People think DnD is Tolkien when it’s more like Fantasy Super Smash Brothers at best.
The thing about Tolkien is that even though he was relatively conservative and a forerunner of the genre, he was a genuinely thoughtful person who considered his Legendarium carefully. A lot of "Tolkienian" fantasy is Jacksonian, or DnD, and that's what most responses to Tolkien are responding to.
I mean, certain DnD monsters were just "we bought a grab bag of plastic Ultraman Kaiju to use as figurines so we gotta give them lore now."
May 7, 2025 12:59There's also a lot of other trad fantasy in there, like Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, etc. (very much etc.)
It was a grab-bag of all culturally relevant fantasy fiction, and now much like the Simpsons, it's being iterated on by people who don't know those sources.
