How do you define quality in Fantasy?

I think you make a good point. I, for one, don't really care much if the character is or is not set up to be an obvious Mary Sue. That said, I do care if the author sets up an incredibly skilled character and then does not own up to making a conflict that is interesting and challenging enough for the character. I think the biggest example of a blunder in this department has to be Twilight: despite the tedious prose, despite the fact that I was not the demographic for the book, seriously, you set up a whole cast of fantastical creatures with extraordinary and - in some cases - very interesting powers and then proceed to not do anything relevant with them? This is one of the extremes when it comes to setting the power levels of characters, the other would be when an author ends up writing a character that is just not interesting enough for me to care about. The two or three initial Kip chapters in the Black Prism are borderline insufferable because there's just nothing meaningfully interesting about him so his scenes end up feeling like a high school novel, in which the world pushes the characters and they just fold and do nothing to push back. There are also ways to do this sort of "underpowered hero" right: one of them is Rothfuss's own novella "The Slow Regard of Silent Things" which deals with someone who could not survive in regular society and one of the characters from Brandon Sanderson's unpublished "White Sand" that I unfortunately can't talk about, but if you've read it, you know who I mean.

Still, the literature is full of examples of characters being clearly a cut above the rest and still making very interesting reads: Locke Lamora from Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastards series and Shai from Brandon Sanderson's "The Emperor's Soul" novella consistently do things that shouldn't be possible even by the standards of excellence in their own worlds, but because they're done right - showing the work needed by the characters to overcome the obstacles rather than sweeping it under the very large rug of Deus ex machina or other similarly disappointing "vanishing act" or "goalpost shifting" tools.

In respect to your concerns about The Name of the Wind, I have to say that, while what you say is entirely true and Kvothe is set up from the beginning as a man apart from the rest, the challenges he faces make up for his superior skills. I love reading Rothfuss not only because he has a very lyrical style that I find quite engrossing, but because he can produce interesting, life-threatening conflicts out of thin air. spoilers for The Name of the Wind ending

I guess my definition of quality in Fantasy is a book that sets my expectations very high from early on in, and then delivers on those expectations in a satisfying way. When authors create interesting characters, and then own up to the difficulty of challenging them and show their work. Their clever or inventive work. A great book to me should read like a Mystery novel: you should be able to guess at a solution to the problem yourself from what's in the text, and at no point should you go "well, that came out of nowhere and there's no way I could have seen that coming". Unless that thing is eagles.

/r/Fantasy Thread