The fantasy cliche

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• 31. I obtained an exercise bike three weeks or so ago and have been using it every day since then. MY CALVES COULD CRUSH YOUR FACE.

Fantasy novels, movies and stories in general usually do not vary enormously from the stock standard story 'roller coaster' conception that's common all throughout storytelling.

1. Bad sh*t goes down.
2. Heroes come up with way to fix stuff
3. Heroes encounter difficulties in fixing stuff
4. Heroes eventually win.

That summarises most common movies. Sometimes when the heroes are meant to be clueless the story will skip stage 2, and replace stage 3 with "Heroes bumble into the bad guys plan". For Greek Myths add a stage 5: "Hero dies horribly alone".

This is true in nearly all stories, so why does Fantasy get such a bad wrap for it all? The reason fantasy stories seem so much more simplistic then the standard story is because the ingredients of each stage is far simpler.

Since in fantasy stories the authors have such a wider range of storytelling abilities available to them (Wizards, Dragons, Spells, the ability to categorically state "This race of people are EVIL") then modern or even most sci-fi stories, so often the fantasy storyteller takes an easy road out.

It does somewhat declaw the evil villain if you know he can be killed just by putting the right magical artefact in the right shelf in the magical castle. With sci-fi and modern stories there's a genuine sense of threat in that you KNOW you have to find some way to beat the guy, you can't just side-step it by putting magical challice A into slot B.

No other Genre is so effectively able to say "Do this one task, and everything will be hunky dory". Yes, it does grant the task a great deal of weight, but at the same time you know once they do it, the war is over and won. Bugger that with the ring of power.

I blame Tolkein. Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that the guy basically CREATED the fantasy genre as we know it, because of him I've spent many a fun evening smacking around Orcs (it's ok, they're all EVIL. Every last one of them). But at the same time everyone is just following in the footsteps. ("Ok Frodo, I need you to put magical item A into location B" "What was that, Gandalf?" "I mean, I need you to destroy the ring of power by throwing it into Mount Doom.").

Fantasy authors, writers and storytellers. Please, come up with something different. Feel free to use the "magical item A into location B" plot arc, but make it a smaller part, not the "Well, we've done that, let's all go home" bit.

Maybe destroying the magical item only weakens the enemy, and doesn't crush them uttery?

C'mon, you can do it. I have faith in you.