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TLDR: Request for fantasy / scifi stories.
I am looking for a certain type of fantasy stories, but it's a bit difficult to describe exactly what too concisely, so please bear with me.
I keep noticing two kinds of problems in Western fantasy stories of the last decade that breaks immersion for me and makes them all feel very similar to each other (and thus more boring).
The first is that the main characters will go out of their way to virtue-signal some stance or action to appeal to the modern Western audience. It may be in the form of immediately going out to fight slavery / chauvinism / racism in a medieval society, even if such a course of action would've realistically carried great risks for the gang and little practical changes.
The second is that their thoughts and actions will be sanitised to not include anything that any large percent of the audience would be likely to find "icky" and cause them to leave a negative review or stop reading the story. This includes inner monologue of sexual nature (if it's in 1st POV); very rarely using intimidation against "non-combatants" / non-enemies; rarely using the character's advantageous position (or e.g. some resource monopoly) to strong-arm concessions from allies, neutral parties, or civilians; almost never deciding to procure slaves of their own (unless there's some convenient excuse to "force" such a scenario upon the MC); and so on.
So I am looking for stories that will not have these two types of writing tropes, and will in addition:
* be well-written in general; preferably be completed and have a large word-count
* the main character(s) should also
** not be edgelords (unless it leads to a really well-executed character development later on)
** not be sadists who tend to cause suffering / harm just for its own sake
** not be hypocrites, not apply double standards when judging others' actions v.s. judging their own
* not be the Prince of Nothing series. (edit:) Or aSoIaF, or Chronicles of Amber.
Does anyone know any such stories? Any format is fine, be it printed literature, web originals, or fanfiction.
And to clarify, I am not advocating for any real-life applications of what I've listed earlier. I just want my fictional stories to have more variety to them, and am trying to find works of western origin that would offer such variety.
edit: stories recommended so far:
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Thanks for all these recs! If you know any others, please post them too, though.
What about the Warhammer 40k universe? Very grimdark of course, but as far as I see it should mostly fulfill your conditions, though it depends on which particular book you read. Neither sadists nor edgelords are rare, for one, but they also aren't universal. I guess some may say the entire setting is kind of edgelord-y.
Another option would be old epics and stories, especially greek or german are enjoyable. Or do you specifically mean modern western? I wanted to mention japanese stories, but they are also excluded if you are spefically looking for western ones.
Eisenhorn was pretty good and would fit this I think. He's a rather grey character even from the crazy perspective of the Imperium
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