A Game of Tropes

Six pet peeves about fantasy worlds

This is an essay I wrote in 2011. Following a conversation with Dave Morris about fantasy tropes, I decided to dust it off and give it a new lease of life. I’ve left the British spellings unchanged, and it still has the tiny images which were standard at the time.

Last week I read Game of Thrones, seeing as people are talking about it, and I have no idea when the HBO series will be coming to Netflix.¹ A few hundred pages in, it struck me just what an unpleasant world he was describing. And it’s not just George R. R. Martin – a world based on medieval feudalism is common to the vast majority of fantasy literature. The chivalric values these worlds espouse are usually held up to be heroic, noble, and something we should aspire to. But they’re not. They’re inherently fascist, racist, and backward-looking.

Let’s just look at six common themes in fantasy literature. Sure, there are plenty of counter-examples of fantasy literature that don’t use these tropes, but there are a lot that do. I’m sure you’ll recognize them.

By the way, don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not bashing Game of Thrones. It’s a good book, and I really like a lot of George R. R. Martin’s work. The Armageddon Rag is one of my favourite novels. My concern is with the underlying ideas that appear in a lot of books of this kind, and which we somehow automatically accept as “good” without necessarily thinking them through. I blame the troubadours and the pre-Raphaelites who created this perception of the world of knights in shining armour that still persists into the 21st century.

The rightful heir

Our hero seeks to regain the throne that is his by right. His family was deposed, perhaps many generations ago, so he intends to kill the usurpers and restore the true monarchy.

There is an implicit assumption here that inherited power is fundamentally right. Because our hero’s great-great-grandfather used to run the country, this gives him the right, and indeed the duty, to take charge. Don’t ask whether he’s competent. Don’t ask whether he’s the best person for the job. Just look at the genealogical tables, and that determines who should have the power.

And, furthermore, don’t ask how his family got into power in the first place. So a few generations further back still, our hero’s family conquered the kingdom and seized power? Well, that’s okay. They’re not usurpers. That was legitimate because, well, he’s the hero, right? And if anyone from those days should try and regain power for their family, they’re obviously evil rebels and should be put down, harshly.

Here’s a modern comparison. A descendent of the Duke of Thuringia, who was deposed by Napoleon in the 1780s, decides he’s the rightful heir to the throne of Germany. So he gets a group of loyal Thuringian supporters together, and plots to assassinate the President of Germany and blow up the Parliament, then set himself up as a divinely appointed dictator. By most standards, that would make him a great villain, but in a fantasy world – he’s our hero.

The family

That example leads in perfectly to the next trope, the Noble House. Everything is done out of loyalty to the House. The House is everything. The only people you can trust are members of your own House. The reason for wanting power isn’t for your own selfish ends – that wouldn’t be heroic – it’s to bring glory and honor to your House. And woe betide anyone who insults your House – they clearly have to die. Anything you do in defense of your House is justified. After all, it’s for a noble cause, right?

We have that trope in modern literature too. It’s called The Godfather. The Noble Houses of fantasy worlds are no different to Mafia families jockeying for supremacy, and dealing out death for the slightest imagined slur on their honor.

And relying on your family to do everything, and putting them in positions of power? That’s called nepotism, and it’s one of the most widespread forms of corruption. Here’s an example from Game of Thrones: one of the country’s leading generals dies, and the king replaces him with a highly experienced warrior. The dead guy’s family is insulted, because his son should have followed in his father’s footsteps (see the rightful heir trope above). But the son in question is six years old, sickly, and largely insane. Anyone with half a grain of sense could see that he’s not exactly the ideal candidate for the job, but in a fantasy world, family honor trumps common sense every time.

The pure bloodline

The bloodline is a recurring trope throughout fantasy literature. Everything about a person can be determined by their genetic background. Everyone from this country is shifty and untrustworthy. Everyone from that country is a skilled trader. Everyone from that nomad race is a cruel savage. And in order to preserve that distinction, the cultural norms of every tribe, nation and family dictate that crossing those genetic backgrounds produces half-breeds who are to be treated as outcasts.

In many places in fantasy worlds, people who aren’t of the True Blood, or foreigners, are treated like scum. They’re only fit for lower class jobs, and the city guard can mistreat them with impunity.

It makes me think of slave-owning states in the 18^th and 19^th century, where white people carefully graded everyone by their degree of blackness: mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, and so on, and that determined their civil rights. It’s reminiscent of eugenics programs, apartheid, or the segregation of the Jews in ghettoes. But in a fantasy world, that’s okay.

The highborn

Here’s another common trope. Our hero is the son of a blacksmith, but he’s always felt different and special. That’s because he’s really a noble. And so he regains what is rightfully his. (Because he’s the rightful heir, he’s restoring his family and the bloodline is what counts, remember.)

