A vendetta against fantasy genre expectations Part 2
Many fantasy genre expectations have shaped modern-day thought in the real world, and not in a good way. Time for another rant.
If Part I exposed how fantasy glorifies war and concentrates power, Part II goes deeper. The problem isn’t just who holds power, but how easily everyone else becomes expendable under it.
Let’s explore.
The disposable commoner
Fantasy is full of people in massive worlds, and most of them don’t matter.
They exist as cannon fodder, background casualties, and emotional stakes for the main cast. Villages burn, cities collapse, armies clash, and the story moves on.
You might get a quick reaction shot, a moment of grief, and maybe even a speech about sacrifice. But then it’s back to the “real” story with the heroes, the rulers, and the chosen few.
Everyone else is replaceable. That’s the quiet assumption baked into a lot of fantasy: that some lives carry narrative weight, and others exist to be spent.
Once you accept that, everything else becomes easier to justify, because now you’re not dealing with individuals, but numbers with outcomes and acceptable losses.
But if a system requires innocent people to be sacrificed in order to function, it’s not heroic. It’s tyrannical, and it’s one thing I avoided in my own work. While it includes many of the above elements, I frame it closer to tragedy than heroism. The aftermath of BattleFront’s climax serving as the greatest example when Mina Hirai blames herself for her world’s suffering.
The “greater good” justification
This is where it all gets rationalized. Quotes like, “It had to be done,” “It saved more lives in the long run,” and “The kingdom comes first,” are just a few “justifications.”
You’ve seen it, and you’ve probably accepted it at some point without thinking twice. Fantasy presents it as maturity, realism, and what separates leaders from everyone else.
But look at what’s actually happening: Harm is justified because it’s framed as “necessary.” And once usefulness becomes the standard, there is no limit.
You can justify war, oppression, and execution. All you need is a big enough outcome, and the story rarely pushes back. It may treat these decisions as tragic—but still correct.
That’s not moral complexity, and it echoes so many “necessities” we’ve seen in today’s world. My greatest example of railing against this comes in my free short novel, Deceived Mage, when the antagonist believes unleashing a false flag is “for the greater good” of his so-called righteous political party.
Static hierarchies and the illusion of order
Most fantasy worlds assume hierarchy. Kings rule, nobles govern, and peasants endure. That’s just how things are. When corruption exists, the solution is almost always the same: Replace the people at the top.
Fix the king, reform the council, install a better ruler, and things supposedly “get better.” Maybe the new system decides to “redistribute wealth,” which is often looked at as a “noble” thing, even if I have numerous issues with it.
Still, the structure itself stays untouched. It’s treated as natural, stable, and necessary. That’s where it gets dangerous, because when a system goes unquestioned long enough, it stops being seen at all.
It becomes invisible, and invisible systems, even with the good guys in charge, are the hardest to challenge. People stop recognizing them as systems in the first place, and they just call it “order.”
That’s easy to do when central planners fork out wealth to people.
The suspicion of trade and voluntary exchange
There’s a strange pattern in how fantasy treats commerce, and it’s something I’m openly critical of in The Witch of Thornvale.
Merchants are often portrayed as greedy, untrustworthy, morally inferior, and almost always loyal to the “evil regime.”
Profit is suspect, trade is secondary, and money is something to be looked on as suspicious. So you end up with a world where voluntary exchange in our own world is nearly always framed as selfish, while “benevolent” coercion is framed as order when someone “rises up” and seeks reform they want everyone to live under.
That inversion doesn’t get talked about much, but it’s everywhere. In reality, trade is cooperation, with multiple parties agreeing to exchange value.
Central planning is coercion, even when sold as benevolent, with one side imposing its will on another. And yet fantasy consistently treats the cooperative side as morally questionable, while normalizing the coercive one.
Violence as the default language
At the end of the day, most fantasy stories resolve conflict the same way: Force, duels, battles, assassinations, and final showdowns make up the traditional formula.
Even when diplomacy shows up, it’s usually temporary. A pause before the inevitable fight. Why? Because violence is clean from a storytelling perspective, even if it’s the messiest aspect of human existence.
It’s decisive, visual, and gives you a clear winner, but it also narrows the imagination. When force solves every single problem, it reinforces the idea that it’s the most reliable path to resolution.
It’s more prevalent than negotiation, trade-offs. peaceful cooperation, or shifting incentives. It’s power applied directly, and that idea doesn’t stay in fiction.
This was tricky when I started writing my own fantasy novels: How do I add in this formulaic element without my characters looking like the aggressor or treating violence as noble? In many aspects, my main cast sought to disable rather than to kill. And if they did kill? They showed intense remorse, and never framed it in a glorified light.
So what’s actually being imagined?
Fantasy prides itself on limitless creativity, but when it comes to power, it keeps defaulting to the same answers:
- Authority
- Hierarchy
- Control
- Violence
- Reform under “benevolent” coercion
Not because those are the only possibilities, but because they’re familiar, easy, and have been repeated so many times that they feel natural.
But they’re not, and they rail against Natural Law. They’re choices, and once you start seeing them as choices, you start realizing that we can challenge these choices shaped by common age-old tropes.
They can be rewritten and replaced, and that’s exactly what I have done in my Renegades Epic shared universe.
