How comes it's so easy to talk about (or, rather...

It's more about having to put more effort into the pretense, even if it's just by spouting technobabble. In fantasy you don't even have to try to excuse it when you set your story amidst the gears of a giant celestial clockwork where butterfly people pilot aetherships to deliver cargoes of children's dreams from the cryogoblin kingdom to the giant's graveyard.

What's a cryogoblin?

Opposite of a pyrotroll.

Because fantasy was already written for us. LotR, Dnd, etc. all are heavily based on existing mythology and history of real world peoples.

We have nothing real-world as a base for sci-fi.

How about Lord Dunsany or Clark Ashton Smith? Not entirely original, I'll give you that, but certainly more "out there" than something like Tolkien.

I'd say it's because not even sci-fi autors are constant, on one story there are laserguns and the other is preaching about mass accelerators while a third is talking about space philosophy.
Sci-fi is way bolder

Wouldn't common sense say fantasy could afford to be even more so? One story you could be hunting snarks and the next you could be befriending the jabberwock (specifically picking entities from no particular cultural mythology here)

Could but often doesn't. There are of course plenty of books that deviate from this, but certain elements(elves, wizards, orcs and so on) form a baseline upon which an oversized portion of fantasy literally is written on.

There are common elements in all standar sci fi tho.

Ships, space exploration, colonization, human society is one/a few big conglomerate, Chrome stuff, simpler muted cloths/with no colourful patterns. The stuff IS there.

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StandardSciFiSetting

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StandardFantasySetting

Step it up.

Science fiction is a far broader megagenre because people classify everything that doesn't have wizards in it as it.

That's the right answer.

>star wars
>scifi
star wars is fantasy though, it's just fantasy in space

in reality it's that fantasy is usually based on mythology and "generic" fantasy is based on the commonalities between many (mostly western) mythological cycles, which are easy things to pin down, while scifi deals primarily with the future and things that do not yet exist and have not even been thought of, so the only generic things in scifi are those that are the most obvious source of interesting scenarios, eg space travel, time travel, teleportation and cloning.

Ironically there isn't really much that takes place in generic fantasy settings despite "generic fantasy" actually being pretty cool, probably because people deliberately avoid it. As far as novels go Discworld is the closest I can think of that isn't obscure pulp fiction, DnD is kinda like that for ttrpg, and I guess Dragon's Dogma comes close for vidya (but not really). Middle Earth is a very nuanced and unique setting and not really generic at all, though the movies (and to a lesser degree the trilogy in general) definitely make it seem a lot more generic.

Fantasy doesn't become any less generic because you rename your orcs "Gralls" and your elves "Faerians". A LOT of cheap fantasy, be it books, video games or ttrpgs, is just generic.

Science fiction includes too many too separate subgeneres that would've probably been considered their own thing if we'd been less stupid.

That sounds almost gimmicky enough to work... Kinda like 95% of Meivilles books.

Bretonnia has squires you dumb faggot

>Because 'standard fantasy' has a far more iconic model to go off of, The Lord of the Rings.
before that Conan used to be that though

And some things that do.

The reason there's not a standard Sci Fi setting is because there's THREE standard scifi settings. There's the Space Opera scifi setting, the Science Fantasy scifi setting, and the Cyberpunk scifi setting. Most common Scifi works can be boiled down into a variant on one of those three.

Star Trek and Babylon 5, Mass Effect and Halo, Legends of the Galactic Heroes and Mobile Suit Gundam, they're all drastically different from each other but if you boil them enough you can clearly see where they all fit under the Space Opera Umbrella. Star Wars, Flash Gordon, Outlaw Star, Tenchi Muyo, Doom and Borderlands all obviously fit under the Space Fantasy Umbrella despite having almost nothing in common. Blade Runner, Gattica, Cyborg 009, Ghost In The Shell, Bioshock and Portal all clearly go under the Cyberpunk Umbrella. You can put almost any scifi under one of those three.

The issue is that Fantasy has seen a weird phenomenon where almost all its potential Generic Setting Umbrellas have gestalted into one that is strongly identified with Tolkien/D&D, but I think it would be more accurate to think of it as Old World/Euro-focused in nature because it's very much fixated on imagery we associate with western Europe, like castles, knights and old growth woodlands.

As someone else mentioned, Conan could be the codifier for another Setting Umbrella, but there aren't a ton of settings that based themselves in that lineage. Gothic Fantasy is another one, but most people don't think of that as "Fantasy," so much as "Horror," and don't allow for a lot of mental crossover between those. Urban Fantasy isn't seen as generic because the generic part of it is "Its our modern world BUT..."

