What are the necessary aspects of a high fantasy novel?

What are the necessary aspects of a high fantasy novel?

Elves and Dwarves

In before butthurt pratchettfags

There aren't any. It's fantasy, you don't have to have certain things.

A passion for storytelling, a good story, thought-out characters and an interesting plot with good twists. That's all you really need for any book.

It doesn't have to be a masterpiece; if every story is a masterpiece, then none of them are.

t. author

Lode-bearing evil lords.

To classify as 'high fantasy' a novel should feature prominent fantasy aspects; which can be for example the presence of individuals, creatures or entities of supernatural nature, powers and/or origin, or one or more non-human races or cultures (or human cultures that are nonetheless very different from those that do or did exist in the real world). Magic-users, magical items, magical places, gods, monsters, heroes and superhumans and otherwordly places and civilization are typical ingredients of the high fantasy genre. It is also usually associated with heroic quests and/or epic sagas and confrontations, and often feature a marked dichotomy between polar principles or worlds (good and evil, light and darkness, chaos and law, nature and civilization, man and monster, mortals and gods, living and undead...)

>Dark Tower only gets longer
Cripes, I'm only one the second book. I'm going to be at this for years.

stop at the end on the fourth one, now you can! you've been warned

Scarecrows, tin men, lions, flying apes, little people, witches, small dogs, anthropomorphic apple trees. Things of that nature.

>stop at the end on the fourth one, now you can! you've been warned
Don't listen to this idiot.

Read the first four, then skip to number 8, "The Wind Through the Keyhole".

OP said high fantasy. Oz is just a country on Earth.

I thought the fourth book (this is Wizard & Glass, right?) was the worst of all.

For all its world building I found W&G to be extremely dry. Personally, I plowed through the last 3 though I slowed down a bit for 7.

I'm reading through the wheel of time now. I'm about halfway through Fires of Heaven and fuck me those books are long

As far as I can recall, people like it because it more definitively sets up the world than all the others before it, whereas up to that point it was rather vague.

Personally, I found it meandering and boring, and it stopped me from reading the rest of the series for a while. This is coming from someone who enjoys (real) Dune books.

>Personally, I found it meandering and boring
I found that too

How do people stand Mazalan? I could barely get through the foreword without choking on what a smug cunt the author is (waaah, Hollywood directors won't throw money at me because they don't understand my genius!), but when I actually got into the book, it was three straight chapters of namedropping shit I don't know what it is and have no reason to care about. Shit shit shit, it was all shit.

>high fantasy
>takes place in a world not our own, but may have protagonists from Earth (LotR, Narnia, Thomas Covenant, Earthsea, etc.)

Contrast with:

>low fantasy
>takes place on Earth, typically with a kind of secret history or supernatural underworld that is known to only a select few (Dresden Files, WoD, Twilight, etc.)
>may instead have a known magical history, but still takes place on Earth (Shadowrun)

That's it. People who redefine high and low fantasy to mean "high magic" and "low magic" in the context of RPGs are just mangling fairly well understood genre labels.

And just in case people ask:

>Barsoom

Not fantasy. Sword & Planet. A largely defunct scifi branch.

>Star Wars

Technically a space opera, but if you want to you could call it space fantasy. SW fans might stab you though.

>40k

Grimdark space opera.

>supernatural underworld that is known to only a select few (Dresden Files, WoD, Twilight, etc.)
That's urban fantasy.

Which a subgenre of low fantasy, which is a subgenre of fantasy literature.

>fantasy
>>low fantasy (Harry Potter)
>>>urban fantasy (Dresden Files)

'low fantasy' is used to describe fantasy set in our world and fantasy with relatively little by way of fantastical elements.
You are both correct.

So Lord of the Rings, taking place on earth, is low fantasy?

What, just because a novel doesn't exposit all over your lap like you're a retard who needs spoonfeeding means it's bad?

I didn't know the Malazan author browses Veeky Forums, although it probably shouldn't surprise me, what with his ridiculously inflated sense of self-worth.

Yeah, if you like a book that reads like an autistic 13-year old rattling off the names of everything in his latest homebrew setting, you're the retard.

No. Middle-Earth is some sort of magical pre-history, not unlike the Hyborean world that Conan inhabits. It's so far removed from the world as we know it that it may as well not be the same Earth.

>LotR
>high fantasy/heroic fantasy, low magic

>Conan
>sword and sorcery

Literature genres are often inexact.

>Oh no a 3.3 million word high fantasy series requires me to invest a little into it
>The foreword even tells me so
>Guess I'll drop it before I get even one percent of the way in and say it's shit

It was the definition of low fantasy, at least in the past.

space fantasy is pretty accepted term these days

If you were really as lost as that then I don't really know what to tell you. Maybe stick to less heavy works.

Gardens of the Moon is a little confusing, but you still have the necessary context to work out what is going on, just not the implications of those events in the greater scheme of the setting, which is what the next 3 million fucking words explore. This is the entire goddamn point.

As if word count has shit to do with quality. It wasn't 3.3 million words when he started writing Gardens of the Moon, and a decent author should be able to cobble together a plot, rather than an incoherent series of smug name drops.

You can explore a setting without coming across like an anime character playing the pronoun game. I'm moderately convinced people mainly read that shit so they can pretend to be intelligent with muh word count, when true intelligence would have been to select a book series that doesn't waste its first million words on fucking nothing.

Considering that's how Lucas described the Star Wars franchise, yes. But I can no longer count the number of times some manchild toy collector has disagreed with the term.

>I can't understand contextual hints

Are you simple or something? This isn't a matter of being intelligent, it's a matter of being dumb. I know chavs who have read Malazan and understood it based on my recommendation. There are people who dropped out of school when they were 13 and could barely read a newspaper before they came to me.

It's not some massive exercise in cryptography. It doesn't take much to work out what the named thing is based on how it is being used, and it's setting the scene for a ton of worldbulding that takes place as you read, rather than forcing massive amounts of exposition down the reader's throat before starting anything. I thought it was quite a refreshing changeup.

There are plenty of valid reasons to dislike Malazan and I can totally understand getting to the end of the first book and deciding it's not for you, but at this point you're basically spouting shit about something you barely even sampled.

Readership.

>I thought it was quite a refreshing changeup.
From what? It reads like anything that thinks it's so great and clever it doesn't have to make an effort to be interesting.

Hell, it reads like just about everything *I* wrote as a smug-ass teenager.

>you're basically spouting shit about something you barely even sampled.
If it takes several hundred pages for something to become even vaguely readable, it's not good.

w- ww w- why are Pratchett's colours fading out

It's called investment. You need to put something into the series if you want to get anything out.

alzheimer's

>Hell, it reads like just about everything *I* wrote as a smug-ass teenager.
Don't hold us in suspense user, share your amazing stories with us.