So I just learned, this morning, over mantecol cookies that Anti-Tolkenism isn't even really anti Tolkien? Like GRRM, Grimdark, & Co. (affectionate) are mad at the wrong person? Tolkien just wrote until his funky little linguistic/history nerd heart was happy with this or that book. Dude was having fun playing with all his favorite toys. (Also maybe playing with your literary toys is a good way to put all your trauma on a page for you to easily digest or understand *shrugs*)
What GRRM, Grimdark and Co (affectionate) should be mad at is Del Rey Books and their boiling down of Fantasy and Scifi to an easily copied formula for unscrupulous publishing companies, those interested in profit over quality, to make bank.. White dude goes on adventure in a world where magic works, guided by grandfatherly or spiritual mentor, and gets the girl in the end when he triumphs over evil. Sexy lamp territory. Strict gender norms up the wazoo. The Mountain Dew of books, which for legal purposes we will call Fairy Sprinkle.
Let me clear I'm not calling your meow meow or blorbos crappy or whatever. I even like Fairy Sprinkle but also realize it's not a substitute for water and is not good for you. I'm not saying you or the authors you like are bad or not good. I can only name two writers I despise. I'm agender and for now enjoy looking very feminine and am very strict about boundaries and power dynamics. You can guess who I dislike.
I'm not gonna tell GRRM or any established author what to do. (Execpt tell the mold lady to stop in meme format) I'm not telling the fans of the contra-Tolkien genres to do anything. Nor, like, telling people in the trenches with me what they should do.
Only.... Maybe don't be mad or hate someone who had nothing to do with your disillusionment or fatigue on things like hobbits, elves, talking, trees, sentient dragons, and magic swords that glow pretty. It's the companies who first tried replacing us with formulas for other to follow (in order to have the hope of getting their works published) and now attempt to replace us with AI slop.
Unfortunately, Hopepunk and such are as subversive to Tolkien as Grimdark is. Grimdark is the formula that responded to DelRey Books' Tolkien Knockoffs formula and Hopepunk or CrystalLight to the Grimdark formula.
We're not selling new flavors of Fairy Sprinkle here, ppl. We're meant to be creating universes, pantheons, best friends, dearly beloatheds, Monster Mommies/Daddies for the monsterfuckers. Corn syrup and spiky water could never.
The answer posed by the video essay I watched? Don't follow or formula or try to subvert something bc pointy ears make you gag. Make stew. Fuck Fairy Sprinkle TM fomulas, its unantural and made in lab and packaged by machines with very few people sprinkled through out.
Grab a bit of everything you want in your book, wash, prep, and cook it so it comes out nice. That is, work with writing techniques like pacing, grammar, plotting, and so on. Making stew is how I interpret it. Cooking has things you do to make sure things don't go horribly wrong, but everything else is up to taste and whim. Also, ya Boi is hangry this chilly awful monday morning. I watched the video during breakfast, but now it's like 3 hours later at work.
I'm gonna try it.
The only authors I have a bone to pick with are ones who turned out to be awful people. The only goal there is to my writing is to write better than them for my sake. And maybe become one of the many to make them irrelevant in the future. Who knows. They might do that themselves.
So let's make stew and stop shitting on a dude who made stew one particular way he liked. It's not his fault someone took a sip and made up a fake recipe for his homemade bowl of hug.