In most fantasy worlds, apparently, nobles really are different to ordinary people. They’re more skilled. They have better morals. They’re more intelligent. And they have a Destiny (say it in your most sonorous Christopher Lee voice, with an echo). They’re highborn, and so they deserve to have the best of everything. And if they have to kill a few people to get it, then fair enough. They’re nobles, after all.

And, by contrast, peasants are peasants, merchants are merely money-grubbers, and slaves are just slaves. And, of course, they should keep to their station in life. If they have to die in the service of the nobility, then don’t worry. They’re only commoners. In fact, if you have to start a major war to settle a dispute between nobles, then that’s fine too. The joyful populace will cheerfully line up to be slaughtered, just as long as House Hero avenges the insult from House Arrogant.

Let’s just recap one little thing in that last paragraph in case you missed it. Slavery is legal in most fantasy worlds. It’s okay for our hero to own people. Because he’s a noble, right?²

The measure of a man (or woman)

Our hero has to acquire many skills, but there’s one that matters above all else. He becomes a real man when he learns to use a sword and kill people. Even women aren’t exempt from this – if she’s not a Xena-esque warrior woman, she learns how to use a weapon in secret. Again from Game of Thrones, we’re supposed to like Arya, the girl who studies swordsmanship, rather than her girly big sister Sansa, who just wants to marry a handsome prince.

Combat is everything – either in the form of vengeance or tournaments, or simply to demonstrate prowess. Rulers who aren’t warriors are usually to be despised, and it’s a matter of personal honor that our hero should regain his throne by killing the evil king himself, thus proving his fitness to rule.

In a fantasy world, violence settles everything. Tombstone and the Wild West were a model of law and order compared to most fantasy worlds. Think Somalia and you’d be about right. Everyone’s armed, and death in a bar brawl is nothing unusual. Power goes to the strongest and most ruthless, and they keep it by inflicting death on anyone who might be a threat to them. In the modern world, that’s a country in chaos. In a fantasy world, that’s how things should be.

A return to the old ways

After our hero regains the throne (at the point of a sword, naturally), he’s going to restore the Old Ways. Once again, everything will be like it was in his father’s day, or a century ago, or a few millennia ago. All you have to do is invoke that trope, and the reader knows implicitly that our hero is doing everything for the best of reasons.

In a fantasy world, there’s no such thing as progress. It was always better back in the old days. The Old Religion was right, and the country will be improved if we get rid of the false priests and put the old ones back.

When that happens in the real world, it’s scary. Margaret Thatcher once proclaimed that she stood for a return to “Victorian values” in Britain. What the Victorians stood for was actually pretty horrific: the belief that white people had the right to conquer everyone else and destroy their culture; the belief that Christians were morally superior to everyone else, and therefore had the right to treat them as they pleased; no votes for women, black people, or peasants; the entire economy and judiciary in the hands of a small hereditary elite; the workhouse for poor people; death for the most trivial offenses; sexual repression (except if you were an aristocrat, in which case you could do as you liked) and so on. Dickens wrote about social injustice for a reason – Victorian society was a far from pleasant place for the majority of people.

Further back in history, look at what happened when the Catholics and Protestants took turns bringing back the Old Ways throughout Europe. Decades of death and terror, and people burned at the stake for following the previous Old Ways. One minute you’re a loyal subject, the next you’re a dangerous heretic in fear of your life.

In the West, there are very few people who think it’s a good thing that Ayatollah Khomeini re-established the Old Ways in Iran. Though we liked it much better when the British, the French and the oil companies got rid of democracy in Iran, and brought back the Other Old Ways in the form of the Shah. And look how well that worked out for the Iranian people.

But in a fantasy world, it’s somehow different. If you bring back the Old Ways, everyone will be happy.

So that’s the world of chivalry in a typical fantasy novel. It’s a violent world ruled by warring mafia families, where your station in life is determined entirely by who your parents are, where commoners exist only for the benefit of the wealthy, and where any attempt at modernization is regarded as treason.

Now I need to go back and think about how many of these I put in The Yellow Flowers without being aware of them. There’s a good chance I’m going to have to do some major rewrites.

1. Obviously, it didn’t.

2. One reader commented that authors don’t condone slavery simply by having slaves in their world. I responded: What I find really interesting isn't what an author promotes or admires; it's more about what they accept implicitly. Like, for example, slaves. An author feels nothing about writing something like "Sir Nice Guy dismounted and handed the reins to a slave dressed in the finest velvet." It's just normal in that world. The author isn't promoting or advocating slavery, it's just part of the world that they want us to believe is so wonderful.