This is the original version of an article that I’ve since updated. I highly recommend you check out the up-to-date version, where I’ve added new entries and adjusted the order.
It’s time to take a look at some fantasy stories: specifically the worst fantasy stories I know of.
When J. R. R. Tolkien published The Hobbit and later The Lord of the Rings, I suppose it was inevitable that such masterpieces would be answered with countless inferior reflections.
When something amazing comes along, people are going to copy it.
When something as amazing as The Lord of the Rings comes along, you can expect that it’ll inspire masses of writers to try their hand at writing something similar. And with that many writers, it’s a safe bet that a good chunk of them won’t be very good.
Finding the Worst Fantasy Stories
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were ahead of their time when it came to how Tolkien treated the issues of the early twentieth century. Now, while most of the writers that followed wrote books that were products of their time, a few produced morals so bizarre as to warrant tossing such people into the nuthouse where they belong.
Adaptations
Welcome to my list of the Top 10 Worst Fantasy Stories. Most of the stories on this list are books that may or may not have been adapted into other media, but I did consider movies and television too.
I decided when I started that I wouldn’t consider bad adaptations of good source material; M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender is thus disqualified in spite of being worse than most of these. Faithful adaptations of bad source material are fair game, although I did try to consider the source as much as possible.
Reading and Research
Although I have had the misfortune of reading and watching some of these in their entirety, others are stories I’d never even heard of before I started this list. I searched the internet to find out what different people thought were the worst fantasy stories, and then I started reading them.
I’d read the first few chapters to get a feel for the writing, and then I’d do some research to quickly find out where the story goes from there. This was necessary as there were a lot of bad stories to get through.
Social Issues
As I continued work on my list, I began to notice something odd about all the stories I looked at. This went beyond simple bad writing; in almost every dreadful book there was something deeply screwed up that made me question the sanity of its writer.
Even the books that were supposed to be for children were full of these horrors. Racism, sexism, BDSM fantasies, and the book that inspired the creation of Jar Jar Binks… If you think you can read about such things without going mad, read on.
10. “The Twilight Saga” by Stephanie Meyer
The Twilight Saga has some things going for it. A lot of things about it are not terrible, and Meyer’s few talents shine through somewhat.
The story and characters are mostly consistent, and what little plot one finds here is coherent. So why is Meyer’s most infamous work on this list?
Simple! It’s because the characters are unlikeable, there’s no meaningful conflict, and Stephanie Meyer appears to be a bit mental.
You already know what this story’s about: an unlikeable high school girl becomes attracted to an unlikeable vampire, and I’m pretty sure there’s a pedo werewolf in there somewhere.
Let’s start with the characters. It is not remotely possible to like or care about any of these people. Bella, the main character, is probably a psychopath; she’s more than willing to toy with the emotions of others if it’ll get her what she wants.
The Cullen family inexplicably fawns over Bella and would sacrifice their lives for her in an instant, but no one else is worth protecting. Jacob the werewolf is sexually attracted to an infant and will someday marry a seven-year-old.
A Peaceful Solution
Next we have the fact that very little of consequence happens throughout these four books. The Volturi are pathetic villains, as are the villains who occasionally pop up to threaten our detestable heroes. The books build up to a final confrontation with the Volturi, evil vampires who slaughter masses of humans and even terrorize their own kind.
Finally the confrontation comes, but then everyone comes to a peaceful agreement that benefits all vampires; the Volturi go home to kill some tourists and the Cullens go home to marry a seven-year-old off to an older werewolf.
The movie adaptation changed it slightly so that we do see a battle occur, but it is then revealed to be a dream sequence and the characters come to a peaceful agreement. Either one’s as bad as the other; this ending is a slap in the face.
Imagine if Hamlet had ended not with Claudius poisoning nearly all the main characters only for a dying Hamlet to kill him, but rather with the entire climax turning out to be a dream, with Hamlet just giving up on his revenge and letting Claudius go on being the murderous, incestuous usurper that he is. Then everyone just goes home and lives their lives undisturbed. Wouldn’t that be the greatest of insults?
Vampire Morals
Stephanie Meyer intended The Twilight Saga to be a romance that would teach Mormon values to girls who read it, which is kind of scary because the morals of these books are truly horrible.
Most important is how the Cullens have no problems with other vampires who kill humans since it’s just a personal choice.
Indeed, the only moral question that Meyer affords a hard judgement is premarital sex; she’s against it. Murder’s alright, though.
I had originally wondered if perhaps this wasn’t one of the very worst fantasy stories. That all went out the window when I looked a bit deeper and saw how bloody racist Meyer’s story is. A Native American tribe—a real Native American tribe—is portrayed in such a racist manner you’d swear this was a ’30s western.
On a number of occasions the unbelievably white Bella is subtly portrayed as being smarter than the Native Americans, who are portrayed very much as “the noble savage” and even a sort of hive-mind. The vampires, conversely, are portrayed as very rich and very white, and they’re deified for it.
Live and Let Kill
At one point in Book Three, the Cullens discover a girl named Bree Tanner who was turned into a vampire by one of their enemies. When Bree surrenders herself to them, the Cullens promise to protect her and even intend to let her join them. Then the Volturi come to kill her and, because she’s not Bella, the Cullens just stand aside and let them execute Bree.
