I just finished watching the movie Warcraft for the first time. I’m an avid fan of the series–played the RTS games thoroughly as a young child and teenager, and then later World of Warcraft (as a male hunter orc named Uran, and then later again as a male shaman orc called Icarus. Uhhh, I may have a thing for orcs…) I was a little disappointed to see the bad reviews for the movie, so I ended up not watching it in the theaters.
I tempered my expectations a bit, but I thought the movie wasn’t that bad. Well, okay, it was terrible, but…as an epic fantasy writer, it was immediately clear what the problem was. It’s just that there is so much story to tell, which you don’t have much room for in a movie. The heart was clearly there…I got goosebumps watching Orgrim Doomhammer’s quick speech near the end.
I see people rant all the time about the quality of certain epic fantasy mediums, and words like derivative or not original enough or not explained enough and so on come up all the time. And I get what people are trying to say–I mean, it’s good to have these discussions, especially as it gives other epic fantasy writers ideas on how to proceed with their work. But it doesn’t change the simple fact that writing epic fantasies is hard.
I’ve seen readers complain, for example, about trilogies; they want to see more standalones. Again, a noble idea…except I think a lot of people would have a hard time writing a standalone while creating a completely new world just for that standalone. If the standalone was part of a larger universe, it could work. Or if you’re Guy Gavriel Kay and you have the magical ability to worldbuild while simultaneously making people explode into tears at the same time.
Otherwise, it’s hard. You end up sacrificing something for the sake of creating a satisfying epic fantasy experience. Look at all the things an epic fantasy writer must be able to juggle: worldbuilding, characters, current plot, past plots that make up the overall history and affect the present, cultures, prose, point of views (where do you focus the narrative?), nations, myths and legends, magic systems, secondary magic systems, fight scenes, battle scenes…oh, and you have to be able to capture the reader’s attention somehow, and tell a story while you’re at it (a point, I may add, that some epic fantasy writers completely miss).
I consume a lot of this genre, and it’s made me appreciate the writers in this genre (except maybe for a handful of hacks whose names I shall not mention). I may not be 100% satisfied with somebody’s efforts, but I can at least respect it. I saw a review for Michael J. Sullivan’s Riyria novels, for example, that bitched about his use of the word “Okay”…even though it’s exactly the colloquial use of language in the characters’ banter that makes his books so much fun to read.
Epic fantasy isn’t something you cobble up in a day or two, or a weekend, or four months. What you see is usually just a fraction of years and years’ worth of work, made by a writer who probably wasn’t even sure that anyone was going to see their efforts. So yeah, the Warcraft movie sucked ass, but I still love the concept, I still love the world, and fuck if I’m not already considering going back to World of Warcraft as I type this…
Read The Agartes Epilogues while I try to pretend this article wasn’t made just for the keyword “epic fantasy” whoops there I go again…
I am full of admiration for anyone who writes epic fantasy.