Iiiit’s Monday, and thus time for more Fantasy with Friends! The prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, and this time we’re talking about fantasy tropes we love:

What are some of your favorite fantasy tropes that you never get tired of?

Naturally, as is tradition, as soon as I’m asked that question, I immediately forgot any trope I’d ever known about, so I went ahead and searched for “fantasy tropes” and we’re gonna pick ten or so from the appropriate Wikipedia category and go from there. It’s far from a complete list, but it at least gets me unstuck, ahaha.

So, first up, accidental travel, and I’m going to assume that refers to accidentally travelling to another world. I’ve always enjoyed stories like this, from C.S. Lewis’ Narnia through to Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar, and have recently been indulging in it more via some Japanese isekai stories like The Other World’s Books Depend on the Bean Counter and A Gentle Noble’s Vacation Recommendation. The former plays with the trope quite a bit, with a young girl being summoned to the other world and accidentally bringing along a 30-year-old salaryman. He’s a workaholic who immediately asks for a job, settles in, and ends up arguably doing more for the world than she does by making her job unnecessary for the future. Along the way he ends up in a romance with a magic-wielding knight who despairs about his workaholic tendencies, saves his life multiple times, and supports his scheming.

The latter features a guy getting transported to an alternative magical kingdom where he proceeds to consider it an extended holiday, and simply dabble in anything that interests him, making friends along the way.

I’ve also been enjoying transmigration stories in the danmei, which are similar — so far The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, The Disabled Tyrant’s Beloved Pet Fish and Mistakenly Saving The Villain, all of which I’m enjoying. Because they transmigrate into fictional stories, you’ve got Shen Qingqiu in SVSSS being too genre-savvy and not realising when the genre changes, Li Yu in TDTBPF not realising the direction his choices are taking him, and Song Qingshi in MStV just completely not understanding genre fiction at all, and thus screwing up the whole story by saving the beautiful but doomed and somewhat villainous Yue Wuhuan.

And of course, a shoutout to Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, where one obsessive reader suddenly finds the apocalyptic webnovel he’s been the only reader of for years is coming true…

Okay, that’s a lot for the first trope I looked at… so let’s nod quickly to the Chosen One, which I’ve previously written about enjoying when it’s done right, and let’s throw in the enchanted forest trope just because it’s cool (and there are so many ways for a forest to be enchanted). Fire-breathing monster definitely gets a nod too, because hello, dragons.

I think occult detective fiction gets in, too, since I love my fantasy mysteries (though fantasy mystery is a lot wider than just this meaning), and portal fantasy is already sort of covered by accidental travel and my associated musings. That brings us to sentient weapon, which is definitely a trope I enjoy: I really need to get on with reading T. Kingfisher’s Swordheart, which I’ve only read the first chapter or so of, though Travis Baldree’s Brigands & Breadknives probably hews closer to the definition here.

Shapeshifting is a pretty general trope, but it can be really fun; I’m currently partway through Finn Longman’s The Wolf and His King, for instance, which is a retelling of Marie de France’s ‘Bisclaveret’, and thus really fascinating to me.

Finally, let’s end at the thieves’ guild: I have a lot of nostalgia around this kind of prompt, thinking about various fantasy novels I read as a kid and teen… and some I’ve been fond of since. It’s a trope that makes a certain amount of sense, allowing people to band together and protect each other, and there are a lot of ways to jump from there to a fun adventure story.

Okay, so that was a bit of a whistlestop tour apart from my extended stay with accidental travel (ironically, perhaps), but I had fun!