this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2025
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Fantasy in general should be weirder, in my opinion. Too much of it is in the Tolkien mode. You are writing about a universe with things like magic. You can be as creative as you want.
"Oh my gosh, your map is so unrealistic, why does your river split like this?" "Because this section of river was once ruled by married river spirits, but they got a divorce and took half each. This town between them has banned marriage counselors, lest the river swallow up the land once more."
Yeah this kind of accuracy elitism (idk how to call it) is ruining artistic expressions and experimentation
I mean you can get much, much weirder.
"Because this section of river was once a fork, but it got stuck in a cow-snake and the cow-snake used its powers of transmogrification to split the river and then it felt guilty so it turned itself into a town full of people."
And I'm sure someone else can come up with something even weirder. I just wish people didn't feel so limited in a genre of infinite possibilities.
Or you can steal some ideas from mythologies, though some are very sex-oriented.
"Why are all the plants in this region red?" - That was where the goddess Bleda had her first period. "Oh. So those yellow fields are..." - Yes.
that's just greek mythology
Better Greek mythology than the usual elves and dwarves and shit in my opinion.
Agreed, even worse then tolkien style, absolute majority is so bland and european-ish dnd style fantasy, without any actual weirdness of real european folk-lore. And they rarely deeply explore it as in how existence of this or that in the world would actually change it.
Morrowind was good in that respect with its power stealing egg-hatching demigods raping actual evil gods, then making a moon thrown at them by divine punishment and suspending it in the air, making it a prison for their political enemies.