Part of me feels a bit bad about what I am about to write, because it's...not quite the most complementary thing I ever did. And that's a shame, because at the time, he was among my heroes, and his work, silly as it was, among the most inspirational to my own.
The inspiration in question is an author named Piers Anthony, and the work in question included many series of books, but the most important ones were the Xanth series. The last time I checked, this series had over twenty books, making it among the hardest things to get through this side of Terry Pratchett's Discworlds. I first read one when I was, I think, 13 or 14. I read nearly the entire series at that point throughout high school, and I thought they were amazing, incredible pieces of fiction.
If you were interested in starting them, I would recommend you not do so.
The Xanth series in particular deserves an explanation. They take place almost exclusively in Xanth, a fantasy land in a parallel world. It mostly is disconnected from our world, but periodically it opens, and when it does it often, at least in modern times, is connected directly to the space around Florida, which the land then resembles and which is, conveniently, the home state of the author. As fantasy worlds go, this one is very strongly emphasizing the fantasy. The place is home to elves, dwarves, dragons, demons, dryads, nagas, and pretty much anything else you can imagine, and even the humans aren't normal. The ones who first arrive act normal, but any human born there (or technically, brought by a stork. It's one of those fantasy worlds,) has a unique magical power. Some are completely useless, but others are so powerful they can lead the user to conquest, and because of this and tradition the land's King is always a possessor of one of these talents.
Even beyond this level of magic, the place is full of strangeness. There's a giant canyon that splits the entire place in half, a magical and angry storm cloud, a sentient, magically-generated computer, gourds connected to the realm of dreams, endless varieties of magical plants and creatures and...the puns.
Oh, God, the puns.
That's the thing about Xanth. It's...it's cute. Monster names are alliterative, human names are almost always tied into their magical power, and nearly everything else is a joke. Most are absolutely terrible puns made into literal monsters, but there are references to pop culture, products, and more. Some of them are fairly amusing (Hannah Barbarian still makes me laugh,) but after a while, they get to you. They weren't so bad in the early novels, but they got worse as they continued, and for a very good (or bad) reason. Piers started taking requests. So he go inundated with puns by his readers and happily toss a couple hundred in per novel and then thanked the contributors in the authors notes. I'd complain more, if I wasn't, well, one of said contributor. Hey, I thought the Hall Minotaurs were funny, okay.
But it's not just the puns that get to me now, especially since Piers' other works mercifully didn't use them. One of his other issues was some very odd takes on relationships, sexuality, and gender. Let's ignore the very odd things, like the "love" springs Xanth that makes you fall in love with the first creature you see, regardless of...pretty much anything. Women play starring roles as often as men, but they often end up in situations where they end up naked or in their underwear. The obsession with the underwear alone is enough to warrant some psychological theorizing, but I won't do that here. It should be noted, of course, that I started reading these things when I was just hitting puberty. These sorts of things were much better at obtaining my interests then, but while it was entertaining enough when I was a teenager, it's slightly less pleasant when I know mostly think that this is a man in his sixties writing endless novels about getting teenaged girls into their underwear.
This philosophical bent often bothered me, too, even when I was a fan. Piers had a very strong opinion on the concept of honor, which among other things, or rather especially, meant keeping one's word and following one's duty. The Xanth novels only occasionally got weird about this, but other works of his often took this to ridiculous extremes. If a supervillain captured the heroes and said "promise to help me conquer the world or I'll torture you to death," the heroes will promise, and that's what they'll do. Even if they escape or the villain just lets them go, they can happily spend the rest of the series working for evil because evil coaxed a promise out of them. Piers even thinks this includes forcing one's offspring into agreements, so if your parents agreed to work for evil before you were even born, when you grew, that's what you did! Between this and the earlier issues, it led to some shallow and frankly insane-seeming heroes.
But of course Piers had his strengths, as well. His imagination was second only to his attention to detail. Xanth itself was pretty simplistic, but it still contained dozens of unique reasons and a long history (most of his early books included a timeline a dozen pages long.) Other works got into much more esoteric lands, like two parallel planes that exist on two sides of the same planet, or an infinite number of planes that can be linked via five-dimensional algorithms represented by five beings. And the long series often took advantage of their length by advancing the plot for years or even generations. Those twenty+ Xanth novels included something like four generations of heroes, letting us see them grow up, fall in love, get married (often two seconds after falling in love, but still,) and having children that would then become the heroes three books later. It was often too pat, too easy, too contrived, but it's a method I never forgot, either.
Many of my later idols, like Joss Whedon, often trended to far towards the other direction. If there was a relationship, it was doomed within a season. If there was a group of characters, expect at least two to die, or at least turn evil. At this point, it's hard to imagine, say, the Buffy universe in twenty years without wondering how any of the characters survived.
These rules have entered my own designs. That imagination helped inspire the multi-dimensional ur-story of all my ideas, not to mention the complex ones individual games use. And that attention to detail? There's a reason my history/timeline is some 200 pages long, and the index of important characters and terms is even longer. And this timeline includes generations, children who grew up, some who did not, and a history full of heroes and villains. If Joss made me unafraid to kill a character, Piers reminded me not to be afraid to let them live sometimes as well. He contributed that much at least. Which at least makes us even after the "Satyr/Satire" pun.
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