Wish someone would peruse through the thread and careful and concisley put togther the most comman issues in a bull it point list
That's
bullet point. I've just read this whole thing for the first time, and while I'm not going to go back and assign numerical rankings, these are the issues people have mentioned a bunch:
1. More diversity! -- We want different settings (Europe, other US cities, other parts of the world). We want authors who sound like they actually know about non-US cultures. We want US authors who make use of the actual diversity of the US.
You've all read the
Watch books, right? The Russian urban fantasy series by
Sergei Lukyanenko? The solution to everything being too US-centric is to read more foreign books.
2. More magical diversity! -- We want less of the trendy mythologies and critters and more of the weird ones. (Though we don't all agree on which should stay and which should go. Personally, I could do without any more "celtic" anything ever, and East Asian stuff often sounds like an anime ripoff.) We want real folklore monsters instead of movie Dracula. We want folklore we haven't heard of before and monsters that aren't in every single other UF book.
3. More
magical diversity! -- Some of us like science-y magic, others don't. All of us agree that authors should be more creative about their magical systems. They need to be internally consistent and not the same as White Wolf or every other UF book.
4. More diversity of heroes! -- Ok, ok, no hero is going to be
ordinary ordinary, but could we at least have some short, fat people in with our Xenas? Or someone who's not a PI, half vampire, or changeling? Or at least some plausible adults? These stories are set in the real world; let's have some heroes from there too.
5. No more sex! -- We're
fantasy fans, not softcore porn vampire romance novel fans. More plot and less nookie, please! Pointless canoodling is what fanfiction is for.
6. No more series-itus! -- Many of us are sick of long series (not me!), but we're all sick of series that go on and on for no reason. Trilogies and stand-alone books, please! Overall series plot, please! No more jumping the shark Anita Blake style, for the love of god!
7. Good prose! -- Just because we like genre fiction doesn't mean we don't like good writing. Publishers need to stop pushing out crapfests just because they're in a trendy subgenre. We want
good books!
So, basically, we want fresh, interesting books by actually talented authors instead of Extruded
Urban Fantasy Product.