Fantasy Tropes and Conventions

Fantasy Tropes And Conventions

There are many elements that occur throughout the fantasy genre in different guises. Worldbuilding, in particular, has many common conventions as do, to a lesser extent, plot, and characterization.

Many works of fantasy operate with these tropes, while others use them in a revisionist manner, making the tropes over for various reasons including; for comic effect, to create something fresh (a method that often generates new clichés), and objections to the effects of old tropes.

Read more about Fantasy Tropes And Conventions:  Good Vs. Evil, Quest, Magic, Medievalism, Other "races"

Famous quotes containing the words fantasy, tropes and/or conventions:

    Fantasy is a product of thought, Imagination of sensibility. If the thinking, discursive mind turns to speculation, the result is Fantasy; if, however, the sensitive, intuitive mind turns to speculation, the result is Imagination. Fantasy may be visionary, but it is cold and logical. Imagination is sensuous and instinctive. Both have form, but the form of Fantasy is analogous to Exposition, that of Imagination to Narrative.
    Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)

    It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole—so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
    Willa Cather (1873–1947)