In keeping with genre fantasy are the requisite scenes of a sexual nature—The Folly of the World adroitly positions them as character development and applies their substance to reinforce the plot, rather than as the adolescent titillation of the prototypical hero’s journey where a heteronormative questing team's budding romance plays out with tepid ennui. The explicit detail is dialed up, but beyond the smut sits a standard plot of three adventures searching for a bauble; the rub is that all three are miscreants and the tale is told in increasingly unreliable voices. The plot is vehicle for character development—standard genre constructions apply.

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