Fantasy is getting embalmed while it’s still breathing.
A big slice of mainstream fantasy is being reshaped into blurby, market-optimized adventure-magic-heroism products, often dragon-adjacent, where the moral framing defaults to a Christian-coded binary of Truth and Light versus Evil and Darkness, and the plot runs like a conveyor belt.
Escort missions. Chosen ones. Relics that must be carried. Relentless pursuers. Trust-no-one beats. Peril-tour geography. “Edge of your seat” packaging.
The result is a weird kind of creative death that doesn’t look like death at all. It looks like vitality. It looks like volume. It looks like covers that glow. It looks like dopamine pacing. It looks like audible-ready chapter endings. It looks like a thousand books sprinting in formation, each one convinced it’s a lone wolf.
And if you’ve read enough synopses lately, you can feel it in your teeth: the template has gotten so efficient it no longer needs the book. The book becomes the receipt.
Take a synopsis like Kingsguard. It’s a familiar skeleton wearing fashionable armor. “Escort the last ancient to the sky.” Great. Instant stakes. Immediate mythic vibe. A faceless evil pursuer that never tires, never doubts, never has a mother, never has a joke. The blurb tells you to grip the seat, not to grip an idea. You can practically hear the trailer voice.
Then take copy like Dragon Riders of Old as a different symptom in the same ecosystem. Here the packaging leans into explicit faith language: Truth and Light. Old sins. Reconciliation-through-forgiveness. Dragons framed as moral restoration, the world healed when hearts return to the right axis.
It’s bad writing combined with templated storylines and binary morals. A lot of fantasy now reads like it was designed to be recommended, not discovered. The new wave of genre authors also promote each other works with review-swaps and engage in paid reviews to bolster their fake authenticity.
Now take the old works. Classic and craft-heavy fantasy, the kind that built the genre’s real muscle. They’re not optimized for immediate legibility. They’re optimized for aftertaste.
Ursula K. Le Guin wrote cultures. Her anthropological imagination doesn’t give you an “ancient must be escorted to the sky.” It asks: what does a society believe about names, power, gender, debt, silence, age. What does magic cost, socially. What happens when you win. What happens when you refuse to win. Her moral complexity isn’t “gray for flavor,” it’s moral ecology.
There are consequences that don’t line up neatly with intention. There are worlds where your heroism is somebody else’s invasion. Her wonder is often quiet.
Gene Wolfe hands you an unreliable narrator and dares you to decide what reality even is. His linguistic density is a moral instrument. If language is slippery, then truth is not a glowing sword you can pick up. It’s a thing you chase and never fully catch.
That is re-read territory. That is “wait, did I misunderstand the last 200 pages” territory. It’s a flavor that refuses to be reduced.
Tad Williams gives you deep time and melancholy scale. He gives you the ache of history, the way the past warps the present like a slow gravitational lens. His worlds are lived in. They have weather. They have boredom. They have songs you don’t understand yet. The mood is not constant sprint. It’s pilgrimage. There’s room for grief to be texture rather than plot fuel.
Even Eddings and Feist, often treated as simple comfort reads, function as bridge figures with older adventure DNA that still had space to breathe. Their stories know the pleasure of fellowship and forward motion, yes, but they weren’t written under the same attention economy. They can afford to be a little weird without immediately justifying it as “a twist.” This is the craft-level difference the template erases, and it’s not abstract. It’s mechanical.
Here is the tell I keep coming back to: when a world wants to be wondrous, does it allow the wonder to remain alien? Or does it domesticate it into a pet? Dragons are the perfect example. Dragons used to be dread, sublimity, the terror of intelligence that doesn’t care about your moral lessons. Now dragons are increasingly brand assets: majestic, redeeming, destined, morally aligned. They don’t burn you into ash so much as they validate your role in the story.
I mentioned Christianity. But it’s not true religion. It’s “Flat Christianity”. Fake, even. Real Christian imagination is not just “be good, defeat evil.” It’s scandal. It’s paradox. It’s the grotesque idea that power looks like surrender, that victory looks like execution, that the righteous are not reliably the heroes, that the saved are not reliably the likable. It’s a tradition obsessed with hypocrisy, with self-deception, with the terrifying possibility that you can be certain and wrong. Flat Christianity takes the brand value and drops the burden. It wants the emotional uplift without the moral terror.
You can spot flat Christianity by how it treats evil. In serious Christian-inflected fantasy, evil is not only an external monster. It’s within you. It’s seductive. It piggybacks on good desires.
Les Misérables is what Christian moral imagination looks like when it’s alive. This is why “flat Christianity” in fantasy feels like a parody next to Hugo.
Flat Christianity externalizes evil into a faceless pursuer, a Dark Lord, a shadow faction. Moral effort becomes cardio. Run, fight, carry relic, repeat. No real examination of the self. No abyss where you realize you might be the abyss.
The ugliest part of the Flat & Fake Christian authors is that “Truth and Light” copy functions like a trust badge. It tells a certain readership: you will not be morally challenged in a way that threatens your self-image. The book will not accuse you. It will confirm you. It’s an affront to both the religion and fantasy, and to all the masters who came before.
That’s the rot.
Fantasy reduced to a 2D cardboard template. Domestication of myths. Flattening of morals. The Death of Fantasy.
It's why grimdark is so important. It's doing something different.
Good points. I think Grimdark makes a similar error but in the other direction. It might reject the externalized binary of Good and Evil, but it simultaneously rejects that there is higher meaning to be grasped. As a result, I find that the "fantastical" elements of Grimdark settings are tend to flatten into mere set-dressing. There's not enough meaning to be grasped through them, since the whole point is that there's no meaning.