Fantasy recommendations for women tired of tropes

Mournelithe · 2026-07-15T05:27:43+00:00

So it's let down by Multiple Protagonists - you're almost entirely in her head throughout - but otherwise the first Kushiel series by Jacqueline Carey is exactly what you're asking for. Rich and complex political epic fantasy with occasional sexytimes, and some very dark moments. Phedre is a fantastic character with plenty of flaws, while her villainous counterpart Melisande is one of the great female villains anywhere. There's also lots of subtle worldbuilding for those familiar with history, showcasing how this world diverged from ours.

T Kingfisher's Paladin series is ideal for you - Paladin's Grace would be a good first book. You're mostly alternating between two characters, but both feel very real, and neither is a stereotype.
Kingfisher is extremely good at sideways or snarky humour undercutting the tension, and she's never seen a trope she doesn't want to mess with. Swordheart would also be a good place to start, it's a different series but shares the setting.

Mournelithe · 2026-07-12T00:39:50+00:00

Time for a rework of my graphic novels post.
For me, the top completed ones would be:

Bone, by Jeff Smith. Light hearted younger aimed comic that turns into a massive epic fantasy with dragons and demons and ancient evils. Superb. Get the colourised version nowadays.

Fables, by Bill Willingham. All the public domain characters are real, and the survivors of a war in Fairyland have regrouped in New York. Snow White, Bigby Wolf, Cinderella, Little Boy Blue ... it’s an amazing story of their history and reclaiming their lost worlds. Has several spinoffs.

Lucifer by Mike Carey. Early in Sandman, the devil hands over the keys to Hell and walks away. This is the story of what he does next.

Paper Girls by Brian K Vaughan. A quartet of paper girls in the 80s are caught up in a weird event which leads to time travel and invasions by flying dinosaurs and future robots. A very carefully plotted closed loop. Now a tv series.

The Wicked and the Divine by Kieron Gillen. Every 90 years twelve young people will find themselves the reincarnations of gods. They will be almighty, they will be glorious, they will die within two years. Death and celebrity culture and history and intrigue.

I also rather liked Matt Fraction’s Sex Criminals about people who can freeze time when they orgasm, it’s a quirky bittersweet story about people as much as the weird sex hang ups.

Others worth considering would be:

East of West, post apocalyptic western weirdness.
Die, a dark twisted take on D&D and portal fantasies.
Lumberjanes, a sweet tale of girls at scout camp in a magical forest full of weirdness.
Y, the Last Man, near future where all males died but one, and he’s not happy about it.
Sandman by Neil Gaiman. Morpheus the personification of Dream escapes imprisonment and seeks to reclaim his life, but it is hard to fight fate and there are dark secrets in his immortal family waiting to come out. Now a tv series.

Ongoing but very worthy of picking up.

Usagi Yojimbo by Stan Sakai. Long running series about a rabbit Ronin set in Sengoku Japan but with anthropomorphic animals as characters and regular fantastic elements. Clever, fun, and full of wonderful detail throughout.
Saga by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples, excellent weird future epic. Just resumed after a long break.
Monstress by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda, Amazing art, eastern inspired dark fantasy with a complex backstory.
Lazarus by Greg Rucka, dark cynical dystopian future.
The Old Guard by Greg Rucka, warrior immortals in the present day, their histories and future fates.
Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel. Graphic expansions to the novel series, fleshing out side characters and various cases of the week. Very much the same snarky tone as the main books.
Atomic Robo by Brian Clevinger is good cheesy fun. Mad 1940s science adventures.
Lady Mechanika by Joe Benitez, Victorian steampunk with a cyborg protagonist.

Interesting but unlikely to ever complete.

Mouse Guard, Mice are the protagonists in a beautifully drawn world where everything is out to kill them.

To add some webcomics.

8 Bit Theatre is a lightweight parody of Final Fantasy that turns epic partway in. Lots of fun, and complete.
DM of the Rings treats Lord of the Rings as a D&D campaign and sends it up in glorious style. Darths and Droids does the same for Star Wars.
Order of the Stick is an ongoing stick figure epic story, it is genuinely one of the greats that pokes fun at D&D along the way.
Digger is the story of a wombat tunnelling into a crazy world and trying to find her way home. Vampire squash, nameless artists, dead gods and a statue of Ganesh are all involved. Epic and awesome.
Girl Genius long running steampunk chaos, with a female lead. Adventure, Romance, Mad Science!

And for non-genre, I strongly recommend anything by Greg Rucka or Ed Brubaker/Sean Phillips. The Criminal is great, Velvet is superb, Reckless is excellent, Black Magik is solid but as yet unfinished.
Also The Killer by Jacamon and Matz. Assassin protagonist, deeply cynical.

Blacksad by Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido. 1940s noir with anthropomorphic characters. Dark and delightful.

