LogFAQs > #945512078

I_Abibde posted...

I always figured authors did that to make life hard for fanficcers, since FFN has a tendency to destroy punctuation, accent marks, scene breaks, etc.

Nah. Like most negative cliches in modern fantasy, this is basically Tolkien's fault.

Essentially, he wrote his books more as an excuse to use the dozen or so fictional languages he made up as his lifelong hobby. And because he WAS a linguist (and was basing his accents and umlauts and apostrophes and cedilla and so on on the ways they're used in actual languages, to indicate specific phonemes and sounds that aren't naturally part of English), when Tolkien had names like Nmenor and Enw and Khazad-Dm, there was a reason for those marks.

And then thousands of imitators followed Tolkien, mimicking the style of his books without really understanding why he did the things he did. For a while it became almost standard that every fantasy novel had to have little poem/song fragments in them (because Tolkien did it), and you had to sprinkle in all sorts of made-up words for people, places and things (because Tolkien did it), and the more odd accenting you included the more "fantasy" it would feel (because Tolkien did it).

That's kind of died off a bit in recent years (mostly because it was SO imitated for so long, and everyone got sick and tired of it), but hack writers still fall back on it from time-to-time.

Ironically, one of the major indicators of hack writers these days is that they're clearly trying to ape Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire - again, without necessarily understanding what made it popular in the first place. So you always get titles like "A [noun] of [noun]", and the story seems to just be trying to be as bleak and dark and cynical as possible without really having a narrative purpose for the negativity, or balancing things out in other ways.

Hack writers almost always mimic whatever was popular because they don't really understand how to be popular themselves using their own voice. They don't actually have a story to tell, but damn it, they're going to tell it anyway.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family