Devoneaux said:
Is there anything -other- than Tolkien fantasy? He pretty much wrote the book on the subject(No pun intended). There's always steam punk I guess, but that's less of a genre and more of a stylistic element.
Okay, that reminds me of another cliche that drives me up the wall: Tolkien.
Not, as some might assume, games being Tolkien-esque. The assumption that the so-called "standard fantasy setting" is Tolkien-esque.
I won't pretend to be a Tolkien expert, but I've read many of his books many times. I've also studied Old English, though I've only dabbled in it while Tolkien was an expert. And what people today think of as "standard fantasy setting" is pretty far-removed from Tolkien's Middle Earth. If you* think having elves and dwarves is enough to make the two similar, you only shallowly read Lord of the Rings (or worse yet, never read the books and only watched the movies).
LotR is actually kinda terrible as narratives go. The characters' motivations are often unclear, there are plenty of plot-holes, and the less said about the way women are depicted the better. The appeal of LotR and other Middle Earth stories isn't in the plot. It's not even in the setting. It's in the experience of reading them. Tolkien was a linguist. He wrote his books as though they were themselves written by people from the world in the books. He actually built linguistic drift into the languages he constructed. His character names are not random (though they may appear to be gibberish to modern readers), many of them come from ancient languages or are derived by real-world linguistic principles. Theoden, King of Rohan, is actually derived from an Old English word meaning 'lord'. The prose of LotR is littered with Old English words that don't mean the same things now that they did a thousand years ago, so for example 'fey' means something more like 'crazy' and 'doom' means 'destiny' (not necessarily negative).
The experience is akin to being in a mead-hall, listening to an epic poem read by a proud skald next to a roaring hearth fire. It's an invented cultural heritage for English-speakers, since the real history of English people lacks the poetic origins that so many other European societies had.
So when I see fantasy cliches with wizards casting fireballs with scrolls, I always grit my teeth when people think that's Tolkien and not from D&D. Because that's not from Tolkien. You'll note that in the canonical Middle Earth stories there is not a single human wizard- they are all either Istari spirits who only look like men or "the wise", i.e. people (usually elves, but sometimes people from advanced civilizations of an earlier age like the people of Numenor) whose powers come not from arcane might but simply from skills learned that mortal men do not have- not because mortal men lack arcane powers, but because humans in Middle Earth are effectively a civilization in decline set against much older civilizations (much like how the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms quickly fell into decline when Viking raids shattered their economy. Learned monks in monestaries often died in those raids, and the people who survived lost so much knowledge that people like AElfred the Great ("Elf counseled") had to institute a basic Latin literacy program for his arch-bishops.)
There are also consistent moral messages in all of Tolkien's work that almost never come out in the "Tolkien-esque" works that followed. For example, nearly every evil that is ever done in Middle Earth is done by someone who desires more than their due. There is a sort of polytheism (though mostly in the Silmarilion, not so much in LotR/The Hobbit themselves) but it's a very Judeo-Christian-influenced polytheism.
So this was meant to be a short little comment but has since become almost as sprawling as a Tolkien work itself. So TL;DR: Most things that people nowadays think of as a Tolkien-eque cliche actually only borrows superficially from Tolkien's work and more properly borrows heavily from D&D, and yes, I would include actual video game material from the Middle Earth franchise in that.
*This is a hypothetical 'you', not calling out Devoneaux personally.