Pretty sure at this point the circle has closed: Tolkien's influence has become zeitgeist and Howard's has become (at best) background radiation. Through D&D, those sources influenced a huge swathe of video games, and they both influenced the fantasy genre. Then those video games and books/films influenced others, which influenced others. Now those things are cycling around again and influencing D&D.
I am, apparently, now too old to have any idea what the youth think or care about. Personally, I'm just real weary of how oppressively DARK so much of fantasy became in the 80s and 90s, and how those things have now broken containment and spread everywhere, giving us things like Superman interpretations where he's a sullen, moody jerk saving the world because that was the homework his Space Dad assigned him. Feels like everywhere I turn, the only thing people want to offer is WH40k with the serial numbers filed off, and I'm just. so. gorram. sick. of such utterly crapsack, nothing-matters, nothing-changes, Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here, "the only stories worth telling are ones where people murder each other for pointless, stupid bovine feces while the world collapses."
My best attempts to describe what I would prefer that isn't this have been instantly written off as either plastic and hollow, or as so overwhelmingly, cloyingly sweet that nobody could stomach them. At the time, my knee-jerk reaction was to say "sounds like what someone who can't see past grimdark gloom would say" but that wasn't kind or productive at the time, and really wasn't accurate either. But it really does seem like trying to have even the TINIEST bit of true sincerity, to have any form of heartfelt message no matter how nuanced and careful, is instantly dismissed as either infantile drivel, obviously a sham, or so painfully saccharine that it would drive off almost everyone.
