As voracious readers, you know what it’s like to do a quick (high-volume) skim of a new-to-you author’s book-marketing material, to see if it gets past square one of looking at it in more depth vs just moving on to the next one. And these days, there’s almost always a “next one” to be tempted by.
I have my own negative-hot buttons, as I’m sure you do, too. But as a shopper, I encourage you to ruminate about your own works, also, with an eye to other folks’ assumptions about your work.
While granting a provisional pass to any author I already know (and have ever liked even a little) which takes me past the first marketing attempts at positive impressions, there are a vast number of kill-on-sight clues which might as well be flashing in bold red with active sirens. (I’ll restrict this discussion to fiction, but nonfiction generates some of this, too.)
We each no doubt have favorite genres, and I’ll ignore the genre-preference aspect of “never will I ever read another one of those…”. Assume the marketing material proffers enough clues for you to give the genre a provisional next-step pass. At that point, what are the things that set your alarm systems off, as in “Danger, Will Robinson!”?
Here is one class of things I take as warnings.
- Mary Sue heroines. She knows what’s wrong and how to fix it. The gods (or goddesses) are on her side. It’s her destiny. (This would be more acceptable if fewer real world women these days seemed to believe this is their calling.)
- The persecuted heroine. So many unhappinesses, so many people who don’t understand her, so much that isn’t her fault. Life is so unfair. Again, this used to be neurotic but relatively unexceptionable, but now so many feel they are owed so much, and it ain’t pretty.
- The heroine/hero is seeking her/his fated destiny where all will bow in admiration (vs. wanting to grow up and do well for self and others and mature, with whatever results). Yeah, well, this one is pure wishful thinking, without the bite (and growth/conflicts) of real superheroes.
Much of the above is an issue of the contemporary times bleeding into fiction: if the sentiments aren’t respectable/realistic in real life, they are less so in wishful-thinking fiction where they tend to be excused and justified. It’s a feel of teenage (immature) takes on reality, masquerading as adult ones. The stink that woke feminism gave to any female lead story line cast suspicion (for me) on most female-lead stories. I debated long and hard with myself about having a female main character in my own second series before going forward with it. Happily, there are still many good uninfected hero/heroine protags out there.
What cliches, contemporary or other, are high on your suspicions list, when you read book marketing for authors you don’t know?
What steps do you take not to appear to be toxically infected this way to readers who don’t know you?
Mad Genius Club 
58 responses to “Contemporary Tripwires”
For me a major turn off is making an established villain the victim. It’s bad in the fanfic world. Too many fan writers want to make the bad guy from a series into a sympathic character, the victim of the protagonists’ misunderstanding. But I’ve seen it in published works too.
I didn’t really like it when Darth Vader turned out to be Luke’s father, and whole good turned dark back to good felt glued on. Darth Vader was supposed to be evil.
The wicked witch of the West was evil. I don’t want to hear that she was just misunderstood as a child, so she turned evil. (Yes, I read the book. Did not like it, twice over since it was based on the movie version and not the original novel.)
There is in classic story telling such a thing as a villain, an evil character there for your protagonist to battle. Real evil does exist in this world, you don’t need to soften it in fiction. You can give your villain/antagonist, a back story, but please don’t try to make them “sympathetic”.
Very good point. There is a huge difference between giving a villain more of a motive than just to be evil and pretending he’s just misunderstood. If you present a character as dedicated to evil without a hint of other motive in a book or movie and then give him a sympathetic backstory and show him to be just misunderstood and redeemed in another, it’s just betraying your audience. Just because Lex Luthor went prematurely and permanently bald as a teenager from a side effect of Superboy’s rescue of him from a lab accident, doesn’t make him any less evil for choosing to become a villain based on that.
Some people travel down the slippery slope of doing evil that they convince themselves is for a “higher purpose”. Like Thanos in Avengers Endgame or the mentally deranged that claim they’re saving the world by splashing dye on the Mona Lisa or setting fire to a Tesla. That doesn’t make them good or even sympathetic. Instead it should show the reader how easy it is to make bad choices. But there are also people who are true villainous sociopaths such as Eric Harris who have decided that they hate God and life and to go to war against both. As Milton makes clear, people in Hell are in Hell because they refuse to leave.
