So, I was scrolling through Twitter today, when I came across this specific tweet right here that really got me thinking: What would people who actually are fantasy writers think about this whole thing that I actually have never thought of before up until this moment? Because for me personally, I don't even know how I would approach such a topic, so I figured that I would probably go through the honor of asking all of you instead for your input regarding this topic. And just note: I am NOT a fantasy writer in ANY way. I'm just some guy who would like to have some insight on a subject matter that I would have never previously considered before. Thanks.

I am trying to understand what makes a good book cover, also wanting to break some rules. tell me what are your thoughts on this book cover (title and author name omitted). Does it inspire you? Does it evoke mystery? travel? adventure? All comments welcomed.

PS: Copyrighted material. Do not use image without my permission.

I think this way of thinking is specially encouraged by book content creators, probably unintentionally. I can't tell you how many times I've heard a booktoker who's trying to recommend books says "in this book he does (insert some hot behavior) to you" or "in this story, your father sold you into an arranged marriage..." Or something along those lines. No, just no. YOU are not in the book, these things are happening to the FMC, you're not the FMC! She is a character with her own personality, interests, looks, mindset ECT, she isn't an empty shell you can project yourself into. This isn't a Y/N reader insert Wattpad story. This language these creators are using is bad, for this exact reason, because it slowly makes you forget how to separate yourself from the MC, and with the rise of brainrot and Anti-intellectualism, this is just another issue on top of the mountain of issues that we don't need.

Does anyone have any positive adjectives that I can use to subtly describe East Asian eyes? I need descriptors that don't mention or refer to continental Asia, because it is a fantasy setting. Previously, I have tried / used "upturned, sharp eyes" and readers seemed to be happy with it, but the characters also had traditional, Chinese names and were integrated heavily into their East Asian-inspired culture, so it was obvious. This character has a mother who is East Asian, and is less integrated into their culture, because the mother died when she was young. It is less apparent that she is East Asian, but I don't want to make a huge deal about it either. Just some casual, non-offensive descriptors, that I can use when FIRST describing her. Attached are some pictures on how I envision her!

Posting AI-generated content is not allowed on /r/fantasywriters. Our rules page makes it clear that we disallow content that is generated in whole or in part by AI. This includes text that was translated by an LLM.

This is a policy that we apply uniformly:

• You may not post AI-generated writing samples for critique (obviously)

• You may not post a thread where the body of your reddit post is written by AI.

• You may not post a comment that is written by AI.

• You may not post AI-generated images.

• You may not post text that you asked AI to "rewrite" or "fix" or "improve" for you.

• You may not post text generated by an LLM, even if the 'only' thing you asked AI to do was translate your text.

In short, do not copy AI-generated text and paste it into your Reddit post. Not as a comment, not as a discussion question. Previously, the point about translated text was ambiguous and enforced inconsistently, so we're making it clear here: an AI-generated translation of your writing created using an LLM like GPT or Google Gemini counts as AI-generated text.

The only exception to this "do not post any LLM-generated content, at all, ever" policy is if you are obviously quoting someone else; we won't ban you if the quote turns out to be AI-generated. (For example, if OP posts an AI-generated story, people who post critiques quoting parts of that AI-generated post won't be banned for their post including the AI-generated text as a quote.)

Please be aware that Google Translate now incorporates Google Gemini, which is an LLM, much like the GPT that is used by OpenAI's ChatGPT. This is considered AI-generated content, and a violation of our "no AI content" policy.

The fact that Google Translate now uses the Google Gemini LLM is why Google Translate now sometimes injects additional information that wasn't part of the text you asked it to translate and why some people are able to query Google Translate and get the same sort of responses you'd get from a conversational chatbot. At this point, using Google Translate is akin to going to an AI chatbot and asking it to translate text for you.

Please note that /r/fantasywriters' prohibition on posting LLM-generated text is not a blanket ban on all machine translation tools.

We still permit the use of translation tools that don't use LLMs, including:

• Apertium

• Libre Translate

• Moses

• Marian

If you're not sure whether a specific machine translation tool would violate our "no LLM-generated text" policy, please feel free to message the moderation team directly to ask for clarity.

FAQ

These are literally "frequently asked questions," very lightly paraphrased from actual queries in our inbox that we've temporarily or permanently banned for AI use.

"I am not confident in my English so I used AI for help with phrasing or translation."

All humans who follow the rules are welcome on /r/fantasywriters regardless of their level of English proficiency. Even if you think your English is "bad," we would still rather see your best attempt in English, rather than read GPT's best guess at what your Russian would look like if it were rendered in English.

"Why bother to remove my post for being AI-generated? The post I made was just posting a question / commenting on someone else's work, not posting part of my novel or asking for feedback on my writing."

The /r/fantasywriters policy against posting AI-generated content applies to everything posted to /r/fantasywriters, whether that's a picture, or a discussion question. People come to /r/fantasywriters to discuss fantasy writing with other humans, not to read posts that were written by AI.