Of course, when the Volturi threaten Bella, the Cullens will sacrifice themselves in a second, but they don’t have to! You see, none of the main characters die because the Cullens are always able to negotiate so that someone else dies instead of them.
Meyer’s live-and-let-live policy is one of the dumbest ideas in the history of urban fantasy. The Volturi still get to regularly kill throngs of innocent people, but that doesn’t matter as long as our unlikeable heroes get their “perfect slice of forever.”
What list of the worst fantasy stories would be complete without a story where the heroes just let the villains go on being villains?
9. “A Song of Ice and Fire” by George R. R. Martin
I know a lot of people love these stories, but even after reading the first book and watching the first four seasons of the TV show I still cannot figure out what people see in it.
The characters are unlikeable and largely one-dimensional, the pacing is lethargic, and everyone in Martin’s “Medieval English” world speaks in the author’s own New Jersey dialect.
How can something so popular be one of the worst fantasy stories ever?
A Song of Ice and Fire has always struck me as a rather soulless attempt to sell a product, and sex certainly sells product.
Even if I force myself to take Martin’s story seriously, all I see is a television script in book form with hints of postmodernism and even dadaism.
Undeserved Sympathy
In addition to the prose sounding like a twelve-year-old wrote it, A Song of Ice and Fire has another major problem in that it expects the reader to care about characters who commit atrocities without remorse.
Rapists and the like are routinely presented as sympathetic, and there are pedo sex scenes that the story presents in such a way that I swear he’s trying to turn his readers on. The victims of rape, on the other hand, are often portrayed as far more evil than the men who rape them.
One of the characters we’re meant to see as a good man frequently beats and rapes his wife; she is portrayed as the evil queen stereotype and will presumably serve as the final villain of the series. But that’s nothing compared to the racism. You see, A Song of Ice and Fire is what is known as a “white saviour” story.
The White Saviour
As I’ve already mentioned, there’s a harmful trope in storytelling called the “noble savage,” and Martin attempted to deconstruct this trope in his story.
Sadly all this really meant was that Martin reveals partway through the story that the non-white characters he’s characterized as “noble savages” are actually not noble; they’re just savages that need a little white girl to civilize them.
The white girl in question goes on to teach the savage natives that slavery is wrong, and eventually she uses them as her own private army. This is the formula for white saviour stories, a formula that A Song of Ice and Fire follows very closely.
Anti-War Preaching
And like many supposedly “dark and gritty fantasy”stories, A Song of Ice and Fire is built around the o-so-insightful message that “War is bad! Don’t do war!”
This ever-present anti-war message, while in some ways admirable, comes across to me as rather naïve and childish—not nearly as childish as the abhorrent pro-war message in some of the worse entries, but childish nonetheless.
This is far from the worst fantasy story that tried so desperately to be darker than its author had the skill to write, but it’s just bad enough to edge out Stephanie Meyer.
8. “Dragonheart” by Patrick Read Johnson and Charles Edward Pogue
The 1996 film Dragonheart has quite the cult following, but it’s really not good. The simple idea that birthed this film was fit perhaps for a one-panel comic strip, but they made a whole bloody movie about it.
It’s the story of how a knight convinced a dragon to bind its own life to that of an evil prince, blamed the dragon when things went wrong, and carried out a genocide; somehow this knight is the hero.
Bowen makes for a supremely unlikeable and slightly inconsistent protagonist. But not only does Dragonheart boast the worst fantasy hero in all of film—it has absolutely zero likeable characters in general.
The Plot
Having killed all but one dragon, Bowen decides that he and the last dragon should team up to scam people. If that idea sounds stupid to you then you’ve been paying attention.
They become friends despite Bowen thinking dragons are evil and despite the dragon Draco knowing that Bowen murdered Draco’s entire race.
At the end, Bowen finds out that to kill the evil king he has to kill his “friend” Draco. This he does, and the mass-murderer/con-man/dipshit settles down with his obligatory love-interest. The end.
The “Hero”
And I thought A Song of Ice and Fire had unlikeable characters; Dragonheart really takes the sodding cake! Bowen is a dim-witted, genocidal, and downright villainous individual. Everyone’s life is worsened the moment they associate with this bloody maniac, as every one of his decisions is either evil or so moronic that it might as well be.
Like those that came before it on the list, though, it’s not the worst fantasy story ever written, particularly as Sean Connery’s performance wasn’t terrible. But all things considered I have no choice but to consider it one of the ten worst fantasy stories.
7. “The Spiderwick Chronicles” by Tony Di’Terlizzi and Holly Black
I thought the movie was bad, and then I read the books. The movie may have been bland, forgettable, and just plain worthless, but the books are much, much worse.
Who knew changing the whole climax to something so… well… not good could actually be an improvement?
I mean, who would have expected a children’s series to have the same moral compass as many of the worst fantasy stories in history?
The Spiderwick Chronicles by Tony Di’Terlizzi and Holly Black starts out as a not-very-good children’s story about three siblings who discover a field guide to the magical creatures of the forest.
