Elf edition.
Since a bunch of the old threads were basically nuked with the server transfer, I wanted to revive some of them.
General discussion of the fantasy genre.
65 posts and 22 image replies omitted.>>45656Just to demonstrate how either insanely lazy, or more likely rushed and assembly line the show must have been shot, at the end of penultimate episode one of the main characters gets killed, and in the next episode he is back like nothing happened, not with any in-universe explanation or anything like that, the show just has such a poor continuity. My guess is that the script called for scene where the villain meets a hero on the battlefield, and defeats him. But when they shot that scene, I guess the director literally did not read the rest of the script, that this character in fact should not die here, and interpreted "defeat" as "murder". So you see a guy get repeatedly skewered in the chest, and then the next episode he is just fine. He is not wounded, nothing like that, the previous scene with him was simply forgotten about.
>>45674Indeed it's not medieval. Taking literally not even ASOIAF or The Witcher are medieval because the societies they represent are only aesthetically and superficially influenced by Europe: there's no confluence of Germanic migrations interacting with an old Roman power to create something new.
Someone probably studied this but it's a 'medieval' aesthetic made true by an stereotyped view of the Middle Ages that seeped into entertainment media.
>>45661Does that orc's armor have spines inlaid in it?
What a bizarre detail. Orc armor was chaotic in the Jackson movies, but it was all functional armor.
>>46240Nobody said he invented fantasy, just that he influenced the whole genre.
>>46241The fixation on distinct fantasy races with their own cultures and languages was original to Tolkien. Elves and dwarves exist in earlier myth and fantasy but Tolkien was the one who spelled them with the v instead of the f and almost all contemporary elves and dwarves take more after Tolkien's races than mythical/fairytale creatures.
>>46245>Nobody said he invented fantasy, just that he influenced the whole genre.But he really didn't. In what way?
>The fixation on distinct fantasy races with their own cultures and languages was original to Tolkien. No it's fucking not. Of course every fantasy race has their own culture in every fantasy work. Look at the OZ series. Look at the books they say
<Tolkien stated in a letter to the novelist Naomi Mitchison that his orcs had been influenced by George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin.[T 1] He explained that his word "orc" was "derived from Old English orc 'demon', but only because of its phonetic suitability",[T 1][17] and I'd say what was maybe new for him was he shifted the focus away from the traditional fantasy adventure format, where the hero, goes on journey, meets this strange creature, this magical character, etc. etc.(which The Hobbit fits more into that mold) and shifted the focus onto a large scale war. Like everyone says about the obvious WW2 allegory of LOTR.
>Elves and dwarves exist in earlier myth and fantasy but Tolkien was the one who spelled them with the v instead of the f and almost all contemporary elves and dwarves take more after Tolkien's races than mythical/fairytale creatures.<Minor spelling changeI wouldn't say that at all. His dwarves and orcs fit neatly with all previous portrayals and descriptions for the most part. And once again how silly it is to try and claim he has the trademark for what he tweaked from popular folklore and mythology.
And top of all that, not all fantasies are Tolkien inspired. There's a lot of fantasy out there. I won't repeat myself again but I hate this shallow media literacy that leads people to make grand sweeping statements about a genre they really know nothing about. Yeah it seems that way to you that the Beatles or Tolkien were completely original artists and all artists after them are copycats of them specifically, but if you had some media literacy you'd understand what work came out before them and at the same time as them, they were inspired by their peers, people today maybe more inspired by one of their contemporaries than them, but their work may share similarities with that other artist they weren't inspired by. To make these broad sweeping statements about the course of an artistic genre, you'd need to have like encyclopedic historian knowledge of literally everything that was coming out then, being written about, being talked about, etc. and even then, you can't really know what was the situation then just from whatever surviving documentation is around.
>>46254It's more like Del Ray's formula was an impression of Tolkien rather than being based on any kind of genuine understanding of Tolkien, which causes Del Ray "Tolkienesque" literature to actually differ significantly from Tolkien's actual works while maintaining surface-level similarities.
Which is important, since many critiques of Tolkien aren't actually critiques of Tolkien at all, but of the Del Ray formula. "Epic Pooh," for instance, is pretty much just a critique of the Del Ray formula, but is so inaccurate as a critique of Tolkien it makes you wonder if Moorcock actually read any of Tolkien's works.
>>46330Exactly.
The only problem it would face is that people would call it fanfiction, but since we're already in a fanfiction era, you might as well go full new material fanfic instead of ruining established material.
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