"I asked a friend to edit my draft for me and I think they might have used AI"

You are responsible for all of the words that you post to /r/fantasywriters. If we accept "my friend did it" as an excuse for why you posted AI-generated content, then we don't have a policy that we can enforce.

"The ideas are 100% my own, the AI just helps me with phrasing. I want to be judged for my actual content, not my writing style."

Here on /r/fantaswriters, we are a community of writers. We believe that "phrasing" and "writing style" are the actual content.

That is why there are so many pieces of writing advice like "be careful with your adverb use" and "try to vary your sentence length." It's why writers care so much about "voice." As a community of writers, we understand that phrasing matters; voice is what makes your writing unique and recognizable. When you post something that is obviously written in GPT's voice rather than your own, people can and will notice.

"What parts of my writing made you think it was written by AI?"

We get this question a lot, including from accounts whose output is obviously 100% bot-generated. As a policy, we won't give you an itemized checklist of what caused us to identify your post as AI-generated. If we did this for every person who we banned for posting AI content, we would essentially be giving AI spammers a playbook for how to avoid our AI detection methods. That being said, while we don't intend to fully disclose the methods we use, we realize that some people are surprised to learn that "AI voice" is so clearly recognizable. To those people, we suggest reading Sam Kriss's piece in the New York Times, titled Why Does A.I. Write Like … That?. The /r/fantasywriters mod team does not endorse everything that Sam Kriss says, and his editorial doesn't capture or convey the full extent of our evaluation process, but he does a good job of explaining how "AI voice" has become so recognizable.

"I'm not using AI, but I'm worried about being falsely accused of using AI.

We believe that a human-written post being incorrectly flagged as AI is a much worse outcome than a few AI-generated posts slipping through the cracks, which is why we always err toward leniency in ambiguous cases. Every evaluation method we use is subject to this standard: if there's an evaluation method that results in human writing samples being flagged as AI written even 1 in 100 times, we won't use it. We can't promise a false positive rate that is literally zero, but we get as close as we reasonably can, and if you ever disagree with a moderation choice, you always have the ability to appeal our decision.

"How can you be confident that you're catching all of the AI posters?"

To be frank, we aren't confident in our ability to catch everyone posting AI content. As stated above, when considering evaluation methods, we put a higher priority on making sure that human content isn't incorrectly flagged as AI.

We have chosen to err on the side of leniency genuinely ambiguous cases, and that choice means that inevitably some AI-generated content will slip through the cracks.

We're also fully aware that there are models that are being trained specifically to avoid AI detection: there are literally thousands of public AI models, with new ones being released every day. However, we are still able to catch and remove a large number of AI-generated posts, because the majority of the AI-generated text is being generated by people who are fundamentally lazy, using the newest models in obvious ways that actually make them easier to catch.

I am getting ABSOLUTELY sick of checking through here, picking something random to read, and seeing god DANG GPT4o writing. I am just SO damn sick of the exact same writing style from people who "have never written before" but somehow have managed to drop us this 2k+ word chapter 1 that's somehow at a level excessively beyond a new writer. I get some folk are just great at writing innately but when I see 10+ people with the exact same structure to their work, it's getting disgusting.

Before anyone jumps down my throat with the "No one is posting AI, the mods are all over it" go and load up 4o, prompt it for some stupid short story, and look how it writes. Just take a second to look at how it actually structures its crap and you'll start to see this stupid pattern of doofuses slamming this reddit with 800-2k word chapter 1s that are somehow structured just like AI.

I'd be willing to be if I cycled this reddit back a couple years, the amount of "new writers" would plummet nearly by 90% and that's what's seriously gross. Thanks for your time.

I was wondering why aren't fallen angels as popular as vampires, mostly in fantasy books and fiction in general, I rarely encounter world-building that touch falling angels, but can find so many that revolved around ancient vampires. Besides a romance novel that did no justice in my eyes to the trope of falling angels, ( fallen becca fitzpatrick to anyone wondering), I couldn’t find any others, and yes, I have read the city of bones trilogy and it either does no justice to the trope — which leads to a second question, why when it IS written, it is executed poorly or too niche-romantic teenage novela? Thanks for anyone answering ahead!

Me personally, on one hand I agree on what this comic is trying to say that kids and teens should read about characters they can resonate. On the other I think it seems to bash the trope of hero discovering they are something more, regardless of how it is written, good or bad.

Maybe I am reading it incorectly, but the comic implies that upon discovering who she really is, all of Theofilia past expieriences as a Poo Person and how they affected her are retconned out of her character arc and she becomes a snobby royal who looks down at Poo People with disgust for any good reason (assuming that her life in poverty wasn't full of abuse from other Poo People).

