What do you think the next big fad will be?

[mythosandmagic]

How about good story telling? Let's make that the next fad, good story telling regardless of tropes.

Stories that have meaning and tell a meaningful story without sex, gore, and/or violence would be nice.
I know I'm dreaming, but why not dream big?

 

[Th3Breadnought]

I don't know what I think the next big thing will be, but I wish it was quality story telling, and taking time to invest in characters and their dynamics. So that I'm invested and actually care for the later payoffs. Rather than feeling like every word is run through an engine to calculate its immediate dopamine weight in gold and forward momentum.

Sometimes I want a bag of chips, it hits the spot when I'm hungry. But sometimes I want a full course meal that actually sustains me even if it means I need to eat my vegetables.

But I suspect this is not the trajectory.

 

[mythosandmagic]

I'm actually going to venture a serious guess here...

A couple weeks ago, Brandon Sanderson announced that Apple TV had bought the rights to make a trilogy of Mistborn movies and a Stormlight Archive tv series. Best of all, Sanderson is being given complete creative control over them, so just from that they're almost guaranteed to great. Between The Witcher, Rings of Power, Wheel of Time, and the last few seasons of Game of Thrones, we've been hurting for a good new fantasy series for a long time now. I theorize that Sanderson's movies and show are going to usher in a new wave of fantasy appreciation. About time too, since all we seem to have been getting lately is superhero and scifi junk. But with that new surge of popularity, people are going to decide to try their hand at making their own epic high fantasy stories. Most of them are going to go straight to Kindle, but enough are going to make their way to sites like this and Royal Road that people are going to notice them. That will cause even more aspiring authors to try out the genre, and slowly but surely it will push litrpgs out of the spotlight.

If I were to take it a step further, I'd say that for a while, generic high fantasy is going to be the big thing, but it won't take long to settle into a niche, just like what happened with litrpg. People aren't going to want to sift through the mountains of trash that sites like this always accumulate when they could just go to Barnes and Noble and pick up something that was edited and published by professionals. The things that blow up online are usually things that you can't get anywhere else. I don't know what that niche is going to be, though. Hard magic systems sound like a pretty safe guess since this wave is going to originate from Brandon Sanderson, but it'll probably find an even nicher niche than that before long. Maybe epic high fantasy adventures with hard magic systems based around people projecting their subconscious minds into the real world through lucid dreaming?

Or maybe it could be pirates.

I've been writing something similar for over ten years, and it's getting close to being finished.

 

[AliceMoonvale]

micro novels for the ever worsening literacy / attention spans of youth.

200 words or less chapters.

 

[FRWriter]

I fear, and I sincerely hope that the next fad won't be a new type of graphic novel... where AI creates an image after every page. I'm already seeing quite a few stories like that, and I'm quickly getting annoyed.

 

[mythosandmagic]

micro novels for the ever worsening literacy / attention spans of youth.

200 words or less chapters.

Unfortunately, you're probably right.

 

[Anonjohn20]

I honestly think it will become a different version of LitRPGs.



Oh, here is an idea. Maybe instead of a stats screen, two or more deities or even a whole pantheon descend upon a planet and start recruiting for their sect of whatever pantheon they are from. They will give their followers missions and reward them for the completion of those missions with different skills. No stats involved, just a transactional form of worship that increases both the god's powers and the people who worship the god, a little quid pro quo.

This is just a type of cultivation story.

I would point out One Piece. I have not seen or read it myself, but still I know it's a form of pirate fantasy, and it's popular.

One show has nothing to do with the setting; it's just a shonen where every important character has superpowers.

Also one of the greatest pirates in history was Chinese

I am aware.

while I don't know how popular she is in China, I suspect she left a mark in their popular culture.

Let me inform you (again). Chinese media has historically not cared about Eastern pirate settings; the very character you've mentioned has few portrayals in modern media, and more than half of those surged not from a love for pirates but from the feminist movement looking for female heroes (in one of the TV shows she's in, she's portrayed as a gallant antihero singlehandedly fighting the opium trade in China, a very unrealistic retelling). Pirate-themed content remains niche in Chinese media compared to wuxia, historical dramas, or modern romance. One of those 10 portrayals is a character based on her in Pirates of the Caribbean and a documentary by the British BBC. The West (that loves pirates) has arguably given her more representation than her own culture because pirates are not popular in China.

soother than those genres, I wish the fucking *paragraph* would make a comeback.

That was killed by Asian translations and mobile users using tiny screens.

 

[Juia_Darkcrest]

This is just a type of cultivation story.

Isn't cultivation that diatain stuff and needing to eat crystals to grow it, or meditate for a decade or two or thousands of years? Honestly, I have almost zero understanding of cultivation from the handful of novels I have tried. All I got from them is that the MC meditated for 10000 years, now he is going to bitchslap everyone I meet who disrespects me; or, I beat a monster and harvested its 1-1000000 drop crystal and ate it so I gained its powers, now I will kill an even stronger demon now and do the same.

