
- Hunger/Poverty
- etc.
None of these are light topics for a fictional universe people delve into so as to ignore their problems. They're actually severe and require a great deal of nuance and tact to engage with on a literary or artistic level.
And yet they are never tackled with much originality or insight because, as is the case with epic fantasy, details are meant to be exposited. So much of these perspectives are told to the reader (from an amateur outlook) rather than shown because epic fantasy approaches storytelling for a definitive fact-based posture while emotional depth is based on sensations which are open to interpretation, not just intellectually consistent.
TDLR: Epic Fantasy can never be simply fun because it requires a high bar of stale and passive information to fit into the category of "Epic" and at the same time it can never be literary or deep because the language is always specific and expository rather than being linguistically vibrant.