I rarely read contemporary fiction, but I remember when I gave up on Thomas Hardy. I usually don’t enjoy tragic stories, but his were so cleverly done, I had to admire his craft. In Far From the Madding Crowd, his heroine makes several tragic but understandable choices. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, his villainous protagonist recognizes his evil ways, reforms himself for decades, and then, on the cusp of true redemption and happiness is led to discover a lie than unhinges him, leaving an innocent young woman to suffer for something she is totally unaware of and had no choice in. But it was Tess of D’Ubervilles that ran head-on into your second trope and made me never read another word of Hardy’s. When all the characters make stupid and evil choices just to prove that life is tragic and then you die, then you, as author, have turned into the sociopath. No matter how clever you are, I want to put a stake through your heart.
I spent a lot of time reading _The Virginian_ by Owen Wister to one of my children, because he loved the story and struggled to read. The TV show made Trampas, a serious villain in the book, into second in command on the ranch. Absolutely disgusting.
And my most hated Mary Sue was the female rabbit introduced into the movie version of _Watership Down_. In the book, the leader’s claim to fame was that no-one died under his leadership. Naturally, in the movie despite being better than everyone, she dies. Ugh. An absolute travesty.
I would push back a but on this – the villain needs to have motivations that actually make sense, and especially need to make sense in terms of how far he is willing to push. Would he blow up a city for a million bucks? Maybe, but unlikely. Would he blow up a city because he thinks that the demon Plotte Deeviiice is going to appear there and go on to destroy everything he holds dear? Much more likely.
I like using Doctor Doom for this example. He’s a petty, vicious villain, but his actual motivation is his arrogance and the fact that he *knows* there are threats out there:
“You people are all idiots, and there are things that will happily eat the world, send it to hell, etc. Only DOOM can save it, and DOOM can only do that if DOOM has full control. So DOOM is going to conquer you all for your own good. Oh, also – Reed Richards was the *worst* college roommate ever. DOOM wants to make sure everyone knows that as well”
Sort of like Lex Luthor in his Smallville incarnation. His answer to any moral criticism is “Did you people miss the the miraculously averted invasion but the super powerful aliens a few years back? We need countermeasures, or we’re screwed, and anything I do is justified in the pursuit of that.”
I mean, from his point of view, he is doing the only moral thing. Evil? Sure, but at least it makes sense.
The successful “flip the morality” stories go all in. Tanith Lee’s “Red as Blood” does not make the stepmother misunderstood. It makes Snow White evil.
and it’s amazing how delicate a touch let her pull that off.
“I didn’t really like it when Darth Vader turned out to be Luke’s father, and whole good turned dark back to good felt glued on.”
The millions of fans who still love the OT despite decades of mismanagement of the franchise respectfully disagree.
I loved Star Wars. Read the book before I got a chance to see it in the theaters (all but the last chapter, so I didn’t know how it ended). But the rest of the series slams up against my obsessive need for consistency.
My problem with the whole Anikin becomes Darth Vader then gets saved is based on the small detail that Star Wars – Chapter IV: A New Hope was originally a stand-alone story. It wasn’t conceived as the mid-point of a series. (the line that Lucus intended this 9-part story from the beginning is a myth) Everything that happens in the rest of the series is grafted on. KInda like how Dragonrider of Pern went from a novella to a multi book series. You can see how things are grafted on.
Drives me nuts to tell me in one book that a dragon is green in one story then changes to a brown in the next story, or that Darth Vader killed Luke’s father, then changes to Luke’s father became Darth Vader.
It could have worked if they’d set it up where Obi-Wan THOUGHT that was what happened and hadn’t gotten close enough to Vader to ‘sense’ who he actually was since then (Then you’d have the Tale of the Other Apprentice as a fertile ground for a prequel). It would have made his going off to find Vader on the death star in a New Hope make perfect sense. He had to find out if he was RIGHT before he told Luke. (the conversation with vader in the hangar bay) It would have avoided the “Certain point of view” conversation as well.
