Blog Take With A Grain Of Salt
Limyaael is well read in and passionate about the fantasy genre and she is a writer as well as reader. She knows, what she is talking about.
Her "rants" cover a wide range of topics, styles and plots. Some are very specific, (Rant about healers), some deal with very basic stuff (making a stand-alone). All of them are written with verve and wit.
She hates tropes for the sake of tropes and suspects that many old fantasy cliches are there because the writer just never thought about them. There is an undercurrent of "fantasy could be so much more if..." She is inventive, finding ways to twist an old idea, pointing out how even the most typical fantasy tropes can be bypassed and describing new ideas she has. She is very good at making one aware of tropes used and avoided.
But there are two problems I have with the "rants". The first, and more troublesome: She mixes up her personal tastes with objective quality. While she often mentions that the rants are about what she likes, the write ups don't reflect this awareness. She likes clear, clipped prose, therefore a flowery one is "purple". She prefers novels to beginn with a character, therefore beginning with a location is boring. She prefers cynical works and treats idealistic ones as stupid.
The other is a personal peeve of mine. Being a writer, Limyaael could talk about her own troubles and successes, speak to aspiring writers as a fellow toiler and encourage new writers instead of intimidate them. But she has a patronizing streak and unfortunately only mentions her works when describing how she did something "right". This style also makes the readers grovel, don't expect much real discussion in the comments.
I think new and insecure writers best profit from the rants by keeping firmly in mind what they want in their work. If the rants point out something one only does because everyone does, maybe the story would be better without it? And be also ready to keep a trope, even if it's just been ripped a new one by Limyaael, because no matter what she thinks, you're just as suited to define what fantasy is and should be.
Blog There's Fantasy and then there's Fantasy
One significant flaw of Limyaael's body of work is that she lumps all of "Fantasy" together.
The problem with that is, there are two very different currents at work in fantasy (that are superficially similar in that they include magic and dragons). There's a current toward literature (attempts to draw social portrait, complex characters and flaws, experiments, etc), and the other, toward storytelling (attempts to amuse and entertain listeners, and to be an escapist genre). They can be mixed, and there's a whole array of stories between them, but the important thing is, both have their place.
That Limyaael just lump everything together and ignores any specificity is obvious: she mentions Tolkien and quote On Fairy Stories (And OFS, The Hobbit and The Lord are all about the Storytelling tradition) then turns around and point to Hobb and Martin as good examples (who lean more toward the literature current, and less the escapist one), right in her introductory essay. Then she turns and basically all her advice is "write fantasy literature, screw storytelling".
Her advice is good if you'd rather write something more on the experimental or literary side. If you want to tell a story, or to analyze the work of someone trying to tell a story, best to ignore her, however. She denounces tropes, but tropes (because they answer concepts that rest deep within our minds) are the lifeblood of storytelling. She's against idealism, and want realistic worlds, but idealism often goes hand in hand with escapism. She warns about having original vilains, but a storyteller's vilain is not a character, he's an interesting challenge for the hero to take on. She recommend geological accuracy in mapmaking, but how many people will even notice, if they're busy reading the story?
Basically, whether or not you ignore Limyaael depends entirely on what you want to write, but there are large portions of fantasy writing that can safely do so.