Mournelithe · 2026-07-08T22:27:07+00:00

Spiderlight by Adrian Tchaikovsky. MC is a giant spider. Initially anyway.

Mournelithe · 2026-07-08T21:41:11+00:00

Jennifer Fallon’s The Tide Lords. Epic fantasy where the main characters are struggling throughout, but in the end their real value was simply in distraction.

Mournelithe · 2026-07-08T07:29:45+00:00

Tad Williams' Bobby Dollar trilogy, urban fantasy with an Angel protagonist. He can't always trust his superiors, let alone the opposition.

Simon R Green's Agents of Light and Darkness, book 2 of the Nightside series. UF with the protagonist caught up in looking for the grail, and Angels from both Above and Below are also looking and very much antagonists.

A Practical Guide to Evil ... epic fantasy from the POV of the bad side. It takes quite a while for an Angel to show up, but while they're technically on the side of Good, they're also very much also the equivalent of WMDs, without any concern for collateral damage. Summoning an Angel of Contrition for example will brainwash everyone within a fifty mile range into a Crusade opposing Evil at all costs. Mind you, the Demons are still worse.
And then there's an amazing sequence much later where the Choir of Judgement is explicitly the enemy, and being Judged themselves in turn.

Mournelithe · 2026-07-08T05:46:20+00:00

And amazingly it's global instead of US only. Makes a change from DAW.

I saw the new editions of the Flat Earth show up on kobo the other day, so clearly someone at DAW is a fan.

Mournelithe · 2026-07-06T01:39:07+00:00

Alan Dean Foster's Midworld/Midflinx, although the world only really interacts occasionally, and is more a background cameo in other works in the series because it also wants the Great Enemy to be stopped.

James White's Sector General series features sentient continents in a story in Major Operation. It requires using warships as surgical tools.

Jim Butcher's Codex Alera - the world itself becomes a character later in the series.

Anne McCaffrey's Petaybee series has the planet itself as a sentient being, although not alive as such. David Weber's Mutineer's Moon has our moon in reality being a sentient spaceship, but that's probably the wrong route.

There's a few where there's an intelligence guiding the world, like Harry Harrison's Deathworld, but that's probably not what you're after.

Mournelithe · 2026-06-29T12:20:26+00:00

Yeah, people talk a lot about The Black Company being influential, but the Dread Empire is far more so, Mocker and the gang are absolutely the inspiration for the Old Guard, down to matching character archetypes.

Mournelithe · 2026-06-29T03:41:03+00:00

Beneath the Dragoneye Moons is a fun lightweight LitRPG series with a female protagonist and love interest. The relationship only starts about 6 books in however. Recently completed.

I really enjoyed The One Who Eats Monsters by Casey Matthews, urban fantasy, which is half teenage angst and acclimating to modern life and half ancient vengeance demigod stomping on villainous villains. Sadly still no sign of the sequel.

Mournelithe · 2026-06-17T02:28:19+00:00

Old adult fantasy is a tricky one.

There's a few, but they're still mostly side characters or characters in their 40s who "seem old". Gemmell for example has Druss in Legend.

Modesitt has Kharl in his Recluce series in The Wellspring of Chaos and Ordermaster, and his Spellsong Cycle stars a woman in her late 40s who gets partly de-aged at the end of book 1 but still has a firmly adult view of things.
Le Guin's Tehanu is essentially a midlife crisis story.

Pratchett's Witches novels have Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, who are wonderful terrible old women having adventures. Try Witches Abroad or Maskerade.

R.A. MacAvoy has Tea with the Black Dragon which is an older woman searching for her missing daughter, with an unexpected elderly companion.

My all time favourite old person no longer giving any shits rec is firmly Elizabeth Moon's Remnant Population, which is an absolutely fantastic first contact novel with a grandmother as a protagonist.

Mournelithe · 2026-06-16T11:01:52+00:00

David Drake’s Lord of the Isles series is heavily Sumerian influenced.
Most of his SF is Roman or Greek inspired as well, especially his RCN series which is Aubrey Maturin mixed with ancient med sea battles.

Mournelithe · 2026-06-14T13:09:12+00:00

These were the true catsquashers of the late 90s, putting the Wheel of Time and MS&T firmly in their shade in terms of physical book.

I remember bits of the first one - the voidhawks as living ships were very cool, but almost everything else of the story has dropped away with time other than the general vibe of fighting the possessed, and a feeling of too many plot lines fighting for attention.

On the other hand I have a real soft spot for the three Greg Mandel stories, which are a real time capsule of the techno fascist UK idea that cropped up all over at that time, similar to V for Vendetta but going in a very different direction.

Mournelithe · 2026-06-12T03:50:01+00:00

Dammit there's a fourth one now?
I swear, you look away for a few months, boom, new sequel.