Would have made Darth Vader more formidable, at that.
Maleficent was the one that really got to me along these lines. No, I don’t want to read about how King Stephan was really the bad guy, and the poor evil fairy was his victim.
I only saw the movie, and then only on TV so I wasn’t that put out. Just a sigh and an eye roll. Angelina Jolie was the only thing worth seeing that movie, honestly. The perfect post-Modern deconstruction/destruction of a Disney property by Disney. Wow.
If I’d been reading it there’d be a dent in the drywall from the impact. But then I’d have seen the blurb and passed before paying money. Sigh, eye roll, move on.
I saw that on TV. I thought it was a decent story, but they should have divorced it from the Disney movie, and just made it A Sleeping Beauty story. Then they wouldn’t have the cool title of Meleficent, though.
Now, me, I did two things with it.
One was that I made it a sleeping princess tale, using several variants on that trope.
The other was that the whole matter was political, a grave matter of state. With better and worse people, to be sure.
You can read about what I did (and my shameless plugging) here
The “no one is good” trope. I’m sure it’s possible to do it without turning everything to grey goo, but I’ve never seen it pulled off successfully.
In fact, “no one is good” usually turns into “everyone is evil.” I remember one book I tried, whose glowing review declared, “This is not a story of plaster saints.” And no, it wasn’t, it was a tale of dashboard devils, every bit as one-dimensional as those plaster saints, except miserable to be around and read about.
As far as my own work goes, I have to say that if I were starting again, I might very well not have put out the series I have, at least not as my first series. I have a female (bad sign) chosen one (worse sign) trying to save two worlds (cringe). Now, granted, Emma is not a girlboss; she doesn’t go around insisting she knows better than everyone, she loses fights (to men, even!), and at one point even has to admit that her male mentor was 100% right and she was wrong. And her “chosen one” status is not about someone showing up and proclaiming she was The One but rather about her constantly putting herself in situations that match the Fae prophesy—a prophesy she doesn’t even find out about until she’s 2/3rds of the way to fulfilling it. But I don’t know quite how to communicate all of those details in the blurb, so it wouldn’t surprise me if some people figure out what my series is about and decide to give it a pass based on how most contemporary stories use those tropes.
“I have a female (bad sign) chosen one (worse sign) trying to save two worlds (cringe).”
Could be worse. You could have robot girlfriends and lippy combat spiders. ~:D
I read an essay by the author. In it, he did not discuss basing Wicked on the movie — he discussed it basing it on both, using whichever elements he pleased without regard for compatibility. That Dorothy used the water in deliberate ill temper (book) — but omitting that the witch had enslaved her (movie).
The older I get the less books centered around “The Chosen” appeal to me.
One example which will have SF types crying heresy would be Azimov’s Foundation series, where you had a small elite pushing around the masses of ordinary people as if they were checkers. I thought it the coolest thing ever when I was in my teens, because I imagined myself part of the elite. Yet as I’ve grown older I realize that is the gateway to tyranny.
Another is Harry Potter where those without magical power are muggles. Untermench. Yes, the story is charming and all, but I cannot get past the premise.
A lot of this is my republican (small R) bent. I believe in the judgement of “normal folk” – the average person who does his best, goes to work each day, looks after their family, and keeps it together. I trust the folks in flyover country a lot more than the special coastal elite.
This is not to say I dislike stories with characters doing extraordinary things, but I prefer those characters to be ordinary people who have risen to the occasion rather than those who have been gifted with special abilities that push the Easy button. (One example is Larry Correia’s Owen Pitt. Yes, he ends up the Chosen One, but readers feel he earned it through hard work rather than being gifted with it.)
I think you’ve missed something: Treating Muggles as Untermensch is one of the things that make the villains, well, villains.
