“serious” high-ish fantasy set in contemporary time in a real city, and adapted to the times.

Something like Dimitri’s Pan, where the shaman of the city of Rome talks, it’s true, to the River Tiber, but also to Subway.

Actions and decisions should have consequences. Avoid deus ex machinas. Most importantly, being edgy/rude/snarky is not a personality trait. Nothing screams YA like coddling bratty, impulsive, toxic or downright irrational characters.

I have been reading since I was four and I have read mostly romance growing up until I became a adult met my husband and rediscovered my love of fantasy, sci Fi, and horror. I read at least four hours a day.

Now that my credentials are done.

I want less romance. I want a fantasy dudes on a quest, I want a new retelling of the Lord of the rings. I want real plan fantasy without romance to make a come back.

Less grimdark. More classical fantasy (Small elves, fire breathing dragons, unicorns, knights… doesnt have to be eurocentric though)

Less or no identity politics. If you look at fantasy books from the past, you weren’t told too much detail about the characters, such as race or sexuality. You could project your own fantasies on to them.

Example: in The Lord of the Rings, were Merry and Pippin a gay couple? Was Frodo an Incel? (We know Sam was straight, of course.) Do we care? Their actions overshadowed such details.

More character perspectives on ideas/worldbuilding. Blasted through The Slow Regard of Silent Things even though I happily didn’t read the sequel to The Name of the Wind, 10/10.

And less the opposite. Tried reading “The Magic of Recluce”, the MC’s personality is “I am bored and that’s an excuse to lore dump on your head.” And I’m sorry but “this island in LOTR knockoff land has an extreme but low key cultural tradition of everyone hyperfocusing on one single task in life in the belief that this will stave off conflict” is interesting, but not interesting enough sans any sort of character or plot or other idea whatsoever for me to continue.

I would like to see more depth. For example: Use of fantasy novel to explore political and philophical ideas relevant to the modern world.

Le Guin was a master of this. But there was a scarcity of this done in non-cringe manner.

I want writers to write what they love and what moves them instead of writing what audiences tell them they want. 🙂

I always want more detail in the world-building. I want magic systems with rules that make sense, magical creatures with weird biological limitations like regular animals. I want magic that’s more like coding or engineering, isn’t just off or on but doesn’t work properly all the time or has to be debugged. Sanderson’s Mistborn is a good example of a magic system with clear rules. Related to world-building: more interesting settings. Future, past, completely different universe, make stuff up, but there’s just too much that’s thinly veiled ‘medieval europe’ vibes and that gets so boring. I also want less chosen-one magic in fantasy. One of my least favourite tropes is a chosen one who can inexplicably do the most powerful magic or speak a particular language without knowing it (that’s not at all how language works!). I want my protagonists to fail, not epically and tragically but just normal everyday failures and imperfections.

To echo what some other comments say, I want less romance in my fantasy. Unless an author has a knack for depicting romantic relationships I find romance falls flat in fantasy novels. Plus if the plot or story is about saving the world or overthrowing an empire than a romance subplot (god forbid a love triangle) seems like a distraction in relation to the larger narrative.

And then my other thing I always like to see in fantasy is having the main character being an audience surrogate. Having the main character introduced to the world and concepts at the same time as the reader always makes it easier to slip into a fantasy novel (examples that come to mind are Lord of the rings, The Hobbit, Eragon, Harry Potter, The Name of the Wind, and even Game of Thrones to a certain extent as we learn about the world through the Stark children and Daenerys)

Less nonsense names. Like Sir Eldenefijerburi went to the little town of Grimfirnutsbadde to buy some sunretretten for dinner. That’s unfortunately pretty common in fantasy, and I think it needs to be taken down like 3 notches lol.

More adventure in the adventure. I feel like a lot of characters “fast travel”, which in some contexts is fine. But sometimes it’s used to make them jump from town to town to move the story along without actually going through the journey

I’m tired of having everything tied up for me lore-wise at the end. It seems like authors have a trend these days of being super proud (rightfully so!) and their intricate lore and then explain every single bit of it to me by the end. All the mystery and magic all explained, eventually, like some sort of mathematic equation.

I do enjoy books like that but I also miss when folks would leave a little bit of it unfigured out. And not like little diddly things that realistically were just there to be a red herring- I mean big shit like what the fuck is Tom Bombadil or… literally everything in Gene Wolfe lol

I rarely read fantasy books where people do cool recreational drugs for fun. They may have people addicted to horrible drugs or people using drugs for a vision quest, but never anyone just doing lighthearted casual drugs for fun or magical experimentation.