They face a lot of evil creatures that adults can’t see before they meet their immortal relative who wrote the field guide. Then the evil ogre kidnaps their mother and it falls to the kids to save her.
And here’s where it goes off the rails and becomes one of the worst fantasy stories ever to appear in the children’s section of a bookstore.
Taking Out Their Families
You see, one of the kids is named Simon, and he’s the one who loves animals. In the fifth book, Simon needs to distract a mother dragon. To this end, Simon crushes the heads of her hatchlings in an act of psychological warfare.
This is treated as heroic, and Simon is praised for his bravery. The mentality behind this ending is even more sickening now that the Americans have their new führer with his “take out their families” sentiments.
This is not an example of collateral damage or sacrificing the few for the good of the many.
This is not a gritty story about soldiers fighting in a war—nor is humanity on the brink of annihilation; indeed, it’s for a very young audience.
Even if these kids were old enough to understand the sort of sacrifices leaders have to make during war, Spiderwick’s Drumpf-esque message of wanton slaughter and “taking out their families” isn’t something a decent person might justify.
Yes, these children’s books are among the worst fantasy books of all time; it’s arguably even worse than putting these morals in an adult book. At least an adult might be able to tell their reading something immoral. And these aren’t even the worst fantasy books aimed at children.
6. “In the Name of the King” by Uwe Boll
It was a tough decision between this and Bloodrayne, but of Uwe Boll’s two fantasy trilogies I think In the Name of the King is a slightly greater insult to the genre. Never before has a single series so butchered the conventions of both high fantasy and portal fantasy.
I’ve seen the two sub-genres merged before—masterfully in the case of Equestria Girls—but if you think Uwe Boll can do the same thing then you’ve never seen an Uwe Boll film.
Like most of Uwe Boll’s movies, these are loosely based on video games. Ordinarily, this would disqualify the trilogy from getting on the list, but Uwe Boll didn’t even try to adapt the source material here.
I don’t consider this an adaptation by any stretch. This is pure Uwe Boll trash. It was inevitable that if Boll made a fantasy movie it would be the worst fantasy film of our generation, and did he ever deliver!
The Worst Fantasy Film Trilogy
In the Name of the King is one of those films that exists purely to profit from the success of a much better film—in this case The Lord of the Rings. Boll’s film is horrible in every way and seems to have been conceived with the idea that fantasy need not take any effort to write.
The characters are flat and often nonsensical, and even basic plot points are bungled beyond what I once thought possible. Despite the first film ending on what any normal person would take to be some manner of ill-conceived cliffhanger, the sequel is an unrelated portal fantasy film.
The third film—called “The Last Job”—is similar to the second, although its quality is somehow lower. Were I not including series, this “conclusion” would hold the spot for being the single worst fantasy film in history.
In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
The problems with each film in the trilogy only build upon the considerable flaws of the previous worst fantasy film, leading to the final instalment being near-unwatchable. Boll’s storytelling manages to deprive what would otherwise be run-of-the-mill fantasy stories of all stakes, investment, and fun.
A perfect example is the first film, where it turns out the main character is the long-lost prince. Obviously he’s necessary if the royal line is to continue, but Boll killed off the prince’s only son, severing the line of succession. This means the kingdom will be in the same predicament in thirty years.
Apparently realizing this, Boll added a sub-plot where the prince’s captured wife is pregnant, but none of the characters know or care about this so it doesn’t restore the stakes for them or the audience.
Not even John Rhys-Davies could save this film. The editing is terrible. Boll’s world-building is beyond confused and often inconsistent.
The villain is an evil sorcerer played by—and I wish I were making this up—Ray Liotta, and he’s as bad as you’d think.
There’s a scene where a character breaks the news of a child’s death to his mother, and it almost seems like he’s trying to be as devastating as he can be.
A side-character called Muriella not only has the closest thing to a character arc, but she’s also the only person with the power to conceivably defeat Liotta. But she’s a woman so she fails, and the underpowered prince somehow kills his nemesis.
In the Name of the King 2: Two Worlds
The second film follows a time-travelling Rex-Kwon-Do instructor who doesn’t care too much about what’s happening around him. Where the first film makes a muck of many high fantasy conventions, the second does the same with portal fantasy.
The simplistic plot somehow succeeds in being impossible to understand or explain. All the dialogue sounds like typical Chosen One drivel, memorable only for Boll’s tenuous grasp of the English language. You can therefore expect random words in a sentence to be replaced with words like “prophecy” and “decree.”
In the Name of the King 3: The Last Job
The last film in this—the worst fantasy film trilogy—is even worse than the other two, with the camera shaking throughout and an even more unlikeable hero.
Like most Uwe Boll films, this one includes a “romance” that’s better described as a one-night-stand. This only gets around a minute of development—even that is incompetent—and it goes absolutely nowhere.
Supposedly important characters enter the story out of nowhere, exposit their importance, then disappear just as quickly. Ironically, the worst of these films has the closest thing to an ending, with the king instantly forgiving the main lovable mobster-sociopath for kidnapping his daughters.
“I shoot it, but I don’t care!”
