I recently read Greenteeth by Molly O’Neill. I enjoyed it, but I spent most of my brain cycles thinking about the narrative tropes it uses, and whether I’ve managed to avoid them in my own work. Too many brain cycles leaves gross brain juice sloshed all over the floor, and one way to mop all that up is to write a blog post about it.
This post contains spoilers for Greenteeth.
By way of review, it’s a quaint found family adventure story set in 16th century Britain. If you like snacky fairy-tale fantasy you’ll probably enjoy it. It’s rocking four stars on Goodreads and it’s not a bad way to spend a weekend. My interest in this post is to break down some of the tropes, and examine some of the common pitfalls I see over and over in contemporary fantasy.
Tropes Are Not Bad
I should state up front that while I’m identifying certain elements of Greenteeth as “pitfalls”, that doesn’t necessarily make them bad. I noticed them because I’ve consciously tried to avoid them in my own writing, but that isn’t an endorsement of one particular style of fantasy. There are lots of reasons to lean on a good, comfortable trope. And if Molly O’Neill ever gets a chance to read Faunel Tales, I’ll bet she would have a thing or two to say about my own crutches and blind spots.
When reading fantasy, there’s a list of tropes I want to see respected. I want some coherency in the magic system. I want the state of politics, and the degree to which they impact the story, to be established pretty early on. I want to latch onto a character very quickly, and I want that character to be someone I can use to get my bearings in the setting. Being savvy to fantasy tropes can help streamline all of that.
My intention here isn’t to lambaste Greenteeth for being a tropey story in a genre that lives and dies on established tropes. It just happens to be the book on my table at the moment.
Pitfall 1: What are we doing here?
One good reason to use tropes is to establish a rapport with the reader — signal to them what parts of the story they can put on autopilot, enabling them to focus on the parts of the story you really intend to shine with.
That being said, I’m struggling to think of what Greenteeth wanted to make shine.
There are lots of good found family stories in fantasy these days, and even a few great ones. Greenteeth is another one. Three unlikely heroes team up to undertake the adventure of a lifetime. They live/laugh/love, they beat the bad guy, they happily ever after. The basic formula works as intended, but… what else was there?
This didn’t hamper my enjoyment of the story as I was reading it. But having read it, I didn’t have a reason to look back or reflect. This is what lends the story its snacky feel. Quick, digestable, ultimately forgettable.
It’s possible the connective throughline is supposed to be the found family aspect, the unlikely formation of a strong friendship between a lake monster, a witch, and a goblin merchant. But it’s such a common and ubiquitous trope these days, and the trope here is played so completely straight, that my brain didn’t latch onto it.
Pitfall 2: Surface-level mythology
Greenteeth ostensibly tells a story steeped in folklore and mythology of western Europe and the British Isles. However, it’s a very thin veneer. It’s a contemporary fantasy story with a spritz of Arthurian legend for flavor.
As an example, I had some vague familiarity with Gwyn ap Nudd as a figure from Welsh mythology, but the presentation of his character in Greenteeth as an inscrutible fae king pining for the days of yore could have been any fae king from any fantasy novel I’ve read this past year. The folklore is not the main source of nutrients.
As someone whose primary creative outlet and primary access to fantasy is Dungeons & Dragons, this is smack in my comfort zone. Every tabletop campaign I run, every video game I play, every fantasy novel I read, takes some element of mythology and repackages it. We’re not exploring mythology, we’re not even adapting it. Instead, we’re using it as a brace to prop up the grab bag of tropes.
I suppose this is the line between fantasy and historical fantasy. This isn’t Claire North’s Ithaca and it wasn’t meant to be.
Pitfall 3: Non-human characters forget they aren’t human
Greenteeth is told from the first-person perspective of Jenny Greenteeth, a lake monster who has lived in a particular pond in England for a thousand years. The first two chapters work very hard to establish Jenny as a monstrous presence, particularly where she intersects with human morality. She lives near a little village, but she never interacts with it, except for the odd bag of unwanted kittens she gets to eat. She spends her time tidying up her pond — an activity that makes no sense to a human mind. When the villagers chuck a purported witch into her lake, Jenny spends a long contemplative scene trying to figure out why she’s there, before she remembers that humans drown in water.
Once the adventure is underway, and Jenny is questing with her witch and goblin friends, her demeanor is closer to an out-of-touch human noble who has been secreted away in a tower for a few generations. She comes across less like a monster trying to make sense of the human world, and more like Marty McFly landing in 1885.
Greenteeth takes a clear stand on fae vs. human morality, and punishes Jenny harshly when she’s on the “wrong” side of things. Though the story is told through her eyes, her values as a fae creature are never validated or explored. The question isn’t even seriously asked. The one time in the story where it looks as though Jenny might assert her fae outlook, a more powerful fae creature sets her straight, and she conforms to human morality thereafter.
