Okay, so I know this is a thing already, but I’m starting to write a fantasy series and I’m sure I’m hitting quite a few cliches with it. For example, there’s a total of four protagonists over the series, one for each book, and for family situations I have two planned out.
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Ayla Maren – Parents together, older sister who is pretty protective. This is because her older sister - Delphi - has had twenty-two months to discover the major downside to the powers that Ayla has discovered.
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Eliane ‘Ellie’ Tana – Parents dead (well, that’s what Ellie thinks) seven years before the story’s start, lives with her aunt and uncle and her younger cousin Oscar. They get on fairly well. In reality, Ellie’s mother is the only dead parent, and her father is really alive, but he’s still not a good character.
There’s also the ‘newfound power’ thing. They learn that they have this magic status in the world of Eldina when they turn thirteen (or in Ellie’s case just beforehand), but the powers that come with it don’t ‘unlock’ until they first visit.
I’m not sure if they count as ‘chosen ones’ – I focus on four of them but there’s quite a lot of people destined to be these Guardians.
Any ideas on whether these properly count as cliches, and any other fantasy cliches I should try to avoid?
I would say that the second one is kind of cliche, because she believes to be an orphan but isn’t. But: a) if your fantasy world isn’t industrialized, orphans and half-orphans are probably way more common than in ours, and b) if her father had a good reason to fake his death that is relevant to the plot, then it’s not a big problem that it’s cliche.
I think that’s the most important thing to keep in mind here. Cliches regarding the plot aren’t really the problem. Tropes are tools. Sure, you should know them, but not so you can avoid them at all cost, but so you can twist them in the way that fits your story.
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I think what you have sounds genuinely intriguing!
You should probably avoid a wizard showing up to their house to recruit your character(s) on an adventure (like [name_m]Hagrid[/name_m], Gandalf, etc.). [name_u]Or[/name_u] all the characters meeting in a pub for a high risk/high reward job (which they probably wouldn’t anyway if they’re 13).
Since the fantasy world technically has no link to Ellie’s family (as in they don’t live there, but it has literally everything to do with what happened to her parents), the whole industrialised thing isn’t something to consider. The opening part is basically set in a made-up town that could be [name_f]England[/name_f] but with better weather, essentially.
Ellie’s father, [name_m]Christopher[/name_m], is a character I’ve not 100% worked out the entire plotline for as of now, since I’m focusing on Ayla’s part of the story as of now. But literally everyone thinks he’s dead at this point, that including the rest of Ellie’s family. Obviously that’s the point, but the faking of his death is a lot more… dramatic. What I currently have in my head, which I might change a bit when I do come to write Ellie’s part, is that when [name_m]Christopher[/name_m] realised that [name_f]Ellie[/name_f] was a [name_m]Guardian[/name_m], he wanted to let her learn about her magic status early on. Her mother disapproved of this and would have preferred to keep [name_f]Ellie[/name_f] far away from the whole magic thing, and when an argument went a lot further than normal – to the point where Ellie’s mother was threatening to leave [name_m]Christopher[/name_m] and take [name_f]Ellie[/name_f] with her, intending to try her best to get rid of Ellie’s ‘unnaturalness’ – things happened.
Obviously since this happened seven years before the story starts, I’m not going to actually write this scene.
Since it would be pretty obvious what happened to Ellie’s mother, and in a very half-hearted attempt to keep [name_f]Ellie[/name_f] clear of what had happened, [name_m]Christopher[/name_m] decided to go down the ‘genius’ route of vanishing off the face of the earth, leaving a hint that he was planning to kill himself in a different location to the house. [name_u]Or[/name_u] something equally convoluted. Like I said, not 100% planned out.
Basically the thing goes like this – neither of Ellie’s parents are great people, but obviously [name_m]Christopher[/name_m] is much worse. While his methods succeeded and he ‘saved’ Ellie’s magic (that’s what he believes he did, which is about half true), he did also end up making [name_f]Ellie[/name_f] despise him.
Then comes the part that sounds really bad in my head, but while he’s trying to hide out in Eldina one of the main villains of the series finds him. As their whole ‘thing’ is trying to collect people like [name_m]Christopher[/name_m], they do so. And that’s where I kind of got stuck deciding between two different plot lines. As I’ve said, though, this doesn’t matter because all this stuff comes out months after the part I’m currently writing.
There’s no wizards – okay, that’s a lie, there are wizards in the story. I mean that, for example in Ayla’s case, it’s [name_f]Delphi[/name_f] who gives her the barest hint of information on how to get into the world and then proceeds to accidentally abandon her sister with a stranger for an entire chapter. And yeah, there’s obviously no pubs.
I feel like that makes it sound worse.