I think the nonexistent-parents thing might stem from the fact that fantasy has its roots in fairy tale. Fairy tales are full of dead mothers and absent parents, and it's for a psychological reason: they're about the child moving into the adult role, filling that space for himself or herself. The parents get killed off or removed in order to leave the 'adult' space open.
Also, it would be cool to see more fantasy where the focus isn't on wars or on the clash of armies on an epic scale and on the fate of the entire world in the face of some vast, implacable evil that seeks to corrupt all. I enjoy epic fantasy, bit it would be fun to read more stories that focus on personal goals, relationships, local-conflicts, and even swashbuckling adventure in settings that are different in ways that change the stakes and dynamics from those we're all familiar with.
The challenge, I guess, lies in making these more personal stories and smaller-scale stakes relatable and important to the reader within a made-up world, rather than having the entire made-up world be what's at stake.
Yep. I almost never read fantasy now, but I tried a lot of it when I was younger, and what turned me off was the epic scale of everything I read. It's the same reason I don't read international thrillers about preventing a nuclear anthrax attack that will obliterate whole continents, or whatever: I'm interested in the small-scale, in individual characters. If the stakes are too huge, then the individual character gets dwarfed: there's no space for the intricacies of the protagonist's psychological development or jeopardy to be a high priority, because obviously the lives of millions and the salvation of the world are more important than whether Joe Smith gets a handle on his fractured sense of identity in time to salvage his relationships with his childhood friends. The personal stakes sometimes did get a look-in, but in the books I read, anyway, there was only room for them to be painted with the broadest strokes. I'd love to read fantasy with individual characters' psychological journeys at the heart of it.
I think one reason why that doesn't seem to happen much is that writers feel like, if you're going to go to the hassle of creating a whole different world and expecting the reader to get to grips with it, the book should be
about the world. If it's about Joe Smith's fractured sense of identity and childhood friendships, then why bother setting it in an alternative eighteenth-century Russia with wolf shapeshifters*? Why not just set it in small-town America in 2017? I don't agree, but I can see how it might feel that way to a writer.
*I would totally read this book.