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That’s the movie version, in the book Merry is the sensible one, even compared to Frodo.

I think any comparison to the UN fails when they start threatening genocide.

I once had a player play as a donkey barbarian for a session. They couldn’t talk though.

Pippin is - he is the son of the Thane. Hence the Gondorians are technically correct referring to him as “the prince of the halflings”. Merry’s dad is the Master of Buckland - not noble, but definitely the hereditary leader of a community.

Quite. But not definitely not the "win" that the movie presents the outcome as.

And exception amongst a huge pile of cosy crime.

Yeah, there is a lot of social class represented in the Shire. Pippin is ancestral gentry, all breading not actually much money or sense, Merry is new money, pragmatism, wealth, but not much class, and the Baggins's are the best of both. But Sam is working class, and the true hero of the story.

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?