 

[Anonjohn20]

now he is going to bitchslap everyone I meet who disrespects me

You understand the genre very well.

 

[TinaMigarlo]

Like hunger games started a dystopian trend, and twilight started a vampire trend.

1984, brave new world. Countless books set in the future, all humans coming out of the ice age that was finally receding. Sunset Warrior Trilogy was an epic example of this. The Dai-San. No, dystopian as the canvas has been around and discovered and re-discovered again and again. Its a "revival" is what it really is. Vampire genre kicked off by Twilight? Hardly. Anne Rice was a revival of the vampire genre. Twilight was just another after her dust settled enough it was usable. Twilight married it to dippy girl romance, was all. Another revival and genre blend.

You have to kick through the ashes, and see what's going to seem fresh enough, and what to marry it with for your blend. My recipe is mine. A healthy base of dark noir. a scoop of hard boil, a scoop of investigation. A tablespoon of pulp action series. A tablespoon of espionage. DOn;t over blend but get the lumps out. Decide which tropes to lean into, and which to flip. My classics blended with a dash of modern sensibilities.

 

[rileykifer]

1984, brave new world. Countless books set in the future, all humans coming out of the ice age that was finally receding. Sunset Warrior Trilogy was an epic example of this. The Dai-San. No, dystopian as the canvas has been around and discovered and re-discovered again and again. Its a "revival" is what it really is. Vampire genre kicked off by Twilight? Hardly. Anne Rice was a revival of the vampire genre. Twilight was just another after her dust settled enough it was usable. Twilight married it to dippy girl romance, was all. Another revival and genre blend.

You have to kick through the ashes, and see what's going to seem fresh enough, and what to marry it with for your blend. My recipe is mine. A healthy base of dark noir. a scoop of hard boil, a scoop of investigation. A tablespoon of pulp action series. A tablespoon of espionage. DOn;t over blend but get the lumps out. Decide which tropes to lean into, and which to flip. My classics blended with a dash of modern sensibilities.

I didn't mean a first time trend. I meant it started the trend up again. There was a huge boom in dystopian trilogies coming out after Hunger Games (Divergent, Legends, Uglies) and vampires got really popular again with Twilight (though I can't think of any major examples at the moment aside from Vampire Diaries). Fads come and go all the time, and I'm sure something big will come out soon that will bring back another one.

 

[Anonjohn20]

I didn't mean a first time trend. I meant it started the trend up again. There was a huge boom in dystopian trilogies coming out after Hunger Games (Divergent, Legends, Uglies) and vampires got really popular again with Twilight (though I can't think of any major examples at the moment aside from Vampire Diaries). Fads come and go all the time, and I'm sure something big will come out soon that will bring back another one.

You don't have to explain yourself. People who understand the meaning of the word "trend" understood what you were saying, and I guess anyone who doesn't understand that word will think you claimed "that Twilight kicked off the genre for the first time ever."

 

[TinaMigarlo]

You don't have to explain yourself. People who understand the meaning of the word "trend" understood what you were saying, and I guess anyone who doesn't understand that word will think you claimed "that Twilight kicked off the genre for the first time ever."

then let me state for the record. I didn't think I was implying a formal... thing on it.
I'm just *not* that pretentious, lol (thanks anonjohn. I missed I was sounding rude. May the pygmies eat my flesh)

I just wanted to draw focus onto the fact its *all* revivals. Its all about, thing x, blended with thing Y. Look at 50 shades. With all the hype and puff gone, at the end of the day what was it really. A box standard typical romance. She just married it to *ooh* some spicy BDSM imagery. There's literally one page of the girl getting 20 whacks with a belt. That's *it*. Everything around it, standard romance. Her GENIUS, though. Was being the first one to use BDSM imagery and take it out of the dirty book store pulp genre, and make it mainstream.

So. it feels hard to sit there and think. What can I do that's *new*. You'll end up sitting there and going over all the same old ground and come up with bumpkus. Now. If you sit there and think instead...

1) what hasn't been done in the last 10 20 years. Or longer, the longer the better.
2) am I going to do just that, or what do I blend it with.
3) how much of each blend, goes in. A little romance, a lot of action. Or about fifty fifty.
4) Now you can make a little diagram, doodling. THIS much pf X. THAT much of Y. A slice of A, just a dash of B. Hey! I like that!
5) do I wanna do X like they always did it? Its been a while. Or do I update and modernize it.

see?
now you have productive and easy lines of thought.
That there's nothing new under the sun can depress you.
Or, it can uplift you. Tomorrow's "new" is some other bygone day or era's... old.

HOW you view a problem, can make all the difference.

 

[Sylver]

Monster girls!

Integrated with magic, medieval fantasy action adventure?

