Thaluikhain said:
Hawki said:
But since people are bringing it up, I disagree that WFB is over the top. W40K? Sure. But WFB is pretty tame in comparison. The most esoteric things you get are Chaos, and even then, the idea of "demons from beyond the world that want to kill us" isn't exactly without precedent in mythology.
The OtT of both 40k and WHFB waxed and waned depending on which author you were reading and what GW was doing with the setting.
I mean, WHFB is nowdays replaced with Age of Sigmar, and that is ridiculously over the top.
But yeah, WHFB went somewhere very different from LotR. In part, I think, so that every army has a reason to fight eveyr other army, and themselves, rather than the "Good" side and the "Evil" side.
Tolkien is pretty OtT. I mean Aragorn in the books is constantly showing off his sword to complete
randos and just automatically expecting fealty. He's kin of a massive douchebag in Fellowship because he's there tossing up whether he should help Frodo or just simply kick in the doors of Minas Tirith and simply take the throne as if one would take candy from a baby.
Then you've got fucking Gandalf who is like; "Lol, I'm the biggest mofo this side of Mordor...." So on, and so on and so on. Throw on Tolkien's patently racist ideas and his musings about the humanity of people who are simply just
not Caucasian, which can be summed up as basically just
screaming 'I truly am this British!' considering his time and place.
Tolkien's stuff is pretty OtT. Let me remind people that Tolkien described the Orcs as
as if the ugliest specimens of the Mongoloids ... yeah, that patently racist. People can scream 'political correctness gone mad' when they display orcs as the
more friendlier depiction of fantasy tropishness of green skinned, tusk-mouthed barbarians ... but just remember that's
not what Tolkien was thinking when he was writing about his orcs.
He was thinking Genghis Khan. And this is the interesting thing of Tolkien's works. Is that publicly Tokien
despised apparent racism in European society, all while failing to critically interrogate his own works and being
incredibly racist. The Lord of the Rings is basically an exercise in how people carry unconscious biases even
as they write them down.
So when people say that Tolkien is the 'father of high fantasy' ... I honestly think we've done a
bigger paint job of his works than people would actually care to realize.
Because the fact of the matter is that orcs as basically caricatures of East Asians
wouldn't fly and even (hopefully) to all those types of people that would just mindlessly scream 'SJW' at the slightest hint of applied critical theory would also (hopefully) feel somewhat uncomfortable if
patently displayed as intended in things like the movie trilogies or cover art of the books.
Moreover, what exactly did Tolkien do but reimagine real world constructs like concepts of God (and Eru Iluvator), and misappropriating things like Celtic traditional fairy tales? It even has a weird take on the Irenaean theodicy and Purgatory and Excalibur. IMO people like Lewis and MacDonald were more high fantasy worlds (in C. S. Lewis' case) ... or MacDonald in terms of an evolution of traditional fairy tales.
Stuff we've done with high fantasy that we attribute to Tolkien have gone through so many creative lenses and transformation it's kind of like calling a bar of soap and a stone slab and wash basin as the 'parent of the top loader washing machine'.