What’s your opinion of superhero books? Because the same dynamic is at work there: powers exist that people without powers have a hard time fighting, and those WITH powers fall into two groups: those who want to use those powers to abuse/kill those without them aka villains, and the heroes who prevent that because they CAN.
Superheroes with superpowers? With few exceptions (such as Doctor Inferno) where the superpowers are part of a humorous tale, I’ll pass. They are playing on easy mode, unless there are equally powerful supervillians, at which point – yawn. Batman or Ironman who are normal humans with extraordinary training or equipment are different. They are ordinary people rising to extraordinary circumstances.
Doesn’t mean other people cannot or should not like superhero stories. I enjoyed them when I was a child and teen, and understand their attraction. But they are not for me, and that was the question asked.
“They are playing on easy mode”
Because picking up a firearm automatically makes you a sharpshooter. And a person with a naturally bulky physique never has to work out or train. And people with superpowers never, ever work to hone those powers to a razor’s edge and employ them with great effect under the most stress.
There’s nothing quite like seeing a highly-trained superpowered individual go up against dozens of thugs armed to the teeth.
But yeah, the Chosen One trope has been badly mishandled by people who’ve forgotten that being the Chosen One is about being chosen to do a tough job no one else can and no one else would want to. In fact being the Chosen One kinda sucks.
“There’s nothing quite like seeing a highly-trained superpowered individual go up against dozens of thugs armed to the teeth.”
Yes, and miraculously no one dies. Not the thugs, not the bystanders. That’s the part of the Superhero trope the Left conveniently forgets and subverts all the time. Superheroes are not playing on “easy,” they’re a bull standing in a china shop desperately making sure not to break anything while fighting bad guys.
This is one of the things that came to surprise me when I was writing my first book. Okay sure, George McIntyre is wildly over powered compared to the cops and zombies he’s fighting hand-to-hand. Post human intelligence, nanotech body modifications, all-seeing penetration of electronic systems, all of that. But he can’t DO anything, because when he solves one problem he causes three more worse problems. Fighting is actually harder for him, because preventing collateral damage is Job One.
If you fire a two-megaton-per-second plasma beam at an orbiting target you better make sure to do it from someplace far enough away that you don’t blind half the city. (Middle of Lake Ontario is far enough, I looked it up.)
In the comics this type of thing is hand-waved away by referring to the peerless abilities and training of the superhero. Superman can use his heat vision to shoot the wings off the fly sitting on the apple on top of the boy’s head. When he picks up a building, it doesn’t collapse because he’s just that awesome he knows the exact spot to balance it from. You can get away with it in a comic, because it is mostly pictures.
In a book, you’d better at least mention the years of practice Superman went through, aiming that heat vision perfectly and learning how to pick up a building without wrecking it. And why he bothered working so hard, that’s important.
This is what I hated about The Watchmen. They’re not heroes. They’re just murderers. Lefties of course love that comic, and lionize it all the time. So Post-Modern! So twanzgwessive!
What I liked about Wearing the Cape. They actually started marking the lift points so superheroes knew where they could push to lift aircraft, or have the heroes study what to look for in buildings so they could go only through the non-loadbearing walls.
More than just “knowing where the non-loadbearing walls were”, they learned “what kind of walls you should or not attempt to go through”.
IE Trying to Go through a heavy stone wall might hurt you more than the wall. 😉
Well, Rorschach was closest of them to being a Hero.
When faced with Something Terrible done in the Name Of Good, he was willing to die before going along with it.
Oh, apparently Moore was surprised by the people who liked Rorschach more than they liked the other characters. 😉
By the way, I really didn’t like Moore’s take on “superheroes”.
I have to agree about Moore and his take on superheroes, especially as he’s aged. Though Moore himself seems dismayed by a lot of what he was paid to do back in the day. He’s all but rejected his infamous Batman story ‘The Killing Joke’. And his “farewell letter” to the Silver Age Superman, ‘Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow?’ really gives you the sense that Moore loved the innocence and fun of those stories, and regrets the part he played in ending that.
