#but I don't think that's the kind of thing the standard medieval-European fantasy story has in mind

[marlynnofmany]

If everyone in the fantasy world is near-immortal, then sure their sense of history could be a little different. But.

10,000 years ago in our world, woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers were still going strong.

starting an elite paramilitary black ops group who sneak into the homes of authors and cut one to three zeroes off any number of years given in a fantasy or sci-fi novel

[randomnameless]

More artbook stuff!

Rounding up the remaining Drakengard characters : desert related people + Jeremy and Hilda!

Wild or not wild, the unpromoted design is... well, thighs for everyone I guess - usual j!fantasy settings often has women riding horses/ponies/griffins in skirts without wearing any pants, and pre-promoted!Doom Knight follow the same trend, but they thankfully gain pants and armor when they promote to better fit the "doom/skull" knight design than... whatever the pre-promoted unit was supposed to be.

I reckon it's a double standard, and I'd love for more female units to gain pants on promotion, especially when they're mounted units, but fwiw, save for the griffin riders, everyone wears pants once they're promoted.

Doom Knights are gimmick unit as in they wreck foes that have been hit with various debuffs, and hit even harder the less HP they get, but damn if they're slow as fuck and as accurate as, well, y'know. But when they get rolling, they're pains to deal with - buff units who hit like a truck is, imo, basically Drakengard's signature units (save for the swordsmasters!) and the Doom Knights are a good illustration.

As for Gloucester, I liked his backstory of actually having been Ludwig's knight and still swearing loyalty to him - when Alain'n'co cure him from the magic brainwash Zenoira inflicted him - and, as an added bonus, we have the "very serious knight who feels ashamed for having failed his lord cannot understand that his lord basically wants them to be friends and not "lord and knight" anymore" FE traditional relationship, with a small bonus over his "I might have been brainwashed but I still made people suffer I'm trash" feels. Desert stuff isn't that well developed in this story arc - but through Gilbert's convo, we learn that Gloucester wants to help this part of Drakengard and its people.

Good for him then, that in his ending, he is remembered as a good lord who managed to rebuild/rekindle relationships between the desert people and the rest of the contry : he and his horse are immortalised in a statue, and I fucking love it because their horses is basically why the Doom Knights are so awesome.

Magellan!

Of course, the medieval european dark fantasy manga is totes not something with some dude who did nothing wrong lol

The male!Merc's outfit is basically Guts' outfit during the Golden Age arc, and let's say it really rocks, but what I love the most with UO's version is the addition of the shield - honestly this game made me love shields.

Much like Gloucester, Magellan was brainwashed by Zenoirans who had him terrorise his desert friends - unlike Gloucester though, Magellan was someone from the desert who lived there and tried to create a community, while being a bandit - and it's imo heavily suggested brainwashed!Magellan killed his mother figure... Yeah. He wants revenge against Zenoira, but also joins to apologise for the nonsense he did, and apologise to his sister.

I don't have a lot to say about Magellan save that his unit is one of my favourites lol, his rapport convo with Rosalinde was sort of surprising (it's a popular pixiv ship?) and his relationship with his sister Liza is nice too - he's basically the "bandit with a heart of gold" trope.

Truth to be told, I wasn't thinking much about Liza in my initial run, because Rolf and Mandrin were, at least I thought so, enough "archers" - Liza being an arbalist was also another kind of "archer", right?

And then I tried to use her more lol.

Sure, the "shield on her back" thing is weird as fuck, but it's funny! And unlike the other two, she actually can be on the front line, or at least, try to cover her allies - and damn she also hits like a truck (quick reload is busted lol).

The notes are about her hairstyle and the plot scene you can see if you recruited or didn't recruit her - personally I liked it, it helped her sell her character more than the tried'n'tiring "spunky lil' sis going to clobber her bro for doing nonsense", save that, this time, her big bro was brainwashed..

Her Melisandre rapport convo, even if it's only one convo, really helped sell the "desert people are actually commoners/seen as the lowest in Drakengard", but unlike some game which supposedly tackles classicism, Liza isn't chewing Melisandre for existing because she was born as the scion of a good famil. Her ending has her travel as a merchant and take over her associate's business, a nice nod to that "when she and Scarlett meet Amalia" scene where it's revealed she's also a merchant.

Both utility and character wise, she's an alright unit.

Jerry!

Jeremy has, like the devs highlight, a lot of details to his face, like his earrings, his scars and, I note, his facial hair - he is introduced as someone who acts as a scumbag without morals, which is played with in several convos, but in the others, he's basically a butt-monkey, becoming Gilbert's unwilling drinking buddy, or getting his secret stash of booze raided by Mordon ^^

Utility wise, much like Magellan and Berenice, the promoted merc class is completely stupid, slap some glasses on them and they can finally hit and slaughter things.

Kuddos to him for being the moron who tells Alain that he wonders how much the Mc Guffin - that symbolises trust and partnership he swore a holy convenant on - can be sold for, before being all "haha I was joking seriously it can kill me???" when he is reminded that the gods will give him a fate worse than death if he shits on that holy convenant.

