With Brandon Sanderson now attracting much more consideration past his loyal fan base than ever before—a headline-grabbing deal to adapt his works into films and series for Apple TV could have that impact—the creator is now addressing a query he’s been requested typically all through his publishing profession, which kicked off in the early 2000s. It’s this: why aren’t there elves and dwarves in his fantasy epics?
Sanderson took to his YouTube channel for his newest in his “SanderFAQ” video series (hat tip: Polygon) to clarify. Principally, when he began writing throughout his school and graduate college days, the fantasy style was “deep in Tolkien’s shadow,” most likely much more than traditional due to Peter Jackson’s vastly profitable Lord of the Rings movies.
And in consequence, Sanderson observed many different works that took inspiration from J.R.R. Tolkien’s worldbuilding. In reality, as he recollects in the video, he was impressed at the time to write a controversial essay “about how Tolkien ruined fantasy,” a bit he now calls “very clickbaity in the days before we understood ‘clickbait.’” (Later in the video, he admits he now realizes he was additionally being “a bit snobbish” making an attempt to inform individuals what they need to and shouldn’t take pleasure in.)
Sanderson says he’s readjusted that view and is even in the center of a Tolkien revisit by way of the Andy Serkis-narrated audiobooks. “However in the late ’90s, I’m like, ‘Can’t we get away from this?’” he mentioned. “Fantasy needs to be the most imaginative style. It’s the style the place you are able to do something … and so I believed, nicely, I need to have a trademark of my writing be that it’s extra human-focused than fantastical-creature-focused.”
And even past that, “If I’m going to be doing fantastical creatures, I need to try to give you my very own. I need to have some new fantasy races that don’t simply really feel like elves with one other identify or dwarves with one other identify.”
He did embody dragons, he famous, as a result of “arising with one thing that has the weight and awesomeness of a dragon that isn’t a dragon is very troublesome … in order that’s the one I made a decision to bend on ultimately.”
At the finish of the clip, he concludes by saying, “I not really feel like we want to ‘kill the elves’ [referencing the name of his essay] or something like that. I really feel like, write your guide, learn your guide, learn what you’re keen on, write what you’re keen on. And there is room to do new issues even nonetheless all these years later with a few of these concepts that Tolkien approached again in the ’50s and ’60s.”
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