I still have some problems with him, I’m not a big Moore fan, but I have to admit that he at least gets that superhero comics should have reconsidered some of the directions they went in.
In Through A Mirror, Darkly, the heroine and other powers save whom they can. Not many. Then, that particular scenario was stacked against them, because there were very many very bad people in it.
Treating Muggles as Untermensch is one of the things that make the villains, well, villains.
Have to disagree with you there. Torturing and killing Muggles is one of the things that makes the villains the villains. But all wizards treat Muggles as though they’re some sort of talking animals. The best of them see it as their responsibility to protect Muggles, but even those like Kingsley clearly don’t see them as equals.
There’s the way that wizards casually manipulate Muggle memories, to the point where some of the Muggles in question end up actually brain damaged. Or how the various wizard politicians treat the British Prime Minister. Or, if you want to argue that those are at least semi-villains, how Hermione treats her parents. I know that there’s disagreement as to whether Hermione consulted them before she erased their memories and sent them to Australia, but even before that, she seemed to treat them as an annoyance she would rather be without; after Book 2, I’m pretty sure that Harry spends more time with the Dursleys than Hermione does with her family.
I enjoy the books despite this, but there’s no question there’s a two-tier system in the Wizarding World, and Muggles are on the wrong side of it.
So, typical teenager? 😎
The big problem with Harry Potter is that the reason for hiding is never given. And it would have to be a truly powerful reason to justify the lengths they go to preserve the secret.
This is a commonplace problem in urban fantasy because the Masquerade (as the trope is usually called) is a machine, a plot device, allowing fantasy to exist in the modern world. All justifications are ad hoc. We get tales that tough, egoistical daredevils are hiding out of fear of mortals whom they could tear apart with their werewolf or vampire powers.
L. Jagi Lamplighter does it well in Prospero’s Children, though. There’s a secret society of utterly unscrupulous men who suppress all knowledge of magic in order to get people to invent screen windows and typhoid drugs rather than grovel before the Lord of the Flies.
Nod.
Although I liked one series’ explanation for the Masquerade.
The magic-users had faced a major anti-magic rebellion against them and they had one major weakness.
Their children were very unlikely to be magic-users. Their “replacements) would be children who lived among the non-magicians and those children would be easy to kill once the non-magicians realized that the children were “magic-born”.
So the magic-users went underground and convinced the world that magic didn’t really exist.
Obviously, this meant a major rewriting of history.
Oh, the author was Joyce Harmon, and the series was Regency Mage.
I thought the usual reason given in stories that have a Masquerade hiding the supernatural and/or ‘hidden races’ of elves, vampires, beast-people, etc. from mundane humanity usually boils down to ‘The (Prejudiced, Christian, Right-Wing, etc., all often heavily implied) mundane human hordes would kill us all in their rampaging bigotry unless we hide from them’. And the whole ‘One of us can kill a dozen of them’ often goes along with ‘But if we kill a dozen of the humans, another dozen humans will be right there to kill you when you drop from exhaustion’.
I admit to getting tired of it myself. Can people be vicious to the Other, especially when they’re scared? Even more so when they’re RIGHT to be scared? Yes. Humans have also shown an incredible ability to accept outsiders, granted not without some bumps along the way, when said outsiders are willing to try and live in peace with them. One hears constantly about Christian/European persecution of Jews, and it happened, yet there was a large and reasonably prosperous European Jewish population down to the early 20th century.
I can also remember from years ago a whole anthology of stories where races of anthropomorphic beings lived alongside humanity, openly, and yet it had no effect on human history at all. In every single story the known existence of cynocephali and whatever you’d call the rest had absolutely no effect on history. religion, science, or anything else. To me that was even more maddening and less plausible than having all the beast-folk hiding behind a Masquerade.
The thing is that they seldom bother to even try to make it plausible.
I think a series of essays is coming on.
If you have anything to say on that topic it’ll be worth reading.
And yes, the complete and utter lack of plausibility was one of the things that drove me up the wall. Of course that fact that in the Historimorphs collection I spoke of, everyone seemed to be getting their historical knowledge from cable TV specials didn’t help.