The only Hilda on a wyvern I can be fond of!

Much like Gloucester, Hilda gains pants on promotion - I wonder if this was just a design choice to highlight how buffer the wyvern units are compared to the ladies riding on griffins. I love the details on the armored skirt thining being scale mail though and, yeah, as much as I love Gilbert the rally bot, Hilda the dragonride being the princess of "dragon kingdom" would have made some sense!

I wouldn't say Hilda's overbearing and "strong woman" feeling is due to lipstick and slanted eyes, but it's more about her role and introduction as, basically, someone who has to make sure a sanitary lockdown is enforced, even if it means striking down the patients - who caught Baltro's magical plague - who try to return home, her reasoning being all about "order" and doing what is necessary to preserve it, until her sister, Primm, finally manages to defeat her (i mean alain's army lol) and make her realise that Baltro was playing her for a fool.

Hell, I wonder if she can be recruited if we don't recruit Tatiana beforehand? Tatiana basically found a cure for the same plague that hit Cornia, so now the people of Drakengard can be healed without Hilda having to, uh, strike them down.

Kuddos to Hilda for being one of the few female characters not to have a romantic ending with Alain!

[kimyoonmiauthor]

You can... but also remember that binary, as a concept, is mostly rooted in Abrahamic belief systems. And if you really do want to create a new gender system, you can blow up the binary system altogether, and think outside of the binary bubble you're caught in. Remake the default. Why should the default be made into a cishet white abled NT male?

Why can't the default of gender also be liquid and entirely blow up the idea that binary even freaking exists?

Doesn't mean one can't have binary gender system, but I'd really ask if one has to adhere to a European and Eurocentric version of what is male, female, masculine, feminine, or anything in between, because the concepts of sexuality, sexual orientation, all of that are usually thought to be static, but they hardly are. They fought hard to imperialize their version of gender on the world, but do Fantasy authors need to let them win their fight?

You ARE gay or You ARE Bisexual, etc actually came out in the 19th century.

Likewise with many of the labels. It was seen as kinda liquid by default and a tendency, rather than an identity. A set of behaviors, rather than ingrained in who you were. Of course, this came with a whole heap of phobia, but does it have to?

So why not also gender?

The concept of nonbinary, itself requires there is binary in the first place. But what if the culture you create has no concept of binary? Then everyone defaults to everything in between.

Even with masculine and feminine, that has not been stable.

So what I'm saying is that yes, you can use nonbinary in your fantasy world, but maybe challenging the idea that binary gender exists in the first place would be more of your jam, you know, as a NB person. Especially those who are fluid or flux.

Invent your own new genders. Go ahead. Trans* people also exist. Make that sandbox yours. Because too many fantasy novels go and copy-paste 19th century and contemporary gender standards onto effectively Medieval stories where that was not the gender standards at all, but 19th century reimaginings of them.

Blow up that gender binary. 'cause Iunno about you, my fellow NBs, but I grow sick of it at times and who the eff wants to stick to it? I want to create whole new gender systems where it's not only three choices in a very hard defined box. But maybe because I've seen outside of the European boxes that I want something you know... more, more imaginative, something WITHOUT the Binary existing in the first place.

Knock yourself out. If humans are weirdest animal on the planet and there are squids with two types of presentation of masculinity, then I don't see why we can't knock ourselves out as writers and write, Iunno, 3 kinds of masculinity. A liquid middle... of say 2 and 4 kinds of femininity. And then delineate those into "gender" and then search for the limitations.

You do not have to believe in the binary to create gender systems.

It won't change anyone's gender or sexual orientation to do so, so why not give it a whirl. 10 different gender systems without using the binary? Why not? Figure it out. No two cultures does gender the same, so it makes absolutely no freaking sense why you're copy-pasting 21st gender standards onto a world that is either "advanced" or pre-industrial technology.

If gender is a societal construct, then truly, truly make it a societal construct. Make all of those contradictory crappy things that European gender teaches as "correct" different more or less consistent. "Ponies are for women and girls" "Horses are for men" Wha~~ I'm giving you permission with my Anthro degree to sandbox the entirety of gender.

Do we really need hypermasculinity to a 21st century standard with an imposed binary in a non-European non-Abrahamic setting?

Name the genders whatever you feel like. If you introduce it slowly and well, the reader will come for the ride.

"You can't use the word nonbinary in a fantasy setting" wrong. Get in the hole.

Genuinely, a lot of people need to reconsider why using thousands of words in the english language that are borne from specific cultural and historical contexts is fine but it's suddenly a problem when those words are about being queer.

[kuiperblog]

There's this oft-repeated cliche: "it's not about the ideas; it's about the execution." I wonder how often people actually think about what that means.

