Trumpy, you can do magic things!

So all this talk of magic and whatnot got me to thinkin' about fantasy in general, and I realized I am of two minds about it.

On the one hand, I like fantasy; I dig the whole magic and dragons and elves aspect, the idea of setting stories in other worlds (or rather, whole cosmoses {cosmoi?}). My folks read me The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings before I could read; I read them myself before third grade. Fantasy is in my blood, man; it marches through my veins...like giant radioactive rubber pants! The pants command me! Do not ignore my veins!

Ahem. But on the other hand, I can't think of much fantasy that I like. It's doubly infuriating, because not only is it not done well, it's got so much potential—potential that's always wasted, thrown away so people like Ursula K. LeGuin or Terry Goodkind can preach to us about feminism/"Taoism" or S&M/Objectivism. The earlier Fritz Leiber is pretty good (basically books two and three of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, and parts of four), and Conan ain't bad, if you can get past the 30s-race-theory aspect (the movie's better). And then there's Tolkien, and various anime like Slayers, Zero's Familiar, and Lewie the Mage-Warrior (not "Rune Soldier"; look at the Japanese title). Other than that, it's a buffet of losers—especially Goodkind (see my remarks about Ayn Rand, and add in that his appearances should probably involve Megan's Law) and LeGuin (aside from her brand of feminism being just as asshat as the Marxism it's an unintelligent knockoff of, no Taoist thinks seeking immortality, as such, is a bad thing...since it's kinda the point).

I don't really know if there's any fundamental rules, but here's a few things I for one could stand to see done different.

1. Learn about the sodding Middle Ages, if you're gonna use a generic "medieval" setting. This involves three main sub-points, actually:
   1. Medieval property laws were complicated. There were guilds for crafts, peasant proprietorship and multiple forms of serfdom in agriculture, and nobles holding land in feudal gift with various kinds of tenants working it, and using it to pay their armies. There were also merchant guilds, which were a cross between insurance companies and "better business"/chamber-of-commerce type institutions, with licensing from guild-members akin to franchising. Women could have full membership in guilds, and unlike men could vote by proxy, which brings me to my next point.
   2. Women's status was a hell of a lot higher than they taught you in school—much higher than in Rome or Greece, and also higher than in the Renaissance or so-called "Enlightenment". Indeed, it wasn't till the end of the 19th Century that they even started making back what they'd lost. Just for example, the very concept of consensual sex is medieval, originating in the Church working out how sacramental marriage works.
   3. The main—almost the only—inferiority of the Middle Ages to any other era, was feudalism. Now what people don't understand about feudalism is, it wasn't hierarchical. On his own land, a Baron was the equal of a Duke, and often of a King. The only distinction was the size of land, and therefore of army, a lord had. This got really troublesome, since they had to negotiate before every battle, since nobody took orders from anyone else and had to be persuaded (your feudal obligation was to show up when your liege asked, and that was about it). Imagine an army where 2nd Lieutenants have to be bribed by Generals before they carry out any military tasks, and perhaps you'll see the difficulty.
2. Don't just rewrite Tolkien, or, more to the point, Gygax/Weiss-Hickman/Greenwood. Go and make a modified version of the elves from folklore, rather than the Quendi (or whatever Greyhawk's elves call themselves); go look up real legends rather than knocking off the Silmarillion (or Dragonlance). How about you learn about onmyôdô or obeah, instead of using Vancian Magic or that tired quasi-hermetic elementalism?
   Late addendum (09/9/27): Not that I don't like elementalism (I just recommended onmyôdô, didn't I?); it's just, it's always the same Aristotelian four, fire/water and earth/air, with the pairs in opposition—Pythagoras/India's Ether if you're lucky, and then as an afterthought. Not even Avatar escapes this, and it's set in a Chinese world! There's other ways to do elements.
3. A world where all the "good" races are actually just oppressing the "evil" ones? Not sodding original. Cliche, in fact, beyond the level of all other cliches because it's also trying to be edgy. Nothing is lamer than this Marxist class-war paradigm, kiddies, so just stop doing it; goblins and trolls are evil, in legends, how about you cope like a grownup? In Hindu myth the trolls (rakshasa) are like the Mazoku from Slayers: they actively seek, as an ideology, to destroy the world. They share an origin with the Jotuns from Norse myth, by the bye—is Surtr just misunderstood and oppressed?
4. Gender-restricted magic is fine—Korean shamans and Navajo medicine-men are both gender-restricted—but try and avoid the feminist/misogynist trappings that so often go with them. In fact, just steer clear of writing about gender-matters altogether; and actually just deny all your impulses to write about social issues "relevant" to now. You're not in eighth grade, and you're probably not well-versed in all the anthropological facets of, say, slavery, or polygamy. Without understanding the subtleties, and a hell of a lot of talent, it'll just sound like an after-school special. What if you try and be subversive, and point out that lots of societies' slaves weren't Uncle-Tom's-Cabin miserable? More power to you, but tread carefully, or you'll come off sounding like a heartless reactionary—like Terry "butcher the pacifists" Goodkind. Also, his gender-stuff leaves the vague impression he's very active in communities that have to specifically emphasize that what they're doing is consensual.