Well, I have begun. It’s going to be a series so you might have to keep watching to see the rest
https://open.substack.com/pub/writingandreflections/p/the-magical-masquerade-part-i
I am already watching you at your Substack blog. Thanks for the heads-up.
Glad to have you!
Jim Butcher did it reasonably well in Dresden Files.
“Do we really try and hide things? No, not really. We have at least one wizard advertising in the phone book and doing interviews. But we are really more concerned with each other than with mortals because any given human is only around for a few decades and our affairs span centuries, human tech is not great at capturing our actions, and we tend to do our fighting in underground/jungle/hidden places because that is where we tend to hang out so that nobody bothers us and the less savory aspects of our lives (looking at YOU, vampires) aren’t out in public. So the general public doesn’t reallybeliev in us because we aren’t obviously around.
And yes, mortals got pretty damned scary in the last several decades and nobody *really* knows how things would turn out, and we all have plans for things to do in the next few centuries that we don’t want to miss on account of being dead because some idiot Black Court vampire decided he wanted to emulate those idiots on Buffy or Twilight”
There was also an aspect that normal humans “wanted to forget or explain away” what they witnessed.
It took a lot for the average person to accept that something strange was happening.
It took a while for Harry’s policewoman friend believe what Harry was talking about.
Does that quotation come from one of the actual stories, or is it your own original work? I’ve read all the Dresden Files novels and I can’t quite recall it.
Whoever wrote it did get Harry’s voice right, though.
When the cover copy uses they/them to describe a single protagonist. Or starts with “In this Saphic fantasy/romance …” Those tell me that the wrappers are more important to the writer or publisher than is the content of the character’s personality.
When the opening paragraph has a lot of in-world terms, so many that it confuses rather than intrigues. And it doesn’t get better by the end of the first page. My store of “trust me” isn’t that full.
One personal peeve, perhaps, was the book that sounded promising and I read the first few pages. The author barely described the setting and waved a bit of character description, but otherwise I had to fill in everything. I didn’t know the land and roads around Philly in the 1850s well enough to be able to follow the action, and I suspect that’s true of a lot of readers.
Nod, I dislike blurbs/cover copies that “shout” that the main characters are gay and are (or will be) lovers.
Yes, Sarah Hoyt in “A Few Good Men” had gay characters who became lovers, that’s not what was shouted in the blurb.
And to Sarah’s credit, the main character being gay is an important plot point. It’s not by any means virtue signaling.
LOL! I welcome it as at least truth in advertising. 🙂
TBH, I did not realize that until fairly late in the book, when Sarah brought out the heavy-duty clue bats. Didn’t affect my thorough enjoyment of the story, but did explain some of the motivation of Villain Daddy (beyond just being a first class asshole).
Yes, I can be very slow about such things, unless it’s in a book where it is expected. Fortunately, IRL, at least for the existence of my three kids, future $SPOUSE$ had some pretty heavy clue bats of her own.
My particular “nope, Do Not Want”, is the main character who starts out living at the bottom of the social heap with everyone sneering at them who then becomes the Mighty Hero who saves all those ungrateful you-know-whats.
That doesn’t work. Children are born selfish – they have to be, to survive – and empathy is something they have to learn. Heroic behavior is something you have to see to imitate, even if you only see it in fictinal characters in a book. Unless there’s some mentor who shows them people can and should be kind, they’ll never learn it.
On top of that it’s a horrible message of how society should treat its marginal people – you know, the orphan, the widow, and the stranger. “Oh, it’s fine if we take everything they have and abuse them horribly! They’ll come back and save us in the end!”
Nope. I’m out.
Now a neglected/abused kid who gets a good look at how healthy people act by being brought into a better situation and decides “I want to do that” can be really good. That’s about half of all of Mercedes Lackey’s stories (at least pre-2000)
Those can work excellently. I haven’t seen many lately, though.
Hmm, tripwires. Taken almost at random from the first page of SF/F on the Big A:
“…a stunning Orwellian vision of the near future….” nope.
