Fantastic Fantasy - a thread to discuss all things Fantasy

This is a thread to discuss any and all things fantasy! Whether it be a book you’re reading / read or writing, or a movie / tv show, or what you like or dislike about the genre or what ever you want as long as it is related to fantasy. You can even ask for feedback on short snippets of your wip (approx 1000 words always in ‘hide details’) or ask for help with blurbs, loglines, covers, summaries and what not.

To start off, please introduce yourself, what your most recent fantasy read is, what your favourite fantasy book(s) is/ are, and what your current fantasy wip(s) is/are. Feel free to put up cover images or blurbs

I’m Swarali and my most recent and current favourite fantasy read is The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri, which is a epic fantasy trilogy with strong lesbian females. My current fantasy wip is called Empire of Lies and it follows a gang leader with a mysterious past who has to save her gang from the noose when they’re wrongly accused of killing a god. I have a thread about this.

PS: Please put this in the right section if I haven’t.

Also, if you’re on the wacky writers site, you might be interested in the fantastic fantasy group

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Ooh! This is exciting! I love Fantasy, but I also love Science-Fiction too. Then again Science-Fantasy is an awesome thing as well.

Still, whether it is Fantasy or Science-fiction or both mashed together. I simply adore the two genres.

I shall return much later because I gotta get some sleep. LOL!

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I’m reading a ton of Mangas, some of them are clearly fantasy while others are little more than Regencies with window dressing or “Historical Urban Fantasy”. I’m navigating messy Korean to English translations.

The most current

(Which will be outdated in only an hour-ish), is I Became the Hero’s Mom. The MC is a self-proclaimed Stan, who gets to come back and be her favorite book hero’s mom. And if it stayed there, it would be comedic gold because she literally worships this child for what he will become, and the father misconstrues it as being in love with the dad (which she goes along with because nobody understands fan obsession and they might see it as something worse). But because whomever wrote this is actually good at fleshing out a pretty deep story, this thing does a decent job of becoming as convoluted as a murder mystery. I mean, I’m 58 chapters in, and I’m not really certain where this is going, which is hard to do to me.

As far as writing is concerned,

I don’t tend to follow the “4 people” model of fantasy writing. You know, Tank, Healer, Mage, Archer? Nah…

Come to think of it, I don’t really read that way, much. I read/write a MC or pair when working on it.

I like writing lizard people. (In the Game of the Gods) I don’t think sentient lizards think enough like humans to act in traditional ways, all the time. In fact, I have the species as a whole, worried about acting too much like monsters around other humanoid species that they spend a lot of time curbing instinct and hiding their natural culture and biology. Which is very fun when the lizard’s ML is a talkative and oblivious Light Elf. I literally start the story where the dang Elf finds out that everyone thought their partnership was an intimate relationship. The Lizard knew from the start what people thought about it, and was fine with living in an almost-relationship. It pisses the ML off. And yay for culture clashes that come from that mess.

My “Could pass for human MC” (To Make a Kinder Children’s Tale) is half human, mostly elven and enough of a sentient wasp to confuse everything in her story. She mostly acts human, so is fairly relatable.

The Assassin’s Journals have all sorts of creatures in it, but the MC is seen as simple Central World human who develops a high psychic-level in Dowsing, Precognition, and Statistics, and much to her annoyance and amusement, it’s well-geared towards random match-making. From setting up 2 coworkers she hates, setting up a rival with her personal hero, a child to raise for the idiot that is the secondary ML, being the catalyst that causes another two coworkers to meet, hooks her grandma up with a man, another servant with twins (to run an inn), tons of random strangers as she bumps into them until something far closer to a god tells her to quit messing with reality so much. This is just a facet of her character.

I like that my male MC in The Fairways Empire is a man who can’t handle relationships because his first one, the girl told him he’d make a better whore than husband. Considering he runs into "obligations with women* all the time, it’s been a good way to keep things more platonic.

Really fantasy can be quite a diverse field, that I rarely think of complaints for it, that have anything rigid to them.

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Hello, I am the NARB. I wrote a story where the moon has grass on it.

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The Merlin Paradox is a science-fantasy I’ve been working on since 2019 and I’m currently rewriting about 95% from scratch.

I had a realization recently that what I’ve been writing vs what I thought I was writing isn’t exactly the same. Here I thought of it as an epic story (though stakes aren’t epic), but if I look at the chapters I’m producing, they’re very fluffy. It’s mostly a gentle drama, a story of a relationship, how two strangers become friends and maybe more. All other stuff is just stuff, just external forces that help the story not become stagnant. And maybe that’s okay.

I’m giving myself permission to continue writing as is, keep the fluff. Maybe I’m onto something. Maybe this story is like a bridge between fantasy and ya contemporary. There’s really no reason why it can’t have elements of both. I hope I’m right.

Will hardcore fantasy fans be disappointed? I hope not, but if they are, there are plenty of books that focus on the plot. Mine will focus on the characters and their relationship.