No bias whatsoever here

 

[Cookiez_N_Potionz]

Magic schools

 

[Sylver]

Also one of the greatest pirates in history was Chinese, a woman by the name of Zheng Yi Sao who commanded some 1500 ships and 80000 pirates at the height of her power, and while I don't know how popular she is in China, I suspect she left a mark in their popular culture.

Is she the Pirate who's husband died so she took over with help from her step-son, and later those two got busy and married?

She'd make for a great protagonist for a romance story with smut like some lore accurate Pirates of the Carribean. But with some bedroom action haha

 

[HungrySheep]

Probably urban fantasy or whatever when the Lord of the Mysteries anime + gacha drops. Combined with Solo Leveling glazers, it'll get pushed to become the next "OMG PEAK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" thing.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

I'm actually going to venture a serious guess here...

A couple weeks ago, Brandon Sanderson announced that Apple TV had bought the rights to make a trilogy of Mistborn movies and a Stormlight Archive tv series. Best of all, Sanderson is being given complete creative control over them, so just from that they're almost guaranteed to great. Between The Witcher, Rings of Power, Wheel of Time, and the last few seasons of Game of Thrones, we've been hurting for a good new fantasy series for a long time now. I theorize that Sanderson's movies and show are going to usher in a new wave of fantasy appreciation. About time too, since all we seem to have been getting lately is superhero and scifi junk. But with that new surge of popularity, people are going to decide to try their hand at making their own epic high fantasy stories. Most of them are going to go straight to Kindle, but enough are going to make their way to sites like this and Royal Road that people are going to notice them. That will cause even more aspiring authors to try out the genre, and slowly but surely it will push litrpgs out of the spotlight.

If I were to take it a step further, I'd say that for a while, generic high fantasy is going to be the big thing, but it won't take long to settle into a niche, just like what happened with litrpg. People aren't going to want to sift through the mountains of trash that sites like this always accumulate when they could just go to Barnes and Noble and pick up something that was edited and published by professionals. The things that blow up online are usually things that you can't get anywhere else. I don't know what that niche is going to be, though. Hard magic systems sound like a pretty safe guess since this wave is going to originate from Brandon Sanderson, but it'll probably find an even nicher niche than that before long. Maybe epic high fantasy adventures with hard magic systems based around people projecting their subconscious minds into the real world through lucid dreaming?

Or maybe it could be pirates.

Given that three of the last seven contests at PocketFM were to write Fantasy Novels (current one is wide open; the previous one was more specifically Romantassy, and the one before that was less open-ended than the current one, and the only one I took part in - didn't win) you MIGHT be on to something (though two of the other four contests were for werewolf stories and the winner of the Forbidden Romance series was also a werewolf story, THAT might be the Next Big Thing[TM])....

 

[TinaMigarlo]

But with some bedroom action...

... with her s-t-e-p s-o-n.
for me that just doesn't compute.
people are into incest? I mean, mainstream.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

I think happy fantasy or travelogues will take over due to the negativity of the current world. People like the opposite of their reality. If they are at peace and happy, most likely they will want darker or gritting stories, and vice versa. This isn't always the case because a lot of people like to project their issues onto fictional characters but for the most part, it is historically.

I saw a theory a few years ago in horror fiction that the trend is towards the darker side of the current governmental trends. When politicians trend to the "Left," things like zombies (loss of identity/self), body snatching aliens (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) or "faceless" killers (either masked gangs, characters like Jason Voorhees, or just monsters you never get to see clearly until the end); when politicians trend "Right" you get more monsters like vampires (individualist parasites who may or may not be contagious and reflect "the old ways"), friendly neighbor serial killers (Ed Gein anyone?), and evil cults.
Since I first saw the article on Cracked.com I'm not sure how serious it is (sometimes serious stuff slipped through there but not often - and usually they were reprinting something from another site when it happened).

I didn't mean a first time trend. I meant it started the trend up again. There was a huge boom in dystopian trilogies coming out after Hunger Games (Divergent, Legends, Uglies) and vampires got really popular again with Twilight (though I can't think of any major examples at the moment aside from Vampire Diaries). Fads come and go all the time, and I'm sure something big will come out soon that will bring back another one.

Twilight crested a surge of supernatural romances, about 2/3 of them featuring vampires - though arguably the Anita Blake Mysteries (and erotica) may have had as much to do with that surge as Twilight did, as I believe those came out first - AND included werewolves and other monsters, much like the Southern Vampire Mysteries (aka Sookie Stackhouse stories, brought to television as True Blood).
Most of them were entirely forgettable (and thus forgotten) with a few exceptions like The Vampire Diaries. I remember going into a bookstore and picking up six different books with different wildly different titles and cover art that suggested mysteries or horror - but the back jacket blurb was about reluctant or recently turned vampires and, in five of those cases, romantic relationships as well, shortly after first hearing about Twilight (but before the wholesale clubs started stocking Stephanie Meyers's stuff).