It should come as no surprise that Boll has admitted to not caring one bit about In the Name of the King, and I doubt anyone else cared either. In the medium of film, In the Name of the King is the worst fantasy story I’ve seen.
Almost everything wrong with every dreadful fantasy film I’ve suffered through is here condensed into a single appalling trilogy. The lack of originality fades into the background in the midst of Boll’s nightmarish execution of every element of these three increasingly-bad stories.
5. “The Wheel of Time” by Robert Jordan
It’s as though any story that bills itself as “fantasy for grown-ups” is sure to be filled with the author’s BDSM fantasies, and Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series will not disappoint.
It starts with the single worst fantasy prologue I’ve ever slogged through. Robert Jordan’s prose is even worse than George R. R. Martin’s, for one thing.
Martin writes like a grade-schooler trying to sound sophisticated. Jordan writes more like a South Carolina redneck trying to write like an Oxford professor of the English language and failing spectacularly. The result is incomprehensible.
“The Wheel of Time Turns” (I Feel It in the Water)
Whereas the writing consists of dull filler and nigh-unreadable paragraphs, the storytelling ranges from regurgitating the same Chosen One crap you’ve seen a million times to plagiarizing Tolkien.
The beginning of the first chapter, for instance, even begins with a paragraph that sounds suspiciously like a particular quote from Treebeard, except that Jordan’s is bloated and terrible. There’s also a mountain called Shayol Ghul, which is Orodruin.
The biggest problem with The Wheel of Time is not any of the above flaws, however. Rather, it’s that it was written in the ‘90s and continued into the 2010s and yet it’s among the most sexist fantasy stories I’ve ever read. I don’t know how it is that a story written in the ‘40s could be so much less sexist than one written in the ‘90s, but it happened—quite a few times, in fact.
Mystical Gender Politics
The Wheel of Time is, at its most basic, a celebration of some of the strictest gender roles this side of Saudi Arabia.
In the unnamed world of The Wheel of Time (which is actually our world in both the past and the future, if you can wrap your mind around that), there are two kinds of magic: male magic and female magic.
Male magic is stronger in pretty much every way we are able to observe, although we are informed through exposition that female magic has certain strengths (which we never see).
Some “ambitious” magic-users tried to find a way for women to attain the same degree of power as men, and this caused all male sorcerers to go mental and kill their families. To prevent this, a group of sorceresses find a solution whereby they can prevent this fate without killing the sorcerer. For this the author demonizes them and brands them “man-hating lesbians.”
Sadism and Masochism
Over on what Jordan considers the good side, one finds an unusual number of women who seem to enjoy BDSM. Three guesses whether, in Jordan’s world of gender roles, they prefer playing the dom or the sub.
When a woman strikes her partner, Jordan treats it like a bad thing, but he treats it as totally healthy for a man to spank his wife for “misbehaving.” Women being submissive and men being dominant is this series’ idea of a perfect world; in fact it’s this idea that forms the core of what The Wheel of Time is all about.
For glorifying strict gender roles in the ‘90s, The Wheel of Time should rightly boast the worst fantasy sexism of all time. But there are more to come! As horrifying as The Wheel of Time’s sexist themes are, it’s no higher on the list because there exist stories so sexist they make this look like the epitome of feminist literature.
4. “The Master of Ragnarok & Blesser of Einherjar” by Takayama Seīchi
We had to get to the worst portal fantasy story ever, and here it is! And if you’ve not heard of it, then your luck’s been better than mine.
I knew at least one terrible anime would probably make it onto the list, and I always assumed it would be Black Clover, but then an isekai (portal fantasy) called The Master of Ragnarok & Blesser of Einherjar came out.
I would have looked at the original light novel for this list, but I didn’t want to give the people who made this any more money than necessary so I settled for the anime adaptation.
The Animation
The animation is hideous, with the animators not even bothering to animate the battle scenes most of the time.
Battles consist almost entirely of unenthusiastic shouting in the background while characters calmly talk about what we’re not seeing. Soldiers in the background don’t even move, as they’re part of the still frame.
You’d think the animators would put more work into the bodies of female characters, given that this is supposedly meant to be a harem comedy, but no! Breasts look to be solid as rocks, while body movements are unnatural and decidedly unsettling.
Yūto, Patriarch of the Wolf Clan
If anything, the plot and characters are somehow worse than the animation. Suō Yūto, for example, is possibly the worst fantasy protagonist I’ve ever seen in an anime. His only character flaw is that he doesn’t realize how great he is, and with the exception of Yūto himself, it seems that every male character in the story is a strawman for Yūto to shout down.
Notwithstanding Yūto comes across as a morally vacant piece of human garbage whenever he does anything.
The first time we see Yūto he’s just won a battle, and we learn that his best warriors are a group of women called Einherjar (this isn’t what “Einherjar” means, but let’s just forget that), who swear allegiance to him by legally becoming his daughters and sisters respectively.
Without exception they all want to have sex with him, and creepily they don’t take “no” for an answer. Rune, one of the Einherjar, defeats the enemy commander and then tells Yūto, “I turned her over to some of the soldiers.” Does this mean what I think it means? Is there anything else it could mean?
