Remember to hem and haw if someone points out the educated, enlightened, suspiciously-like-us Indian women who have arranged marriages. It's different when it's, you know... real people in the real world.
Princes. Princesses. Kings. Queens. Emperors. Empresses. The rest of society did exist. Really. Even before the creation of the modern middle class, untitled people showed occasional humanlike traits and the rare glint of personhood. I know it's hard to think up stories they could star in, since everyone nowadays is a titled royal and it's tough to envision the world as it was before that happened, but try. There's a reason it's called "fantasy," after all.
Magical jewelry. Magical swords. Also magical capes, robes, shoes, socks, underwear, and frilly garters. And magical gems. And magical cups. In fact, try not enchanting anything and see how it feels. It was a stupid idea to begin with, as any evil sorceror who stuffed his power into a tchotchke knows, so let's at least pretend that the fantasy world is capable of learning.
Yes, I know, this kills the quest plot. That's okay. Let it die. No one else is ever going to be as good as Tolkien anyway.
Plots powered by the gods. Let those bitches do their own damn chores. What's all that power good for if they're going to sit on their butts dispensing magical jewelry and bad prophecies to peasant boys? Besides, gods are traditionally characterized with the delicacy and individuality of three-year-olds' crayon drawings; if we're going to suffer through lousy characterization, can't we have it stuck onto characters who are close enough to the ground to occasionally get the stuffing knocked out of them?
Developing magical powers. Oh look, magical puberty! I bet they don't want their powers to begin with, then grow to appreciate it! And have at least one hard-knocks lesson about responsible use of power! And if they foul up, the world is doomed! Never read THAT story before!
Prophecies. Please do learn to establish a plot without laying it out beforehand in bad poetry. If the plot wouldn't happen without the prophecy, then let it not happen, and go write a better book.
In conclusion, a few books that aren't about any of these things:
Damiano and Damiano's Lute, by R.A. MacAvoy
A young Italian witch (who used his witchcraft to call down the Archangel Raphael to give him lute lessons) becomes a musician to survive in war-torn, plague-ridden Renaissance Italy. It's a strangely sweet story, and the relationship between Damiano and Raphael is one of the best parts.
Shriek: An Afterword, by Jeff Vandermeer
Hard to describe. A scholar goes too far in investigating the mushroom-people who live under his city; his sister, the main storyteller, deals with "normal" life in the city above. It's mostly about the wonderfully weird city of Ambergris.
Larque on the Wing, by Nancy Springer
Immersive fantasy about a suburban housewife who paints horrible, tacky "country" paintings for tourist traps in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania until her doppelgangers thwack her out of her rut. Amazon saith: "Larque creates temporary people from nothing, which does not become a problem until a ten-year-old version of herself leads her on a search for lost dreams and she returns stronger, braver--and male."
Swordspoint and Privilege of the Sword, by Ellen Kushner
The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman
His Majesty's Dragon, by Naomi Novik
Aunt Maria, by Diana Wynne Jones
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susannah Clarke
The Iron Dragon's Daughter, by Michael Swanwick
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But I am looking forward to the witch-becomes-a-musician story. Such a reverse of the hackneyed musician-becomes-mage plot. (Vanyel who?)
Warning for rampant Christianity. I remember it as a tolerant and non-evangelical approach to the religion--the Christian mythos is real, the angels and Lucifer are real and solid parts of the world, right morality is important to the plot but its definition is questionable and, again, the question is important to the plot--but then I read it as a Christian, and am faintly worried that it will pull a Narnia upon rereading.
Please to be skewering urban fantasy next. Personally, I like to find ones from 1987, where the classic U.F. streak of trying to cram as much trendiness as possible into 250 pages looks both silly and stale.
Urban fantasy will have to go unskewered because I don't read it. Most of it seems to be detective stories, which bore me, or paranormal romance, which I loathe.
All joking aside, those are exactly the reasons I hardly read fantasy anymore.
(This list also doesn't include Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar series, which started as rebellion against Sword & Sorcery and was so good that the subgenre moved to meet it. Rampant royalty, magical jewelry, gems, and swords, god-driven stories, prophecies--but dammit, it's fantastic.)
*grin* So apparently my thing about royalty kicks in hardcore only when royalty are the main characters, and even then is flexible. Note that there are no arranged marriages or magical puberties whatsoever on the list. Hah.
I plan to start it tonight.
Now I need to go find Vol. 2.
Hate Million Year Picnic. Evil evil, book dealing bastards, the lot of them!
"Hate Million Year Picnic. Evil evil, book dealing bastards, the lot of them!"
C'mon, you know you really like it when they abuse you so :-)
Butbutbut... The whole point of Evil Overlords is that they *do* keep making the same mistakes.
"Plots powered by the gods"
Have you read the Vlad Taltos books, by Steven Brust? Some of them have plots that involve gods, but intriguingly fallible ones.