Because I've been looking at lots of maps, YouTube recommended this video to me recently and I watched it. I'm familiar with this guy, and I've watched some of his stuff before. I got over him. He's reasonably charismatic, but I disagree with a lot of what he says. About fantasy, in particular, but not just about fantasy. And he even makes some pretty bone-headed comments in this video itself (yeah, mountains along coasts aren't common at all. South America, North America, Italy, Spain, Scotland, South Africa, Australia, Scandinavia, Japan, New Zealand... and more: "what are we; a joke to you?"
But whatever. He also highlights a huge part of where my disconnect is with him. And maybe my disconnect is with the "larger" fantasy fan audience. Or maybe it isn't. I don't know for sure how the numbers play out in the broader population of fantasy fans. First off, he complains about west coast sporting maps. Apparently it doesn't occur to him that the vast majority of fantasy genre fan readers are of European heritage, and a map that's oriented and vaguely reminiscent of Europe is much more natural to them? And he praises maps that are innovative and "tell a story"; in particular, a Brandon Sanderson map in a series that has a storm theme has a main continent that is shaped like a storm. Kinda. Or maybe a spiral galaxy. To me it looked more like a slightly flattened and rotated image of the Pinwheel Galaxy, M101 NGC 5457 than a storm, but I admit that the imagery is similar. Other than the novelty value of "oh, hey, that continent and its archipelagos looks like a hurricane!" I'm not quite sure how that makes any real difference to the story.
He also goes on and on about the map of Camorr from The Lies of Locke Lamora. It's just a fantasy city with canals. He calls this really original and unique ("Venice: what am I; a joke to you?") That map does absolutely nothing. It's a round blob, about as useful as the map of Southtown from the first Fatal Fury game, and actually... kinda drawn in a similar style. It's convenient that it shows the layout of the neighborhoods, in case you need to know which neighborhoods you pass on your ride in your Venician gondola on your way from the Temple District to the Dregs. It's a utilitarian map, kinda... and that's it. It isn't evocative. It doesn't tell any story. It doesn't do anything except show you where stuff is in relation to other stuff. If by "stuff" you mean specific neighborhoods, because that's all that it does. And I'm not trying to knock on the map for being that. That's what a map, ultimately, has to do. That's its main purpose.
Now, I'm not trying to say that there's anything wrong with the Stormlight Archive's continental setting kinda looking like a hurricane, but I don't think that there's anything particularly compelling about it either. As a person who's admittedly never read the books, I don't think that anything about the map is particularly compelling. What is a Sesemalex Dar supposed to be? Or a Ru Parat? Bizarre names that conjure nothing in particular isn't evocative, unless you're already familiar with them from the story. To be fair, there are some more evocative names out there too, that when I see them, even as a non-reader of this particular series, I think—hey, that sounds kind of interesting. Horneater Mountains? Dawn's Shadow? Unclaimed Hills? The Shallow Crypts? Maybe they're not the most innovative. But they do the job better than the "innovative" foreign sounding names that don't sound like anything and therefore don't evoke anything.
Now, I'm not saying that foreign names don't necessarily ever evoke anything. If you have names that sound kinda Japanese or Norse, or Roman or Greek or Hebrew or something; those are names that most certainly do evoke something. Names in English, especially using archaic words or stems when possible, evoke something. Those are maps that tell a story; not a map that just happens to have a weird shape that is a metaphor for the story itself, or whatever.
I've long said that innovation is over-rated; it's always trumped by execution. This is especially true in fantasy. There's a subset of fantasy fans who are really science fiction readers, but aren't comfortable with the smug, nerdy engineer aspect of science fiction. They tend to be the ones who are impressed by a story or setting that does something unusual for its own sake, and they tend to see such novelty dog and pony tricks as a hallmark of some kind of brilliance rather than simply a tawdry carnival trick. But by and large, fantasy fans like fantasy because it echoes with the past. It is a nostalgic genre, which needs to resonate with our cultural heritage, our mythology, our culture and our identity to really work. (As an aside, China Mieville once complained very vocally about that in particular, especially with regards to Tolkien and Tolkien style fantasy. Then again, that was going on twenty years ago now. In the meantime, who's name have you heard more since then, Mieville or Tolkien? Who's going to be read twenty years from now just as much as he is now, and who's going to be forgotten as a fad?)
Which is why most fantasy settings have a vaguely European Medieval cast to them, not only in the themes, the tone, the elements that you're likely to see, but even, yes, in the geography itself. Because fantasy is a genre that is primarily written by and for white men. Nobody else in the world really gets into fantasy in numbers like the people of Western Civilization (and especially men; in my experience there are significantly fewer women who read fantasy, and when they do, they tend to prefer what come across as either grrl-power screeds or romance novels in fantasy trappings rather than actual fantasy anyway.) Latin America, Africa, Asia, etc.; none of them have a big reader base for anything that really resembles the fantasy genre, although they do have story traditions with elements that people (mostly stupid, shallow people) have pointed to as superficial similarities to fantasy, such as mythology, superstition and folklore.