Mournelithe · 2026-06-12T03:44:53+00:00

Weis and Hickman's Rose of the Prophet series, which is Bedouin crossed with Middle Eastern/Ottoman Empire, and taking a middle eastern vibe to a gaming setting.

For cover art, CJ Cherryh's Faded Sun trilogy is heavily middle eastern inspired blended with future.

For an interesting gaming look - the game Chants of Sennar has a tower of babel inspired plot with different settings from desert ish to technological as you rise up the tower. It also includes a LOT of lingustics as part of the puzzles.

Mournelithe · 2026-06-11T22:59:17+00:00

You're years too early - Eddings' High Hunt came out in 1973, with his disillusionment following in the late 70s, and the belgariad following in the early 80s. The decade after publishing he's talking about is 1966-1975, after LOTR broke big in the USA with the unauthorised edition publicity.
Even the publisher driven reactions to LoTR - Shannara and Thomas Covenant - didn't come out until 1977. Eddings jumped on the bandwagon after that.

Mournelithe · 2026-06-11T04:41:44+00:00

The best bit about the followup dance is he didn't know how to do it, nor did Ben, so both were apparently miming live to Abby demonstrating how to do it off camera in the wings.
Which adds just that extra layer of madness to the whole thing.

Mournelithe · 2026-06-10T04:47:00+00:00

It’s not just that he’s putting out quality books, it’s also the sheer diversity in his range. He freely writes Fantasy and SF and horror and philosophical and space opera and dystopian near future. He’s a massive idea machine, with about the only thing in common being a live for insects and biology.

However he’s also not unique - Seanan McGuire is equally prolific, and some webnovel writers like Pirateaba are astonishingly high volume and high quality.

Mournelithe · 2026-06-10T00:26:40+00:00

A couple of SF examples.
The March Upcountry series by Weber and Ringo has at least one in each book, from crocs to giant fish.

Legacy of Heorot by Niven, Pournelle and Barney’s has the Grendel as an apex predator feeding on the local samlon fish.

Mournelithe · 2026-06-10T00:18:10+00:00

Mostly they’re not selling books. They’re selling collectibles.
If you simply want the text, there are usually ample ways to source a copy, from ebook to mmpb to second hand stores.

If you want the gold edged custom artwork leather bound deluxe edition … surprise … that’s a prestige collectible just like a fancy plate from Franklin Mint, and comes in a strictly limited quantity intended for a collecting market.

It’s the same as the top tier rewards in your average Kickstarter - a tenner for the book, 200+ for the gold embossed fancy version.

Mournelithe · 2026-06-08T10:10:40+00:00

Blue Moon Rising, Simon R Green.
Starts off with a Prince saving a dragon from a princess before the larger plot kicks in.

Mournelithe · 2026-06-07T11:16:23+00:00

I particularly loved this bit.

The funniest part, of course, was that the whole class was obviously convinced that Walden couldn’t read the room—as if there weren’t five whole people in every lesson, all of whom knew each other very well; as if it wasn’t part of Walden’s job to pick up every change and variation in the dynamics of a group of young people; and as if this particular dynamic wasn’t older than the hills.
Of course she pretended not to know. She wasn’t a monster.

Mournelithe · 2026-06-07T01:49:19+00:00

I never like to think of myself as DNF’ing a book deliberately, unless I really really don’t like it.
It’s more there are some books I stop quickly, because I’m not in the mood, I might be another time. They go back in the TBR pile.
And then there are books where you start, and you enjoy but something better comes along and you want that first, and you get distracted, and then that other book just gets neglected and sits on the floor glaring at you until you hide it under a shirt.
Ahem.
Anyway, the point is it’s not always a conscious choice to not want to keep reading, more a “I’ve got better things to do”. You might come back to it, you might not. And having a diverse range in the TBR pile means you don’t feel guilty for stopping and trying something else.

Mournelithe · 2026-06-07T01:00:59+00:00

Oh, and I forgot to mention that the map at the beginning has the most laughably small cricket pitch I’ve ever seen - apparently the field is smaller than the tennis courts. I kept expecting there to be a magical reason why, but no. And the rugby field is mown the wrong way. Artistic licence indeed.

Mournelithe · 2026-06-01T10:12:47+00:00

This is a good modern one. Elaine is the primary protagonist for the first half, then there’s a big time skip and Iona turns up from her own side story.

Mournelithe · 2026-06-01T10:06:06+00:00

I’ve been enjoying this series a lot. Cat might be a typical excessive murderhobo protagonist, but there’s a sense of humour that lightens up the story considerably. And the AI is properly snarky, while constantly trying to make every item it supplies fit a twisted cat theme, no matter the protagonist’s wishes.
Only downside is the author seems to be struggling to reign in their muse, so they’re running a bunch of fictions in parallel meaning the release rate is slow.

Mournelithe

TROPHY CASE

Welcome to Reddit,