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Yeah, I think I am also leaning toward sci-fantasy/urban with more of a modern flavour vs the classic sword-and-sorcery. I really want to eventually do the 1920-30’s stylized setting.

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qualeshia3 or Qualeshia.

Nothing at the moment or rather nothing at all.

Don’t really have any. Shocking, I know.

Right now, I am working on a novel anthology that focuses on six people who are the mother, her three children, the father and the uncle. The mother and father has died a mysterious death which has caused the three children to try and solve the mystery behind their death. They do this while nobles are fighting to claim the throne from the children and the uncle is plotting something sinister.

That is all I got. :slightly_smiling_face:

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This seems like it’s on topic. Truly this is just as fantastical as dragons and magic.

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Hellom I’m Alena. I don’t have a current fantasy read 'cause I haven’t had time :sob: I don’t have a favourite fantasy book but my favourite fantasy author would be Sarah J. Maas. Love all the books. I’m actually a science-fantasy author and my current WIP is called Tear In The Megaverse. Long story short: Creation is falling into the Void because of pervious events and now the characters have to stop this from happening which is a lot more easier said than done :joy: It’s also a two book storyline, this is just the first of the two.

Nice to meet everyone! :blush:

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I’m only into Urban Fantasy.

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I don’t see that format in books very much, either… I don’t know if it’s more popular in anime or manga :thinking:
Seems like you have a lot of fun writing different species!

Hi NARB! oooh, how’d that come about?

Ooh I had a similar problem with a wip before, which I eventually abandoned because my vision wasn’t working out. It’s very annoying when that happens.

That’s the spirit! Hope this works out!

Yeah, those fantasies have a pretty big market, too!

And I see another curtain peeling back from Altaerra (did I spell that right?)

Yes it is totally on topic, and totally true. I’m a 16 (soon-to-be-17) year old, and I have to tell you that NONE of the boys my age look even remotely close to that. Then again, I do live in Asia, and they’re all nerds. (ofc I don’t mean that to mock them, they’re very nice)

It does suck when that happens :frowning:

Oooh interesting!

It’s still fantasy subgenre, so welcome here! Do you have any particular projects going on that you’d like to discuss? Or maybe any books you read?

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Hey hey! I’m Lex A. (they/them) and my most recent fantasy read is Legendborn by Tracy Deonn. (Quite ironically, most of the locations in the book I know by heart since they’re “local,” but friends online got me into it lol). My favorite fantasy book right now is Wings of Ebony by J. Elle. My current fantasy WIPs are long in matrix form (i.e. there’s a lot of them and they are all long) but Meiste, How to Catch a Demon, and the other one about space pirates lol. Happy to see y’all!

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I’m playing around with vampires and wolves as ideas at the moment. And I’m sorta dabbling in reading some sorts of “urban” fantasy series as well. I’m finding my footing in the genre and what I like. I explored Cemetery Boys, and Sarah J Maas too (don’t judge lol). I’m figuring it out but I am verging toward the Urban side of it, deffo.

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Those reccomendations are always fun!

What’s it about? The name seems somewhat familiar

Happy to see you here! Welcome to the group!

Ooh some of the authors on the forums have werewolf books, too.

That’s good to explore! The more you know about the genre, the more you can find your prefernces!

That’s nice. Urban fantasy is definitely more popular in YA then Adult (from my experiences, at least). One very popular urban fantasy series is The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare (I haven’t read it, but my friends have). You also could look at a recent urban fantasy I’ve been seeing blow up on youtube - Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

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Yeah, I am siding with the vamps at the moment. Wolves are still cool. I have a character called Christian but everyone calls him Pissy cause he’s always in a pissy mood. He’s a vampire, but his uncle Rod is a wolf. :joy: Cause I am awkward like that. I was toying around with that. They have wolf books? That sounds cool!

True, it’s definitely not Brendan Sanderson, but I am plodding around Grishaverse too. It seems alright.

I heard about The Mortal Instruments too. That’s the one that had the TV show, right, and the movies? No, that was Shadowhunters. But did she combine them both for the TV show? I can’t remember, I know they combined both for the Grishaverse (still need to watch that show too xD Come on Churro!)

Yeah, I have Legendborn too. I haven’t gotten around to reading it, because I’m awful at keeping track of my books and remembering what ones I bought lol. I got it in a sale as a paperback, I remember that much along with Lore but I gave Lore away cause I wasn’t into it.

It’s actually “Alterra”. LOL!

Yup, hopefully there will be time soon

Glad you think so :blush: It’s my biggest storyline so far and I keep getting stumped :joy:

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Ok so basically a Black girl gets kicked out of a hidden, magical ‘kingdom’ for revealing herself to her sister whom she had to drop in order to live in said kingdom. She spends the rest of the book trying to find out how her mother was killed, which is how she wound up in said magical kingdom. It’s p cool and I have connections to the location so I really enjoyed lol.

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My understanding was the opposite, that nobody bought urban anymore, but I am just on Wattpad, so it’s all the same to me :sweat_smile:

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Does Undertale fanfiction count?

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