I do tend to also look askance at people who reject their own heritage, their own culture, and their own traditions and go haring off after some alien novelty all the time, or they can't be entertained. I admit I don't understand it at all. The kind of fantasy that Daniel Greene is advocating for in this map video (and other videos for that matter) isn't fantasy at all to me, half of the time. But I can see why people who only look at superficial things don't see the difference. Just like people often say that Michael Moorcock's Elric books and L. Sprague de Camp's Harold Shea or Pusadian stories were sword & sorcery, when in fact they rejected all of the themes of sword & sorcery and explicitly reversed them and did the opposite of what sword & sorcery would have done. But lots of people just see the superficial similarities and can't see deeper than that. The same thing happened with Westerns, where Revisionist anti-Westerns are seen by many people as great example of Westerns. But the real Western fans weren't fooled. Clint Eastwood once wrote John Wayne shortly after releasing High Plains Drifter suggesting that they work together; Wayne sent him a very hostile, angry response that he wanted nothing to do with his subversion and inversion of the Western into exactly the opposite of what a Western is, yet still wearing the skinsuit of the Western so that stupid people would see that wolf in sheep's clothing and be fooled.
Now, I realize that some people feel all sad and upset that people might notice that fantasy is a white guy pastime. To them, I say: you're a racist. Diversity means actual difference, and not just some superficial thing like skin color or hair texture or regional food. Expecting Africans or Latin Americans or Asians to think, act, and have the same behavior as white people is racist. It presumes that their actual thoughts, actions and behavior have no value, and that they're just interchangeable widgets with white people, that you can trot around and wear like a medallion for your virtue signaling Olympics. Which is really what the Diversity Is Our Strength™ hoax and con job is all about. Ironically, the people who parrot this delusional cult thinking are strongly correllated with hating, at least publicly, everything about being white. White heritage, white culture, white traditions, white literature; it's all there to be non-stop excoriated. If you're one of the people who is sad that I notice that fantasy as a genre is, generally speaking, a white male genre both on the creative side and the consumer side, and that to the extent that is changing, fantasy is also becoming not fantasy; it's just a trophy that POX and feminists wear to try and humiliate white men, as they lecture them via what used to be their genre.The Third Law says that SJWs Always Project. You are a person filled with hate. You hate "people of color" because you hate everything about them unless they act exactly like white liberals. And you hate white culture, because shrieking like a harpy at white people is your identity. You are nothing but hate and bitterness turned into a wimpy, bitter, beta human-like form. I would tell you to go see a therapist and try turning into a person again, but in today's environment that would probably just enable you rather than fix your fundamental dysfunctionalism. Better yet might be a pastor or priest, but in today's environment... again, caveat emptor.
And another quick aside; for the binary thinker who isn't very bright; speaking about generalities and trends means that yes, of course exceptions exist. They may even be a significant plurality of sorts. But it doesn't disprove what I said either.
In my experience, much of the "modern fantasy" genre is exactly that. It's not fantasy. (Admittedly, my experience is limited. As I saw this trend growing, my interest in following "modern fantasy" withered and dried up right quick, and I usually avoid most of it now.) It's fantasy's corpse, being trotted around all weekend by Jonathan Silverman and Andrew McCarthy, desperately trying to convince everyone that this grotesque fantasy Bernie is still alive by giving the illusion of activity and stuff. But what made fantasy fantasy has been cored out and abandoned, left for dead except in the field of mostly indie writers and older material.
Now, I'm being a little dramatic. I'm sure that there are people who are writing more traditionalist fantasy stuff that's really good out there that is still in the mainstream, published by big NYC publishers (big being relative nowadays in the world of book publishing) and selling reasonably big numbers. I'm not so sure that even people like Brandon Sanderson or Brent Weeks, for instance, aren't still writing stuff that is still genuine fantasy rather than anti-fantasy, although I admit to not being very farmiliar with the work of either. But I think much of what the "modern fantasy" fad does is little more than what Revisionist westerns did to the Western; turn it inside out to mock it and ultimately destroy it. And then pat themselves on the back for how clever and more sophisticated than flyover people they are as they trot around the corpse of the genre that they destroyed like a trophy. Isn't that pretty much what Joe Abercrombie or George "Rape Rape" Martin are doing? But you can probably see why I've turned my back on almost anything coming out of a NYC publishing house and want nothing to do with it unless it was published at a minimum thirty years or so ago; fifty years or more is even better. For sword & sorcery explicitly, the best stuff was eighty to ninety years ago!
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