I usually think of this as a “kitchen sink” approach to fantasy creatures and races. We have orcs and elves and dwarflings and boggarts and a thousand other kinds of things, but aside from some physical quirks and a little cultural friction, we treat all of these as just being funny-shaped humans. We take it as given that the monster’s desire to “become human” is aspirational, even in stories where human flaws and tragedies are front-and-center.
Pitfall 4: Anachronistic language
Okay, this is more of a nitpick than a pitfall. I don’t actually want to read an entire fantasy novel written in authentic 16th-century English. Especially not filtered through the viewpoint of a character who is likely to still think and speak in 10th-century Old English. It’s the brain cycles again — I can put them to use parsing a minefield of thees, thines, and thous. But I don’t want to with a book sold to me as cozy fantasy.
Still, we have some conventions for giving a nod to archaic language without actually delving into it. That is, here in the 21st century, we have ways of approximating 16th century speech while still feeling conversational to our own sensibilities. We can make it “feel right” without insisting upon laborious accuracy. One way we do this is with a well-placed thou.
At various points in the story, Jenny’s witch friend Temperance is referred to as “mistress”, “maiden”, and “lady”. Temperance is none of these. She’s a common-born married woman. If the story took place in 1985, we would understand these words as being synonyms for “young woman”, but the story is set in 16xx.
Hmm, perhaps I’m just chafing at the missed opportunity of having a character named “Goody Crump”.
Pitfall 5: The ending twist (on page 50)
While tropes are not bad, overly relying on specific tropes means your more genre-savvy readers will guess your clever ending twist 200 pages too early.
Early in Greenteeth, Jenny takes Temperance to her little mermaid grotto, which is filled with interesting treasures and baubles from the human world. Among her collection is a mysterious sword which never rusts, and which Jenny cannot recall finding. So of course my immediate thought is, “Oh, Jenny is the Lady of the Lake, and the sword is Excalibur.”
When she departs on her adventure, Jenny takes a few of her treasures with her, including her sword. We’re told she’s not a sword fighter, and that she is perfectly capable of being violent and scary without a weapon, but she takes it anyway. Of course she does — it’s Excalibur.
When the fae king counsels you that it’s impossible to kill the big bad because all the legendary magic swords are lost to time, that’s the book signalling that the heroes are going to find one. And, of course, Jenny already has done.
It’s hard for me to gauge how deep of a pit this is. I’ve been reading fantasy for over thirty years and I went through a pretty in-depth Arthurian legend phase. I purposely selected Greenteeth from my Audible recs because I thought blending Old English mythology with Middle English witch trials was a cool idea. And, of course, guessing the twist early didn’t impede my enjoyment of the story.
There is something else about the twist that bothered me, though.
Pitfall 6: First-person secrets
First-person narratives are tricky because unless the viewpoint character is established to be unreliable, there’s an expectation that they and the reader are working with the same information. If something important happens in the story, and the viewpoint character is there to witness it, we-the-reader get to witness it, too.
But there’s a common trope in genre fiction for the viewpoint character to withhold information, specifically to make an upcoming twist work. So when Jenny executes Temperance with a bloody slash from her definitely-magic sword, and then throws both of them into her lake, you know there must be more to the story. Something happened in the scene which Jenny failed to tell us about, in order for the next scene to work properly.
I don’t really know what to do with this, except wrinkle my nose at it. Tropes are not bad, but this one’s only use case seems to be to build artificial tension in a story.
So how many pitfalls does Faunel Tales stumble into?
Of these listed? All except the last one. I’m deep down into it, baby. I’m so pitfall I’m on the Atari 2600.
Beta readers have dinged me for my use of the word “okay” as an inappropriate anachronism. They’ve also guessed the book three twist after only reading book one. They’ve wink-nudged me for everything I’ve borrowed and skimmed from my obvious D&D influences. Heck, the way I use the word “druid” in my story only makes sense if you think of fantasy adventurers in terms of having character classes.
And endlessly, agonizingly, I am in a constant state of trying to inhabit the minds of my non-human characters. Faunels aren’t humans. They shouldn’t think, act, or talk like humans. But I’m human, and I’m the one writing them. More to the point, I want my readers to like them, and to relate to them — and they’re humans too. As Jenny Greenteeth found out, that’s a very hard line to walk.
More and more, as I consume genre fiction, I find I examine it through the lens of my own work. The comparisions and contrasts bubble up, and then the brain cycles are off again. I don’t know if that’s a healthy way to read fiction, or if it’s just the natural response of someone who has written a book. I’m still new to this.
Or, maybe that’s just another pitfall I’ve fallen into.
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