I should clarify that there's isn't so much a generic Science Fantasy setting so much as there are keystones of Science Fantasy that makes it immediately recognizable as that no matter what the setting actually looks like. Its a little different from the Generic Cyberpunk and Generic Space Opera settings which are much more like the OP's conceptualized Generic Fantasy Setting, but I would still say it qualifies.

The fuck you smoking nigga. Every fantasy is a Tolkien ripoff(done better, you can't possibly be worse than Tolkien)

Sci-fi has huge ranges. Plus fantasy is a lot easier to get into than Sci-fi, so more people talk about it.

A lamia IS a snake monster. Debate me.

>I can definitely say the majority of fantasy has magic
Sure.

>elves,
Certainly not. These days they're relatively rare in anything but D&D-derived RPGs.

>or dragons of some kind or another.
They're common, but they're hardly in the majority of fantasy stories.

It's because D&D is the default RPG and hugely influential in a way that none of its successors have been.

The standard fantasy setting is only a thing in gaming. To the average normie "fantasy" is as much Harry Potter and Game of Thrones as it is Lord of the Rings.

>elves,Certainly not. These days they're relatively rare in anything but D&D-derived RPGs.
>or dragons of some kind or another. They're common, but they're hardly in the majority of fantasy stories.
Fine, the majority of fantasy has beast people that interbreed with each other. Happy?

How do we kill the normie?

Do you think that Normies see Game of Thrones as distinct from Lord of the Rings rather than just "Lord of the Rings but Grittier/Sexier/More Realistic"? I grant that Harry Potter is a bedrock influence in the mainstream, although I think it has the problem of being set in the real world to keeps it from strongly influencing the common conception of fantasy beyond a certain point.

Evidently, Warcraft is also why Warhammer Fantasy is seen as /the/ generic fantasy setting, because its arguably the codifier of contemportary fantasy while Warcraft and mobas like League and Dota which are derivatives of itself were the popularisers.

I think they see it as the same sort of stuff, and also know it doesn't have elves and magic rings as a given so it slightly expands their concept of what other-world fantasy can be.

Do Zelazny's works qualify as Science Fantasy?

I think they might fit that mold. I would certainly classify the Marvel Thor comics/films as Science Fantasy, and they share some DNA with the Chronicles of Amber. Its also arguable that his works lie closer to Urban Fantasy, alongside things like Dresden Files, Highlander, Percy Jackson and World of Darkness, rather than Science Fantasy. Its definitely a line-blurring case.

>Lord of the Rings seen through a highly reductionist lens through which you miss the overarching themes of the novels as well as the fact that they drew inspiration from pre-existing mythologies.

Kinda described the entire fantasy genre right there

Because fantasy has a common substrate in the form of countless folklores and mythologies that, even if in different hemispheres, draw from common motifs and archetypes, as Jung shows so well? For example, "heroes" and "martyrs" being found in any random mythology?

Plus, the endless oral variations coagulated as the written word and the Internet advanced, to the point that fairy tales, of all things, have "canonical tales"?

Isn't that what they were in Greek mythology, where they came from? similar to gorgons in the snake part, but their origins were, I think, some fucking bitch queen?

Here's an intelligent answer.

I just took a course on tairy tales and all the students kept refering to the 'original tales' and the prof kept explaining that no version of any fairy tale can be said to be original. She had to repeat that until the end of the course because undergraduates are morons

It does sound very Mieville-ish.

And similarity shit.

Damn, we should make that setting.

Because fantasy, despite its name, draws more heavily from history and existing mythologies which are a known and quantifiable resource. Science fiction on the other hand draws from the author's imaginings and dreams about future, which is something unknown.

>Every fantasy is a Tolkien ripoff
They really aren't, though. Just because there are things called dwarves, elves, orcs and dragons in them doesn't mean they have much in common with Tolkien - as many Veeky Forumsers complain.

>the codifier of contemportary fantasy
That's DnD.

Or the derivative literature, in any case.

Literature, games, movies, etc. From the 70s-80s, most fantasy products are clearly DnD-inspired, and the relationship is much stronger than the one between DnD and Tolkien.

Speaking of derivatives, can somebody tell me where the original "druid sleep" idea came from? It's in Warcraft (the Emerald Dream) and I know it was in the Shannarah books, but that's all I know.

wtf is monster musume