Three bad fantasies, three lessons learned
It's an almost universal axiom among writers that you learn from what you read, and you usually learn more from bad stories than you do from good stories. (For one amusing example, see this passage from Stephen King's On Writing.)

I'm no exception to this. I've long been a voracious reader, with a particular taste for fantasy (my field of choice, if/when I finally start turning out publishable work) and I've learned a great deal from what I've read, not just in terms of style, but in terms of plot, of setting, of complications, and so forth.

Three fantasy novels, in particular, stick out in my mind (and quite vividly, considering how long ago it was that I read them). These were all reasonably well-written books; stylistically, there was little I could find to complain about, and in the case of two of the three I'd read and enjoyed other works by the same authors...which made it all the more jarring, the way each of them jerked me so completely out of the story and made me want to throw the book against the wall.

I came away from each of these books seriously pissed at the author, for a very specific reason--and vowing to never make such a blunder in my own writing.

• The Dragon Prince and Dragon Star trilogies, by Melanie Rawn
  
  These two trilogies formed a six-book sequence, and a quite enjoyable read for the most part. At some point in the second trilogy, though--I want to say it was the final book, but I can't be certain--the story was derailed by quite possibly the single most anachronistic scene ever to appear in a fantasy novel not written by Terry Goodkind: a showdown over, of all things, abortion.
  
  It wasn't simply that there was a character who sought to take a certain combination of medicines in order to induce a miscarriage, and another character who tried to stop her. No, they got into a "debate" over the moral value of the act itself, complete with one-liners ripped straight from the talking points of the modern pro-life and pro-choice movements.
  
  And note the quote-marks around "debate." This was a debate only in the sense that two people were arguing with each other. Rawn deliberately picked one of the strongest possible arguments for one side, and one of the weakest possible arguments for the other. It wasn't going to convince anyone who disagreed with her--it was just the author interrupting what was, up to that point, a very good story, for no better reason than to get up on her soap box and lecture any readers (like me) on the other side of the issue about what inhumane bastards we are.
  
  Just to make things even more ridiculous--afterward, we're still supposed to feel sympathy towards the character on the "wrong" side of the argument, and at the end of the series, the serious falling-out between the two is waved away as simply an unimportant issue that the one in the "wrong" was "mature" enough to "get over."
  
  It was an aggravating, insulting, and unnecessary addition tacked on to an otherwise very good series.
  
  Lesson learned: LEAVE POLITICS OUT OF IT.
  
  
• Sing the Four Quarters, by Tanya Huff
  
  This is a novel about a chase. Our heroine, a princess, has renounced her royal heritage, and is now fleeing for her life, with her brother, the king, in hot pursuit. The chase continues through the entire book, until at last, at the climax, the king finally catches up...
  
  And we get a happy family reunion.
  
  In a scene that's apparently supposed to be heartwarming, we learn that the king never had any intention of killing the princess. Our Brave and Intrepid Heroine (TM) was never in any danger whatsoever; there was no reason for her to run away to begin with.
  
  How funny! Come, everyone! Let's all point and laugh at the stupid girl who spent three hundred pages running from her own shadow!
  
  ...and at the stupid reader, who was with her every page of the way.
  
  Since then, I have not so much as touched anything written by Tanya Huff.
  
  Lesson learned: NEVER MAKE YOUR READER FEEL LIKE AN IDIOT FOR CARING.
  
  
• The Tyrants and Kings trilogy, by John Marco
  
  With Marco, unlike Rawn and Huff, I hadn't read any other works of his beforehand. (I couldn't have--the books of this trilogy were his first published novels.) I learned about him from an interview he gave for a book on fantasy writing; I liked a lot of what he had to say in the interview, so I decided to give his books a shot.
  
  That was a mistake. I made it through the first book, somehow--to this day, I'm not sure how--but around the halfway point of volume two, I finally threw the book away in disgust.
  
  The problem with Tyrants and Kings was that Marco was overly enamored of a certain science fiction convention he should never have ported to fantasy: the underworld slum.
  
  If you've read any amount of SF, you probably know what I'm talking about--it's that foul place lying beneath all those shiny futuristic bells and whistles, where everything is rotten. There is no light, or beauty, or hope; everyone is either a despicable predator or helpless prey, and there is never, ever any escape.
  
  Usually, in SF novels, the protagonist either stumbles into the slum by mistake and later escapes, or begins in the slum and somehow gets out, never to return.
  
  Marco? He took the slum, covered it with swords and a bare minimum of sorcery, and made it his entire fantasy world.
  
  I have never seen a fantasy setting so utterly repulsive. The world is dull and joyless. The protagonists are heroes lacking any heroic qualities. What few innocents there are--children, and so forth--exist for one purpose, and one purpose only: to be killed, in increasingly horrendous fashion...usually, but not always, by the villains.
  
  Every great fantasy appeals to the reader. That's the whole idea behind self-insertions--in the environment and/or characters, the author has created a world that is so inviting in some aspect that the fan would very much like to visit, if not live there.
  
  Marco has done the exact opposite. He has created a world without any redeeming features whatsoever.
  
  I wouldn't want to live there, I wouldn't want to visit, and given the opportunity, I would in fact cheerfully nuke the joint.
  
  Lesson learned: UGLINESS IN MODERATION...EXTREME MODERATION.

Today's story: Blood & Spirit (Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha)