One Of My “Most Disliked” Tropes Of SFF / Epic Fantasy

One of the great dangers of writing SFF is what the great Ursula Le Guin calls the “Expository Lump”, ie in lieu of a Vulcan Mind meld between author and reader, the author downloads details of worldbuilding, backstory, or other essential plot information in a giant lump of text.

Urrgh, I hear you all cry, quite rightly.

But there is an SFF trope ‘sometimes’ deployed to counteract this — or worse, simply to make the plot work — which drives me crazy as a reader.

This is when a character (often o...