“…The secret of zir divine heritage revealed, X finds zirself on a path that will see thousands of lives lost to the magic in zir blood….” nopenopenope
“…With a hellish journey before him, it’s a good thing X has the devils on his side…” Um, hell nope.
I’m pretty done with mainstream publishing, honestly. Just the blurbs alone annoy me, most of the time.
What I see out there mostly is Scolding, served on a platter of Cautionary Tale, with a side order of Frankenstein and some I HATE CAPITALISM!!! sauce. Would you like fries with that?
Nope. Because I would be fairly sure that they spit into them.
The father is always the bad guy.
And conversely, picking up a firearm doesn’t automatically turn Joe Everyman into Rambo.
We get to visit one of those lost “utopian” societies of the halcyon past, like Krypton or an elf kingdom only to find them plagued by the same problems that are perceived right here and today as “the worst problems ever.” I get that no society is ever truly utopia, but it would be nice to portray one as having different problems connected to a more advanced civilization. It would also be pleasant if every now and then one of those vanished civilizations was actually portrayed as “good,” or at least closer to the good, so that it’s loss was a genuine tragedy.
Also, if aliens can build a ship and travel across interstellar distances, I think they might be able to manage a stick shift. Albeit with some practice.
Poor oppressed anything. I get that it’s a powerful trope that speaks to many cultures, and I’ve used things adjacent to it (I have at least one Cinderella and one Cinderfella protagonist in my backlist, from different series) but I just don’t trust the average English speaking writer who packs their blurb with fashionable buzzwords to do it right. Straight-up power fantasies, whether male or female, tend to put me off as well. I might have had the patience twenty years ago to “read around” Corrupt Church/Wise Wiccan cliches, but I don’t have it anymore. I’m not necessarily opposed to Chosen One stories, although I don’t actively seek them out either. If they’re whining in first person in the blurb about being the Chosen One, *that* is a red flag.
I don’t know is it’s a major ‘do not want’ on my part, but I get a little frustrated with fantasies, let along historical novels set anytime from the Middle Ages on back where someone decides they’re going to make society all egalitarian and democratic and of course everyone except the villains will fall in line and do whatever they say without question.
This is especially true when you have a multi-racial culture where those on top really and literally are physically and mentally superior to the commoners. Or they have magic, or are immortal, or whatever. You try and tell the guy who can alter reality with a thought that he doesn’t have any more rights than you.
It’s different when said egalitarian is a stranded time traveler or dimension-crosser, though they always seem to think that the locals will OF COURSE toss over the society they’ve been born and raised in just because Mister Liberty told them to. And he gets to be the new ruler, because why not.
I mean, how much time did it take in real life for the idea of modern democracies where everyone gets to vote, not just the property holders, become popular? Just looking at medieval history would show several ways to introduce some liberty without trying to turn everything backside over teakettle, but that almost never happens.
It’s just, a little research would make this all more plausible.
First you have to get to the idea that property holders can vote.
The development of the nobility in Poland and the Sejem might be a useful model, to a certain extent.
Always useful to get more models!
The main thing I can remember right now about the Polish system is that the great nobles often had more power, and bigger armies, than the king. It was described as a case of ‘the tail is wagging the dog’.
The Sejem as a whole had over a thousand members, ranging from the great magnates to the lesser nobles (gentry to use the English version). All of them had to approve of major decisions, and until reforms in England in the late 1500s, Poland had a larger voting population per capital than did the Mother of Parliaments. It was awkward, and slow at times, but the basic idea was that if a man had a duty to defend the land, and owned property associated with that duty, he had a right to a say in government.
I’m married to someone of Lithuanian immigrant descent who acquired an obsession with the history of the Polish/Lithuanian nobility et alia. The unanimity of the voting requirement (the Liberum Veto) has always struck me as the most…um…unlikely-to-persist modern governmental policy I have ever heard of. And, indeed, it caused the paralysis that resulted, among other things, in the partitions of Poland. (Even Wikipedia gets this one right.)