From Mistborn: The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson. Why does all fantasy have to be like that?
Please recommend some fantasy novels with themes of real liberation to me. I love fantasy but I hate that it's always a new monarchy people happily submit to...
it's a fucking masterpiece. CW for sexual violence however. nothing crass but still.
The worst one that I have read for this is the lightbringer series. The whole time you are thinking surely now the main character will lead a rebellion against the nightmarish monarchy based on human sacrifice, but no. He just doesn't, and the evil war criminal type guy becomes king in the end.
Why wouldn't they just get a new king? Is the Lightbringer out there developing the productive forces? Are they partitioning the commons and driving the peasantry to work in cities? Is the light they're bringing actually colonialist plunder?
Thanks for recommending something I specifically asked not to be recommended smh my head
I'm gonna try to not go on a rant, but THANK YOU! On Reddit ( I know I know but there's not a lot of places to talk about the cosmere) there's are large contingent of anti kelsier thought and I fucking hate it. People keep pointing to his hatred of the ruling class as a sign he's evil and bad. All I can think is have any of you people read the novel. Everything about the mistborn world is fucked and not wanting to kill the ruling elite I think makes you the real sociopath. But the oppressed actually hating and wanting to get rid and kill their oppressor makes the good libs of Reddit a little to uncomfortable. So they call him a psycho and say him wanting to use every tool in his arsenal to get rid of the enemy makes him a bad person
Yup. He gets genuinely furious at the way the Skaa are treated, which we know because there are multiple scenes from his POV where it happens. Yet r*dditors will still say he only cared about revenge or his own ego or whatever. Can these people not read??? If we only knew through dialogue or something there would be room for debate but we're literally showed his emotions as a viewpoint character. BRUH.
Tbf he couldn't know Elend would become a king back then. I actually like a lot about how the post-revolutionary government is presented in the well of ascension. Elend starts out really idealistic and naive but that ultimately just opens the door for reactionary forces to swoop in and take control. I wish they would have just given him a position and title that wasn't hereditary though, would have made everything way cooler
I have a leftwing SF trilogy coming out soon and am now working on a leftwing fantasy trilogy which takes place in Byzantium.
Please make a celebratory post here when your book is out! I'd love to read it.
leftwing fantasy trilogy which takes place in Byzantium.
:lets-fucking-go:
I thought we were an autonomous collective
We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune! We're taking turns to act as a sort of executive-officer-for-the-week--
But all the decisions of that officer 'ave to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting
By a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs--
But by a two-thirds majority, in the case of more major--
I want to write an anti-colonial, anti-monarch fantasy novel but that involves writing and I dunno about that
Just do it. I used to write something like that and while it's never getting finished or released it was really fun to screw with the format. Made sleeping a lot easier when you could lay in bed thinking about cool premises and tropes instead of worrying about life
Just start writing lol
E: bad and lazy advice tbh :bern-disgust:
Wikipedia is actually a decent resource to get started. Your story seems set: an oppressed people in a colony yearns for freedom. Congo under Belgian rule is a great reference to describe the horrors of colonialism. Describe it from the protagonist's point of view - what's their life like? What do they know about their colonizers, like, are there rumors about where they came from? Then look at various anticolonial struggles. Sankara is a magnificent template for The Chosen One. Once you set up the world and have started describing your protagonists life, your story starts writing itself.
Loved mistborn but that aspect did bother me. Also why is Elend spelled like that
Non english speaker here. Had to translate the (admittedly misleading) blurb because it captured so well what annoys me about fantasy. I didn't know Elant is spelled Elend in english lol
cross indexing various translations to triangulate your position...
FYI, mistborn isn't suuuper pro monarchy. The new king is effectively a figurehead for a bourgeois democracy whose main trait is that it can't get anything done.
Sanderson's politics are mostly cringe but usually in a lib way.
Looking through my (pirated) library, I'd also recommend The Masquerade as someone else did. Powder Mage is also a very fun story, though the central revolution is very Liberal in nature, a closer analog to the French revolution than anything else.
Ya, as I said the blurb is misleading but it brings the point across
What's messed up is in the sequel series it really only gets worse. I love Brandon Sanderson but he's a liberal in every sense of the word. I'd say closer to the Mike Duncan variety but still a massive lib
He seems like a really chill dude, actually. /r/bookscirclejerk is about 10 layers deep into making fun of him and everyone who likes him, and someone once pinged him there and he showed up like "haha, i see what you guys are doing here, but it would probably ruin the joke if i hung around, so have fun" and then just fucked off
real :gigachad-hd: energy tbh
i'll still never be caught dead reading one of his books though
His books are generally good, the worldbuilding and magic systems are usually well put together, he takes the effort to try and represent marginalized people in his books, like there was a person with paralyzed legs in one of his books and he took the advice of people with that disability to represent her well.
He's a progressive well-meaning liberal, and a bit of a prude as well, being mormon.
a bit of a prude as well
I can't really find that a fault in fantasy writing, since just completely ignoring sex is so much better than inserting a few pages of really awkwardly written smut into a story.
ohh I agree with that, some fantasy literature is too horny for its own good :volcel-judge:
Sanderson is incredibly chill. People will ping him in /r/fantasy and /r/wot all the time, and occasionally he'll pop in to answer questions or confirm fan theories. He's legitimately one of the better fantasy writers out there too, especially if you like hard magic systems.
If I was writing posadism would incoherently bleed through everything and none of you nerds would get any of it tbh :posadas:
It's sci-fi but the Culture series by Iain M. Banks is a good representation of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism. The Player of Games is probably the best intro to the series as it juxtaposes a similar society to ours with FALGCS.
Consider Phlebas is a bit out there, a nice space adventure though. Player of Games is probably my favorite stand-alone sci-fi book
Lol I had to startpage FALGCS after you already spelled it out
it's quite absurd, the historical models fantasy mines are full of semi-democratic institutions! village government, city government, the city-states!
fantasy Venice would be frikin cool
Check out The Water Mirror by Kai Meyer. Bit of a youth's book really but fun to read.
Hey sometimes it's scheming merchants replaced by the noble monarch
I'm not a big fantasy reader so I don't know any really good examples. Recently I read The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, which is pretty anti-authority in its themes, plot and message; however the monarchy is not abolished.
I can't recommend The Masquerade enough. Especially the first book. It's fucking dark though. Liberation from imperialist rule is a central theme but don't expect a Star Wars-esque resolution.
Such a good series. Nuanced exploration of imperialism and how it affects native peoples of colonial territory.
