What's with modern fantasy?

Aero

Recently I watched that movie where Matt Damon goes to the great wall of china and fights aliens. It was ok I guess. Too much filler, not enough plot. But then that got me thinking about fantasy settings in general. How come I was able to summarize that movie in such a short phrase? Fantasy is supposed to wild and imaginative. It should hold settings and characters that struggle to be summarized. I couldn't summarize Conan the Barbarian like that. Conan's world is weird, creepy, and rough around the edges, but it's really an indescribable experience. It's truly a world foreign and alien to our own, and any meaningful summary would be at least a paragraph. These days I really don't see any Conans, but maybe that's why it stands out so well.

Somnolence

I have had the same thought before, and I wonder what the cause is. I think it boils down to basically two things that are somewhat related.
The first being basic marketability. A pretty basic fantasy world like Game of Thrones is a lot easier of a sell than something like Zeno Clash - which really pushes at the borders of the genre.
Maybe a bit more devastating though is that the second aspect is that people just aren't as interested in being really creative anymore. There's something to be said about how nothing is original anymore; coming up with something truly unique takes a lot of energy. So people end up just using existing shorthand to save themselves the time and effort. This also means it's a bit less stressful for the audience in a "Do elephants exist in Pokemon?" sort of way.
If your setting is pretty stock, you don't have to spend so much time explaining it, and you can devote more effort to whatever you really do care about, like character drama, a magic system, political intrigue, Minotaur dick- what have you.

Aero

Somnolence That's very true. Sometimes there's fantasy as a backdrop in a story about something else (like character drama or romance) as opposed to the author writing about fantasy as a fantastical world that a story takes place in (although the Matt Damon slop was neither lol)

Ross_R

I like to say that humanity right now is in deep worldwide cultural crisis. It is not hard to se how throught the 2000's all kinds of art fell down, across all countries and mediums, and the only things that are worth anything right now are mostly those ones that try imitate the old. But we do not really create anything new, and the exceptions to this rule are quite rare.

Just the other day I was talking with a pal about how few fantasies are just that nowadays: fantasies. Really, nowadays it is rare to have fanatsy for the sake of fantasy. You gotta have some social commentary, or some underlying political discourse or something else - and it is always visible enough to interfere with fantasy itself.

This might be one of the reasons why fantasy settings fail, but, of course, there are dozens of others. Most media today is controlled by corporations, who, it seems, absolutely refuse to risk any profit and only make the most safe art possible. Tried cliches, zero new ideas, always aimed at the lowest common denominator.

And then I just can't help but say that creativity of people altogether kinda falls down, because the modern systems do not really reward creative people. You gotta be bractical and business-savvy these days, and one can say that if a creative persone is forced to run the business side of art as well, he at the very least have less time for creative endeavours.

So on, so on. I can write a lot about it, but I have this thread open in a tab for a month by now, so I just want to write something. Let it be this short sum of my thoughts, and I hope you will catch my wave here.

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