The Incestuous Harem
After the soldiers presumably rape the enemy commander Linnea, Yūto threatens to kill a bunch of innocent people if she doesn’t become his “little sister” and join his quasi-incestuous harem. She agrees to this before almost immediately falling madly in love with him.
Of course, given what genre this is, Yūto doesn’t give in to any of the women begging for a shag—even his… ugh… adopted daughter Felicia, whom he appears to share a strong bond with. She’s told him she’s attracted to him, and we know that he’s attracted to her.
We learn that the reason Yūto won’t shag anyone is because he has a crush on a girl he’s not seen in years, may never see again, hasn’t told about his feelings, and doesn’t know likes him in return. And somehow he expects her to wait for him, securing Yūto’s status as human garbage.
The other characters in the worst fantasy anime aren’t much better. Aside from Yūto’s bland harem and the aforementioned strawmen, there’s a rip-off of Gilgamesh from Fate/Stay Night and… not much else to speak of.
Incest Is Only the Beginning
The third episode kicks off with a depiction of twin incest. And they’re children… I think I might puke.
Sexualized child characters are surprisingly common in bad stories, both eastern and western; this list should be proof enough of that. But unlike many anime that do this, Master of Ragnarok and Blesser of Einherjar doesn’t even fall on the often-flimsy excuse that these characters are actually millennia-old immortals. Instead it goes the A Song of Ice and Fire route and writes child incest polygamy off as a practice of the time despite not otherwise caring about real history at all.
Of course the story also forgets that Yūto is from our time! He shouldn’t be okay with his soldiers gang-raping prisoners of war or half the other things people do in this story, and he definitely shouldn’t be okay with what comes next.
Slavery
While touring his city, Yūto sees a slave trader selling a woman and her young daughter. We hear him think, “A little girl like that…” and then immediately he buys the two of them.
I don’t think those were thoughts of pity or disgust at an act that virtually everyone else from Yūto’s time reviles; they sound like the thoughts of a man appraising an item he’s interested in buying.
And before you ask—yes, the little slavegirl does become part of Yūto’s harem later on.
The Worst Isekai Ever Made
Without a doubt, this is the worst fantasy anime I have ever seen and one of the worst fantasy stories of all time. The characters are horrible, the morals non-existent, and the animation absolutely repulsive. The protagonist makes Itō Makoto from School Days look like a decent human being.
I was only able to watch one episode at a time; otherwise I’d lose a good deal of my sanity. I made the mistake of watching one-and-a-half episodes once, and it left me gibbering. And do you know why I watched this disgrace to humanity? I watched it so that I might warn you to stay away!
3. “The Fifth Sorceress” by Robert Newcomb
Take The Wheel of Time, remove most of Robert Jordan’s attempts to steal from Tolkien, and make everything else wrong with it five times worse; you now have an approximation of Robert Newcomb’s debut novel The Fifth Sorceress.
Where The Wheel of Time was built on the rather antiquated idea that men and women cannot and should not fill each other’s roles, The Fifth Sorceress is built on a simpler philosophy: men are good and women are evil.
Yep; sounds like the third-worst fantasy story of all time to me!
Outright Misogyny
We begin with a common theme in the worst fantasy stories. Not only does male magic work differently from female magic in Newcomb’s world, but female magic is altogether evil.
This means it turns women bisexual, which Newcomb characterizes as something almost too horrible for words. The sorceresses are all portrayed as leather-clad rape-fiends with little to no motivation to explain why they’re so evil.
Indeed, the only explanation we get is that women are easily corrupted. Men, on the other hand, are repeatedly shown to be virtuous creatures. On the rare occasion that we see a woman who’s not evil, she’s certain to be a caricatured paragon of innocence.
The main character is a thirty-year-old prince named Tristan, who looks and acts like a teenager. The sorceresses’ minions rape and kill most of Tristan’s family and turn his sister evil. The plot gives new meaning to the word “stupid.”
At one point, a rape is referred to as “attempted rape” because the victim didn’t orgasm. Now, I think for the moment it’s safe to award The Fifth Sorceress the Worst Fantasy Sexism in the World Medal, at least until our next entry…
2. “Xanth” by Piers Anthony
In the late ‘80s Piers Anthony started a book called Pornucopia. Apparently it’s a real-world version of “The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs,” filled with outlandish and horribly perverted demon-sex scenes.
Xanth, on the other hand, is his attempt at a light-hearted children’s fantasy series. It’s about what you’d expect to happen when a porno-writer tries to write for kids.
The moment one opens up Anthony’s first Xanth book, one is greeted by a map of Xanth, which is a map of sodding Florida. It’s Florida; the author even admits it! We’re off to a great bloody start, but it only spirals downward from here.
Let’s start with the prose; it’s not good. I’ve heard some people say that Tolkien went into too much detail when he described things. He didn’t, but Piers Anthony sure does.
Even the worst fantasy prose usually at least tries to be interesting even if it’s just trying in vain to copy Tolkien, but that’s not the case here. Anthony just goes on and on about everything and nothing.
The Origin of Jar Jar Binks
The main character Bink appears to be someone without magic in a land where everyone else has magic.
