One of the things that D&D has to be praised AND blamed for is how it managed to unite together polar-opposite fantasy works.
I was planning on updating my old fantasy read list for "old school D&D" and so as I dug into the fantasy books the game took inspiration from (or in the case of the first edition, ripped off from Xp), I came to this realization.
It has already been established that one of the main reasons behind D&D's great success and lasting appeal is that it managed to bring together and unite elements taken from ALL the great, classical, foundational fantasy works of the time into one same universe that was the ultimate synthesis of what fantasy was at the time. You've got Tolkien and Leiber and Conan and Jack Vance and the Cthulhu mythos all together in one game...
... But not many people point out that this same thing is also what made the original brand of D&D fantasy age badly, what caused many of the first-generation D&D-inspired fantasy works to be plain bad , and what changed massively people's view of fantasy for the bad. Because, what EXACTLY did D&D do? It took polar opposite fantasy works, and blended them into one same thing. It took away all the nuances to have one monochrome set. It focused on uniting together the elements, the characters, the places and the archetypes, but at the cost of losing the themes, the motifs, the tone, the uniqueness of it all.
Mind you, again it was and still is one of D&D's strength. It built itself into an open-game allowing for all and any sort of stories and adventures - and many of today's web-series based on D&D show the game's current ability to do ANYTHING by having so many different tones and settings and inspirations... BUT it does not change the fact that, as a result, it erased massively the diversity of what fantasy used to be, to replace it with this artificial idea of "generic fantasy" that then became a reality.
For example, let us consider how D&D united together the pole of the two "classics" of first-generation fantasy, Conan the Barbarian and The Lord of the Rings, with the two most famous "anti-Tolkien" and "anti-Conan" fantasy works: Earthsea, and The Elric Saga. The character of Elric was designed to be the very opposite of what Conan was, and by extension the world of Elric was also designed to oppose all the settings Tolkien or Howard could have written. Earthsea was also designed to oppose and contradict Tolkien's work in every way in terms of setting, tone, inspiration, aesthetic, scope... As I said before, the world of Earthsea already offered in the 60s and 70s what so many modern fantasy novels of the 2000s and 2010s are claiming to be "the first ones to do", like... having a POC main character, having a female main character that isn't sexualized in a fantasy story, having a fantasy story not inspired by Europe, having a fantasy story that is not solved and is not about warriors, war or weapons, using fantasy to deal with internal problems and psychological topics... It was all there before, and yet everybody forgot it until quite recently, and why? I am very tempted to say that D&D and the format of fantasy is spread in American culture from the 80s onward had a part to play.
Because D&D took these elements from Earthsea... and placed them in a world inspired by the Lord of the Rings, and that smashed Conan with Fafhrd, and as a result it got dissolved into these other works, and Earthsea was often see as "Oh yes, just another sword and sorcery story, isn't it?".
Of course I am not claiming this is what actually happened, nor that Earthsea was the only work to suffer from it... But it cannot be denied that the massive spread, success and fame of D&D in America (and in Europe afterward) led to a certain idea, conception and vision of fantasy to be massively shared, copied and treated as the "real, typical, true fantasy"... When in fact it was a mash-in and blending of very varied and nuanced works offering a vast and complex extant of fantasy... A reduction and synthesis that gave a false idea of what fantasy was and ended up burying many strange, bizarre, alternate, groundbreaking or before-their-time fantasy works.
Of course, I am also NOT saying D&D is the only one to blame for that... The success of The Lord of the Ring movies in the early 2000s also had a part to play in this ; and then it was the success of Warcraft, etc etc... But I can't help to compare a bit what D&D did to the idea of fantasy, to what Coca-Cola did to the image of Santa Claus. Santa Claus/fantasy did exist long before Coca-Cola/D&D got hold of it... And afterward Santa Claus/fantasy regrew in its own thing... But in between Coca-Cola/D&D managed to reinvent fantasy/Santa Claus into a massively shared concept and widely accepted idea that became part of culture and marked deeply the history of fantasy/Santa Claus...
