>>16139178
What the fuck did you just say about J.R.R Tolkien you little bitch?
What would you describe a generic fantasy orc as being like? Probably green, big and hulking, right? No, that's D&D and Warcraft - Tolkien's orcs were bow-legged, long-armed, smaller than a human, crafty, squat, sallow, slant-eyed, and fond of human meat.
Elves are all lithe archers that live in forests, right? Half of Tolkien's elves preferred caves and stone fortresses, or comfy houses. Really, the stereotype conflates Lothlorien specifically with all of elvendom. On top of that, they were the closest thing to divine beings that one could find, with the exception of the few Maiar that wandered Middle-Earth. Tell me, where the elves that constantly sing and dance under moon, sun, and starlight? Fuck's sake, even Hackson couldn't bother to make the elves in the LotR movies sing, when singing was constant in the books. Yeah, the original D&D borrowed heavily from Tolkien, but even the artwork from that is nearly unrecognizable today. Really, you ended up with this chain of derivatives where Tolkien borrowed from actual mythology, D&D borrowed from Tolkien (and from other works in its later editions), Warhammer borrowed from D&D, Warcraft straight-up ripped off Warhammer because Blizzard couldn't get the IP, and then thousands and thousands of games, books, and settings ripped off everything from Tolkien on up, with the emphasis being on the most recent works (e.g. Warcraft). Eventually it devolved into a gigantic hideous circlejerk where everything looks the same. People like you then dismiss it all as "Tolkien-esque" without realizing just how generationally far-removed it is from Tolkien himself.
Nobody writes good fantasy because no one is studying the classics anymore.
Anyone attempting to tell a “fantasy story” now, is doing so because he read and loved other books in the “fantasy genre” already. Because Harry Potter is so successful, along with the tidal wave of Young-Adult Fiction books that have appeared since.
Worse, many young intellecuals begin writing without having read anything at all. They get into it because of the Final Fantasy games, the Zelda franchise, and Warcraft. Somewhere between these guys and the readers are people who have only ever read manga and comic books. And this is where a lot of throwaway fiction is coming from.
A very small number of people are reading THE BIBLE with an author’s eye, or the Volsunga Saga, and the Nibelungenlien, and the Eddas, which Tolkien quite litterally plagiarized in some respects. People only know of Beowulf second-hand, typically, and JRRT read it in its purest form. I hadn’t even heard of the Kalevala before I picked up Tolkien.
“Fantasy”, and I think fiction as a whole, suffers from a kind of intellectual inbreeding. Of all the authors mentioned above, most of the successful ones educated themselves on the same things that gave JRRT his edge. To be original, you must study the ‘’origin.’’