Although you may be suffering flashbacks to Black Clover (perhaps the worst fantasy shōnen) right now, it might be more appropriate to have Star Wars Prequel flashbacks because this character may well have been George Lucas’s inspiration for the character of Jar Jar Binks. I’m not kidding!
One should also note that bestiality is a central plot point in this children’s story; humans apparently like to have sex with basilisks and harpies, which has caused the population to go down.
Bink, for his part, doesn’t judge such people. This is because he’s one of them!
Sexism
I noticed some hints of sexism, too. And then I noticed more than hints, and then Piers Anthony bashed me over the head with such contempt for women as might make Robert Jordan blush.
In the first book we’re introduced to Bink’s soon-to-be-thrown-away love-interest Sabrina, whom we learn he chose for lack of a sex-slave. Bink’s reaction to a murderous psychopath sexually assaulting her is as though he’d touched one of Bink’s possessions.
Later we meet a character called Chameleon, a woman whose menstrual cycle causes her shape-shifting power to cycle between a woman who’s smart and ugly, one who’s average, and one who’s beautiful but stupid. And yes, it is her menstrual cycle that does it!
Bink chooses to leave Sabrina for Chameleon because he decides he can’t trust a woman who’s both smart and attractive at the same time.
“Those Crazy Child Molesters!”
But now we come to the main reason these books are so awful.
Your first hint should be that there’s a book in this series titled “The Colour of Her Panties.” Does this sound like it’s going to be anything less than a cringe-inducing abomination?
Whereas A Song of Ice and Fire is certainly little more than glorified porn, at least it is marketed towards adults. Xanth is similarly disgusting porn, but it’s different in that these books are actually intended for children to read.
Anthony constantly writes scenes of adults attempting to rape little children, but he never portrays these child molesters as the villains. He portrays them as old people trying to have a good time, and it’s bloody sick.
One really gets the feeling that Anthony is taking way too much pleasure in imagining children squirming as some adult molests them.
A Friend to Pedos
All that I’ve talked about before is just the tip of the iceberg, unfortunately. Most of Anthony’s other series glorify paedophilia even more than Xanth does. This should surprise no one, as the author remains good pen-pals with quite a few convicted child molesters.
He has also used many of his books to blatantly defend those who rape children, as he did in his book Tatham Mound by way of a scene in which the point-of-view character has sex with a ten-year-old girl.
Even our “relatable hero” Bink is a twenty-five-year-old man who later realizes he has a thing for fourteen-year-olds when a witch shape-shifts into one so as to seduce him. Of course, Anthony treats all this as completely normal and okay—even admirable.
And parents give these books to their kids! I think I can safely say these are the worst fantasy children’s books I’ve ever read. No one should ever give this abomination of a series to their child.
Dishonourable Mentions
“The Realm of the Elderlings” by Robin Hobb
A lot of people like these books, but after reading the first I had no interest in continuing. Robin Hobb’s book Assassin’s Apprentice contains quite a few interesting concepts and the setting’s really not bad.
Unfortunately, like many of the stories on this list, it moves forward at an incredibly slow pace, seemingly determined to stretch out the buildup phase of the story so it takes a whole book.
Or perhaps the slow pace is the result of this story being character-driven despite the characters—particularly the main character Fitz—not being interesting enough to make anything happen.
O, Look—Another Dog Died!
Fitz just gets dragged through whatever passes for a plot, and he barely reacts to anything. Everything that happens to Fitz is due to a decision made by another character. If Fitz ever does anything in this book, then I must have zoned out by that time.
All I can remember about his character is that he loves dogs. I remember it because Robin Hobb plays the main-character-loses-his-dog card at least three times in the first book alone.
The first dog gets taken away, the second is killed during a break-in, and the third dies saving Fitz from drowning. Also, Hobb established that her world operates on something similar to absolute primogeniture so why are all the powerful nobles male? Come on; this was written in the ‘90s!
Robin Hobb clearly has a spark of creativity, but this story reeks of laziness. Why else would she kill or otherwise remove the main character’s pet not once but thrice in one book? Why else would the main character be the blandest protagonist since Harry Potter? Of the stories that almost earned a place as one of the worst fantasy stories, this has got to be one of the most listless.
“Shannara” series by Terry Brooks
It has proven incredibly difficult to get information on these books, as the Shannara Wiki seems to mostly contain information on the television adaptation.
However, from what I’ve gathered, Terry Brooks was among the first authors to blatantly rip off Tolkien. While Brooks’ success may have given this genre the boost it needed at the time, I cannot forgive how ineptly he copied Tolkien’s masterpieces.
“Cut from the Same Cloth”
In case you’ve doubts as to whether this is a Tolkien rip-off, Brooks has said that his protagonist Shea Ohmsford is “cut from the same cloth” as Frodo Baggins.
He’s not. Frodo isn’t a flawlessly bland chosen one. Shea Ohmsford, on the other hand, is a generic chosen one like all the rest.
Brooks struggles to evoke an atmosphere but does a better job of it than some who made this list. This is one of those nuclear-war-creates-a-fantasy-world-in-the-future stories, of which perhaps only Adventure Time has achieved greatness. Here, however, the concept comes across as preachy.