I am firm believer in the idea that every trope, with a bit of creativity, can be well written, without resorting to subverting it or making the fun of. If the book from this comic was well written, Theofilia wouldn't forget her family and friends she lived with as a Poo Person and get corrupted by the royal life of luxury. Instead she would use her new position to call out the injustice and fix what's wrong with the society and ensure that the quality of Poo People's lives will increase significally and there won't be any societal barriers between them and the Specials.

The revelation that Theofilia is Special, shouldn't change or erase what happened before, that she lived in poverty and had to work hard in the dirt for food, that she knows about things any Special would not know because of their high status.

EDIT: I've been made aware that the correct message should be that it's bad when someone could achieve something not because of their hard work towards it but because of their bloodline or some other "cheat". Still, I think using having literal magic powers as an allegory wasn't a good example for the "everyone can be like/achieve this" lesson because having any superpower feels like something genetic. It feels like saying "you're growing taller than anyone else in this family not because of you drinking milk and your healthy lifestyle, but because you're actually adopted and your biological parents are both over 2 meters tall".

Last month, there was a post which flared up writing subreddits about a witch-hunter who got into a lawsuit for libelous statements regarding a real author. Many writers I know have also been accused of using AI at least once since 2022. I myself have been a victim of the witch-hunt.

These people energetically slander others. However, one thing I noticed which they all have in common is that they never produce anything worthwhile, or read anything worthy of arts. I once sent some passages from actual books to an online writing group to test them out, and half of the responses claimed these passages were written by ChatGPT.

The witch-hunters are basically just a bunch of poorly-read readers or amateur authors pushing for conformity to styles they're familiar with. However, AI witch-hunters are dealing more damage to writers than the AIs themselves. Real authors are getting harassed by ignorant witch-hunters. Libels are being made, and threats are being sent.

Witch-hunters cannot be ignored. Once a genuine author is mistaken for a clanker user, their financial and legal rights, as well as well-being are compromised. Something should be done, but for some reason a lot of people don't think much of it. Authors should be forming international organizations or, at least, local organizations to protect themselves against harassment. If AI technology is the future, regulation is the way forward.

However, on an individual level, how do you guys deal with the AI witch-hunters?

Yesterday in the evening I've written a death scene for a side character in my novel series and honestly, I didn't expect to get as emotional about it as I did. It wasn't a character I particularly liked, in fact, I purposefully created him to be quite unlikeable. At least for the largest portion of his presence in the story. He is overly insecure, has a bad temper and has racial prejudices, he adopted from his father. Of course I designed his character arc in a way, that he would eventually overcome his ignorance, showcasing, that even a flawed character like him cam change and grow under the right circumstances and the people around him, but once I didn't expect to get hit this hard by his death. I actually had to pause my editing process, since I started tearing up quite a lot, and went to the garden to have a smoke and calm down ... Have you had such an experience during your writing process?

We get a lot of tropes related questions here, in terms of what's ok, what's not, what people are tired of seeing etc. Tropes themselves are fine - it's all in the execution. Regardless, I decided what some tropes are that people always love reading about, and reached out to the fine folks at r/fantasy. Who better to ask than some of the most seasoned readers of the genre? You can check out the thread here. I've also made a list of some of the top loved tropes below based on upvotes:

- Heroic last stand - a person or a group of people standing alone against an overwhelming force

- "Wise old mentor figure who's also a badass and can kick ass with the best of 'em

- A nobody turning into a badass through hard work, grit and determination

- Lovecraftian ancient cosmic horror gods

- A prophecy that turns out to mean something different than what people had originally thought

- Motherfuckin' dragons

- Former villain gets redeemed and teams up with the MC

- Ancient civilization/ancient ruins and tech that plays a part in the story

- Magic swords with cool powers

- A group of dysfunctional characters team up to go on a quest

Hope this helps some aspiring writers when trying to decide if they should use a trope or not! Remember, they become tropes for a reason - people love 'em.

There’s been a significant increase in AI generated art being posted in this subreddit.

Our stance is very clear on this and will remain as such: AI generated content is NOT welcome here, and that absolutely includes art.

Any type of AI slop will be REMOVED. Read the rule about this in our wiki

I’ve seen people accused of using AI only based on the fact they’ve used an em dash. Em dashes were already controversial before but after the rise of Ai it has become virtually extinct. I think this is both good and bad. It forces a lot of writers to use more unique punctuation for their writing. The semicolon stocks are at an all time high. But another thing that worries me about this is what if the list expands. As Ai advances will entire story structures be deemed Ai generated.

This is all but I have to write more characters to post.

I’ve seen people accused of using AI only based on the fact they’ve used an em dash. Em dash were already controversial before but after the rise of Ai it has become virtually extinct. I think this is both good and bad. It forces a lot of writers to use more unique punctuation for their writing. The semicolon stocks are at an all time high. But another thing, that worries me about this is what if the list expands. As Ai advances will entire story structures be deemed Ai generated.

For me, if I was lucky and met the heroine, Roichirono, I would definitely run away. But if I met another character, I would definitely run away. Running away equals survival here