One of my favorite anecdotes is that Daniel Abraham (one half of SA Corey of The Expanse fame) is not really known for writing fantasy "by the numbers." If you've ever read The Long Price Quartet, you know what I'm talking about: it has this eastern-inflected setting where the conversations happen in tea houses instead of taverns, and only a few people on the continent can use magic at any given time, and the applications of those magic are usually things like "separate seeds from cotton" or "make stone softer," which go on to be world-shaping because they basically slingshot certain regions up the tech tree.

After writing the Long Price Quartet, Daniel Abraham wanted to do something different: he wanted to write epic fantasy as readers expected it to be.

He got a giant "epic fantasy symposium" together with a bunch of fellow authors who he respected, including George R.R. Martin, Walter Jon Williams, Ian Tregillis, Carrie Vaughn, and Melinda M. Snodgrass, who was kind enough to let him use her home to host the event. The group of them discussed at length what epic fantasy is, how it functions, and what reader expectations were.

And so, armed with this knowledge and insight from some of the great minds of fantasy, Daniel Abraham set out give the readers exactly what they expected from the fantasy genre: a bunch of fantasy races in a faux-European setting set some time in the medieval era, with a story that begins with a scholar inadvertently awaking an ancient evil, and a heroic mercenary captain who goes on a quest to obtain a magical sword and slay the ancient evil, and an abandoned orphan child who ascends from inauspicious origins to become a peer of monarchs. The first book in the series is called The Dragon's Path and it's got a picture of a giant sword on the cover.

It's easy to describe The Dagger and the Coin in ways that make it sound like everything you'd expect from a bog-standard epic fantasy story, and that was, in some sense, kind of the goal. Except, of course, that Daniel Abraham can't help but inject his favorite things into the genre. So, in his own words, "instead of having a farm boy chosen by prophecy, I’ve got an orphan girl who was raised by my version of the Medici bank," because Abraham is fascinated by the Medici bank, and so the orphan who ascends to power is a banker who never picks up a weapon, and by the way she's also kind of a functional and (mostly) prosocial sociopath.

The aforementioned mercenary captain who goes on a quest to obtain a magical sword and subsequently sets out to slay the source of the ancient evil is, well, not exactly the center of the story, because it's hard for "one guy with a sword" to accomplish much of anything on his own. After all, wars are won by armies, not individual soldiers. And as Napoleon once said, an army marches on its stomach, and so the ability to fund and procure supplies for an army is a great deal more important to running a war, and it quickly starts to become clear why a banker might be better qualified to save the world than a guy with a sword. That being said, the former mercenary captain can make a pretty good general if you give him the chance.

But, of course, paying armies is not the only way to get people to fight for you: those who don't fight for the highest bidder are often those who fight for ideology, and the conflict of "mercenaries vs missionaries" becomes very literal in this story. When one side of the conflict is driven by missionaries who are very good at spreading bad ideas, you have a conflict that is literally about how to defeat a totalizing ideology, which isn't exactly the kind of thing that you can reliably accomplish with a sword, and so this story becomes a story that is literally about the world-saving power of epistemic humility.

Running through all of this is the fact that, as Daniel Abraham does his best to write to genre expectations, one of the main viewpoint characters is sort of holding a mirror up to a certain kind of reader. After all, if you're a "typical fantasy fan," maybe you have certain aesthetic preferences and beliefs. Maybe you find yourself more comfortable with books than interacting with your fellow people. Maybe you believe that ancient prophecies are true, and find yourself easily persuaded by wise old bearded men who speak in aphorisms that resonate deeply. And most critically, maybe you believe that the world can be neatly divided into "good" and "evil," and that the appropriate response to the presence of evil is righteous violence. Daniel Abraham suggests to us that if you fit this profile, then perhaps you are not the "good guy," and that you could, with someone whispering the right things in your ear, very easily find yourself being the bad guy.

And Daniel Abraham does this while also delivering everything you'd expect from a traditional epic fantasy tale. This is not a story that is reliant on you buying into the idea of a "genre deconstruction;" Daniel Abraham just looks at the things he finds interesting, and says "okay, that's going into the book." Most of these things are not really that subversive: the guy who goes on a quest does indeed find an epic sword, and he gets to do some cool and heroic stuff with it, even if his sword skills alone do not suffice to conquer evil. You come to love the heroes, and hate the villains, and you sometimes even root for the antiheroes when they happen to find themselves on the right side of the conflict.

In a sense, he is not really "subverting expectations" so much as actually delivering on the expectations that readers did not know that they expected from the genre, because The Dagger and the Coin is one of the few epic fantasy series that actually grapples what it means to have a feudal society where people actually believe in the Divine Right of Kings, and why a constitutional monarchy would be total anathema to people who actually believed that members of the noble ruling class were inherently superior. He's not here to "subvert" or "deconstruct" the fantasy genre; he's here to deliver the series that epic fantasy readers have always wanted but didn't know they were allowed to ask for.

Some books I think it would be fun to take a crack at writing (which do not have anything like a planning doc or partial draft):

Choose-your-own-adventure

Shonen trading card game battler

Locked-room murder mystery

Scifi amnesiac protagonist

Little people book (like The Borrowers)

Very generic romance

Travelogue