Adverbs, Adverbs, and More Adverbs!
Perhaps the worst part is the writing style, which almost made it one of the worst fantasy stories ever. Brooks uses adverbs in place of everything else, it seems.
Everyone uses adverbs—often quite a few of them—but an adverb has to tell the reader something they wouldn’t otherwise know. Here they don’t.
Instead of having the black, flying creature do something scary, he just tells us how scary it is—with adverbs. Adverbs constantly! It’s like every sentence has a sodding adverb in it—too many adverbs and too few pronouns. Early on in the story Brooks kept referring to the main characters’ father as “the elder Ohmsford,” which struck me as being a little bit pretentious.
From what I’ve heard of the later books, they’re each just the same as the first, except that the Elfstones have different powers in each one (why be consistent when you could just make up new abilities every time?).
And the series just keeps going without deviating from its let’s-steal-from-Tolkien formula. Happily, I can say that this is not one of the very worst fantasy stories, as it’s not even worth that distinction. Let’s all just forget it exists, shall we?
“Black Clover” by Yūki Tabata
I really wish I could talk at length about the terrible voice-acting of the anime, and I’d be lying if I said that didn’t influence my decision to mention this one, but Black Clover started out as a manga.
Thus when I talk about it on a list of one of the worst fantasy stories, I prefer to consider the manga alone. Luckily there’s quite enough that’s bad about Yūki Tabata’s original work to give it an easy place in the honourable mentions.
Naruto, but Worse
Black Clover is the worst fantasy shōnen I’ve ever encountered—hell, it’s the worst shōnen I know of. The main protagonist Asta is a generic yet wholly unlikeable one.
Asta is a young boy born without magic in a world where everyone else has magic, but don’t expect a likeable character like Midoriya Izuku. No; Asta is more like a very poorly-drawn version of Uzumaki Naruto with all good qualities removed.
I suppose it’s worth mentioning that the illustrations are horrible. Black Clover is, in fact, the ugliest manga I’ve ever read, but that’s nothing compared to taking place in one of the worst fantasy worlds ever.
What makes this one of the worst fantasy worlds, you ask? It can’t just be how generic and ill-defined it is, can it? Well, allow me to explain: every human being who lives there is horrible!
The Clover Kingdom
Everyone except for the bland Uchiha Sasuke-type character likes to laugh at our screeching protagonist’s rare disability. It soon reaches the point where one has no choice but to think the people of the Clover Kingdom must have just bred out all the non-psychopaths in the worst fantasy eugenics campaign in multiverse history.
But do you know what I hate most about Black Clover? The illustrations! I mean, look at them; they’re hideous. It’s something about the mouths and the spiky… everything. Or maybe it’s the shading? I don’t know, but these are the worst fantasy manga illustrations I’ve ever seen. Let’s move on.
“Gor” series by John Norman
Just in case you didn’t think stories like this could actually lead fans to form demented sex cults, we have the Gor series by John Norman! To give you some context, Norman is a eugenicist and a huge fan of Nietzsche.
His career as a professor of philosophy seems mostly focused on encouraging sadomasochistic sex, in particular men treating women as slaves.
The Chronicles of Counter-Earth
The Gor series, also called The Chronicles of Counter-Earth among other titles, takes place on a hidden planet where aliens dump abducted earthlings.
The gravity somehow causes men to develop superhuman muscles but has the opposite effect on women. Speaking of women, John Norman believes that all women subconsciously want to be slaves. I know this because he feels the need to remind the reader of that quite a few times in each Gor book.
“I have wondered sometimes if a man, to be a man, must not master a woman and if a woman to be a woman must not know herself mastered.”
John Norman
The Humiliation of Women
The first Gor book begins with some irrelevant, rambling, and long-winded etymology that even I find boring. It just goes on and on, never stopping. Several books in, the author appears to give up trying to keep his dreck at least pseudo-intellectual; the series is mostly just glorified depictions of sexual slavery from then on.
The usual formula is that the aliens abduct a proud woman from Earth and leave her stranded on Gor, where she is then enslaved. Invariably the woman discovers she enjoys being raped, beaten, branded, and otherwise humiliated.
The Gorean Subculture
John Norman’s sick philosophy and the fictional culture built around it have led to a scary number of fans arranging their lives around his teachings and organizing into Gorean sex cults. Often this just means some weird-but-consensual sex practices, but at least one cult leader was sent to prison for forcing his girlfriend to have sex with other men, who are believed to have payed him for it.
The only reason Gor didn’t earn a place on this list is because it contains so many science-fiction elements that I barely consider it fantasy. But all this means is that instead of being one of the worst fantasy stories ever, Gor is one of the worst science-fiction stories of all time.
1. “The Sword of Truth” by Terry Goodkind
“This looked like a chicken, like most of the Mud People’s chickens. But this was no chicken. This was evil manifest.”
Soul of the Fire
When I started this list I thought The Wheel of Time would be the worst fantasy series, then The Fifth Sorceress was the worst fantasy book, then Xanth.
But then a good friend recommended I read a “really good fantasy series” called The Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind.
