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Yup, painted into a corner. A good ending would have betrayed the point of writing the novels, a bad ending betrays the audience who has stuck with it for so long. I don’t think the TV audience would have been any happier with “they all lived happily ever after” or “everyone dies”. They just...

Doesn’t matter what the motivation was, the aliens sorted out all of Earth’s problems with a big stick. It’s really up there in “we need a really strong leader to sort people out” territory.

Even Tolkien is only really romantic about pre-WW1 rural England. He may have loved the Saxon period, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t want to live there.

Actually some Discworld stories do romanticise the past - just not the medieval past. Raising Steam romanticises the age of steam. Unseen Academicals romanticises pre-professional football. And lots of stories romanticise religion to handing out pamphlets.

My point is, it’s a major everything trope. It’s not specifically fantasy, unless you define fantasy as “LotR and it’s knock-offs”.

Some stories are told as warnings "don't play by the river children or Green Jenny will get you". Some are just told to entertain on cold winter evenings "Beowulf ripped the monster Grendel limb from limb". Of course, these days idea of a "warning" is most commonly associated with (but not...

Mythology is fiction, fiction is mythology. It's all just stories.

I will point out that the original GoT author hasn't been able to adapt the story competently either. The trouble with setting out to subvert tropes is that you paint yourself into a corner. "Has a satisfactory ending" is an unrealistic trope - and it was Tolkien, not GRRM, who hung a lampshade...

Have you read any historical crime fiction!? As for "medieval" romance, I would say there is nothing medieval about it. It's just feel-good fiction that has been around since stories were first invented, and is found in most popular fiction, irrespective of dragons. Most people read for...

Pretty much the whole of the urban fantasy subgenre for a start (Dresden Files, Rivers of London etc). Steampunk-adjacent fantasy such as the Ketty Jay and Cinder Spires series. Anything by Phillip Pullman. Game of Thrones: "here is your medieval, look at how sh*t it was". The genre that really...

GoT managed to look good and have interesting characters established in episode 1. The TV adaptation of WoT had unlikeable characters and looked a bit naff. It’s amazing it lasted as long as it did. Frankly, I don’t think the quality of the original novels really matters in order to make a...

Something can belong to more than one genre at the same time. Problem solved.

How do you determine when something is supernatural?

Sounds like helping to me.

There is no such thing as “ideologically neutral”. You either represent, or you exclude.

So what you are saying is, it’s a secret.

Rocket Jump? Mythal Repellent Batspray? Some glairing omissions too.

If you look at the gender of the people who are reading fantasy these days, it's more female.

I put Forbidden Planet in my number 1 slot, but aside from that other 50s films failed to make my top 5, influential as they were. I prefer the original Thing from Another World to John Carpenter's remake. I'm fond of Quatermass, but as those movies were remakes of a TV show I would probably...

Treating Xorn as civilised beings rather than animals, which is how the tend to be used, makes me think of the Horta in Star Trek: The Devil in the Dark.