In the wake of the Season 8 finale of "Game of Thrones", based off of the George R.R. Martin book series A Song of Ice and Fire, it may be time to take a serious look at high fantasy as a genre and ask ourselves one simple question: where does it go from here? What is there left to do in fantasy that someone else hasn't already done to its fullest potential? How much can the tropes that populate the genre really be changed?

I gave the example of A Song of Ice and Fire mainly because its author prides himself on subverting the tropes of fantasy and giving us, the readers, a gritty and intense world that seems new and novel. Martin himself is known to have criticized fantasy novels for sticking too closely to things such as a dark lord bent on world domination and a pure-hearted hero rising up to stop them. The sentiment is shared by many and the largely successful subversion of these tropes is what has made the books and later show so popular.

But the point has to be made that in the end many of the same tropes were met. There is a dark lord bent on taking over the world for ambiguous reasons. There are several basically good people that are willing to risk it all to stop that from happening. The journey may be different but the destination is ultimately the same in many people's opinions. But if someone sets out to try to subvert the common elements of fantasy like that, why can't they?

It may be that there just isn't enough wiggle room within the parameters for a story within fantasy that result in a satisfying conclusion. There is a real fear that if the story doesn't amount to some epic battle between good and evil that we as the readers will feel cheated. Maybe it all comes down to that

It is also wrong to say that A Song of Ice and Fire is alone in trying to pull away from these tropes however they can. For instance, it could be argued that the idea of the chosen hero rising up to defeat some great evil, while done very well in the series, is done even more effectively in a lesser known trilogy called the Broken Empire. Here, in place of a righteous hero, we have Jorg Ancrath: a sociopathic, estranged prince that takes over a neighboring kingdom and later defends it out of a combination of boredom and the possibility of personal gain.

Yet, it is a bestselling series and renowned for its detailed and darkly humorous characters seen through the sadistically gleeful first-person perspective of Jorg himself. But Jorg’s character, even while reading the books for the first time, feels like lightning in a bottle. There is very little doubt that such a dynamic and interesting character only works because he is a subversion of the common traits of protagonists we have seen before. If it became the norm to write such characters, it would lose all of its effect on the reader to do so.

The Broken Empire trilogy also use another subversive trope that is growing in popularity in more recent works which is to throw in a twist later in the story that, rather than actually being in a fantasy world apart from our own, the entire story is set in a distant future of our own world in which society started over after an apocalyptic collapse thousands of years earlier. Unlike other subversions, in which the primary criticism is that they don’t lead anywhere or change much, placing the entire fantasy in our own world makes undermines the definition of the genre. Many would say that it passes into science fiction territory the moment the word “apocalypse” is uttered.

So in the end what is left? There are very limited structural tropes of fantasy that can be changed without leaving the reader feeling dissatisfied and cheated, and only a handful more subversions that can be made to the characters and tone that fit. In both of these cases, it runs the risk of the genre becoming tired and redundant. While this is not yet how fantasy is commonly seen, this could someday be true in the near future. In the end, it is just up to new writers to keep trying new things and up to their readers to be open-minded to them. Otherwise, fantasy may risk slipping away into obscurity, without a soul to read them.