When someone make a post saying how much they like the series, then for some reason there are often others who ridicule them for that. Why? One of the strengths of speculative fiction is the diversity, We have gritty stuff like Game of Thrones, and we have more innocent and cozy stuff like The Shannara Chronicles. Something for everybody.
shareThere is room in my heart for fantasy stories of all shapes and sizes. To me, fantasy can be mind-blowing and amazing (like GOT or LOTR) or it can be light hearted "comfort food" (like The Princess Bride, or early Harry Potter). The Shannara Chronicles falls in the latter category. There's nothing wrong with that. You'll never catch me trying to turn The Shannara Chronicles into something it's not. It has its problems as a lot shows do. I still enjoyed it though.
No one should be getting trolled for being positive about a show or film. That's not right.
"Long days and pleasant nights!"
Yes, despite a few deaths, this is what I would call a feel-good fantasy that even children can enjoy. Low fantasy or high fantasy, urban fantasy or sword and sorcery, YA-fantasy or adult gritty fantasy. They are all branches on the tree of fantasy.
Sadly there are also posters who are wasting their time on something they claim to hate, but still decide to watch. Like the other poster in this thread, which one can easy ignore without using the ignore function.
Yes, I just *ignored* him actually - he clearly wasn't going to say anything useful.
I don't watch shows I don't like, but I've been surprised in the past, by what I've taken a liking to in terms of programming. Most of the shows I watch are pretty intense, so I watch stuff like iZombie, The Shannara Chronicles and Supergirl as "pallete cleansers".
"Long days and pleasant nights!"
The show is dumb. REALLY dumb. It is like the writers assume the viewers are full-blown mongoloids. The plot-holes, the poor writing, the sloppy directing, the atrocious acting. It all adds up.
shareI enjoy the overall series, but could do without the love triangle, or who is hooking up with who.
It's not about gritty vs. innocent. It's about layered and complex vs moronic. The problem with the Shannara Chronicles is not even that it's aiming for simplistic or that it's condescending to its audience so gleefully, it's just that it's doing it poorly.
Really though, the biggest issue I have with it is that since it's easy to make something as crappy as this, that's all we get now and the good complex stories are never told anymore.
True, OP. Game of Thrones sets a standard for attempting realism in a fantasy context, though it shouldn't be to the exclusion of other fantasy ideas (though sometimes those ideas are not executed in a way that is absorbing and not cliched or with a mundane feeling - a story should be well told and represented).
Not sure about innocent and cosy, though: black magic, doomsday annihilation, ugly bestial races, etc. It certainly has a classic fantasy story feel with the combo of those elements and the positive characters and their counterwise activities.