As it turns out, these books are almost worse than all the others combined.
The first thing I noticed were the adverb-heavy sentences. I am unsure what it is about this lacklustre writing that so quickly filled me with an almost irrational loathing for Goodkind.
As I read on, however, that hatred became increasingly rational. Why? Because Terry Goodkind’s books are filled with his particular morality, which he bases on the works of Russian author Ayn Rand.
Objectivist Fantasy
In case you’ve not heard of her, Ayn Rand was a crazy, totalitarian cult leader who believed—among other things—that anyone who didn’t prefer Rachmaninoff to Mozart was evil and deserved to die.
She wasn’t the worst fantasy author ever (Goodkind is), but she was the worst author ever, by my reckoning. The Sword of Truth is what happens when you take her writing style and transpose it into Fantasy.
What is it about the fantasy genre that attracts these mentals? It would take an eternity, I think, to explain every reason for which this is the worst fantasy story of all time. I may go into more detail in a full review someday, but for now I’ll just list some of the many things wrong with Goodkind’s magnum opus.
The Morality of Madness
As you might expect from a piece of Objectivist literature, the worst fantasy story of all time glorifies some truly bizarre and self-contradictory morals. Over-the-top selfishness is, in their view, the highest virtue, yet supposedly selfish characters can justify almost any selfless action as being selfish. Not that the Objectivist hero isn’t by his very nature a psychopath—he most certainly is.
The “hero” Richard is just such a person, based heavily on many of Ayn Rand’s protagonists. He’s the worst fantasy chosen one of all time, being at once entirely self-absorbed, all-forgiving, and ludicrously violent.
In the first book Richard lashes out at an eight-year-old, cutting out her tongue and nearly killing her. Goodkind treats this as the right thing to do, justifying it by asserting that the child was “evil.”
Separate but Equal
Later on, the chosen one decides he needs to reform a bunch of equally sadistic torturers who serve him. To this end he gives each of them a chipmunk to take care of.
Because they’re all women (and because Richard is an übermensch) this works like a charm. Richard has no experience with carving, and yet at one point in the story he quickly carves a beautiful statue of himself, which somehow converts a bunch of communists into Objectivists.
There seems to be a trend in these books: men and women filling completely different (gender-segregated) roles in government, and the genders are portrayed as being “separate but equal” in this regard.
I don’t think I’m nitpicking here, but in real life, where there’s segregation, there’s rarely equality. Sword of Truth takes this “separate but equal” crap to an extreme not unlike Robert Newcomb, equating the concept of a strong woman with demon worship.
The Glory of War Crimes
Richard spends most of his time rescuing his beloved wife Kahlan, who’s almost as bloodthirsty as he is. Kahlan’s sister is a pacifist, which in Goodkind’s mind means she’s evil and deserves to die in a rape dungeon; Kahlan sees to it that this comes to pass. War-crimes—up to and including genocide—are something Terry Goodkind frequently glorifies. This quote by Kahlan is a perfect example:
“If war is brought to you, then let there be war like your enemy has never imagined in his most frightening nightmares. Anything less, and you hand victory to your foe.”
Kahlan Amnell
And yes, she is referring to a genocide. Richard, the worst fantasy hero himself—Objectivist moral paragon that he is—realizes partway through the story that his army will not be able to defeat the enemy army.
His solution is to bypass the army by sending his soldiers to kill all the woman and children; the soldiers bring him the innocents’ ears as proof.
Elsewhere in the story Richard slaughters peaceful protestors for being pacifists. The scariest part of all this is that many readers supposedly ask themselves in their daily lives, “what would Richard do?”
Terry Goodkind Sucks
It should come as little surprise that Terry Goodkind has some serious issues in real life—he certainly treats his cover artists like crap.
But even were Goodkind a well-adjusted human being, that wouldn’t stop this being the worst fantasy story I have ever encountered.
I wouldn’t be surprised if The Sword of Truth were the reason so many people don’t respect fantasy; it’s that bad. And I’ve not scratched the surface of this abomination!
Everything about this story is the worst. Richard is the worst fantasy protagonist I can think of. Kahlan is the worst fantasy heroine I can think of. As Goodkind himself will admit, he does no world-building; he said it as though it was a good thing, but as a result everything feels flat and shallow.
And finally, the story has—without a doubt—the worst fantasy morals of all time. There’s a good chance that if you read this series you’ll come out a worse person on the other end. Stay away.
Worse Than Just Bad Prose
I don’t know how most of these stories got to be this bad, but they did. The strange thing was how many of the worst fantasy stories have a huge following; most of them are quite popular.
I skimmed a lot of fantasy novels and watched a lot of movies when making this list, and what struck me was how the worst of them weren’t just bad because of bad prose or bad storytelling. Rather, they contained undertones of—or even expounded the virtues of—sexism, racism, and everything else of that sort.
I’m glad there are better fantasy stories out there: stories that teach good lessons and are often a ways ahead of their time. Such stories can make the real world a better place. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to read some Tolkien and some Fullmetal Alchemist. I might watch a bit of Avatar: the Last Airbender or My Little Pony, too. I suggest you do the same.