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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8203639" data-attributes="member: 18">I get that that you're just making a cheap shot, but that's actually a kind of interesting thought-experiment.Let's say Tolkien never exists. Okay so fantasy and SF are going to be totally different, games will be totally different, TV, movies, etc. will be very different and the genre "fantasy" as separate from SF/sci-fi may never really be "a thing" (I won't belabour the point, but when LotR came out, the idea of "fantasy" as a genre was so foreign to many readers that a lot of people read in as distantly post-apocalyptic SF - c.f. the BBC documentary series "Worlds of Fantasy").So what defines LotR? I think two things:1) The "invention" or at least massive up-gunning and popularization of intentional, carefully-planned and very thought-through world-building, where effort may be spent for years before a book is written. That's the key impact on fantasy, particularly modern fantasy.2) The intention of creating a relevant and specifically English mythological setting, drawing from various legends and myths.If that happens now, I think first off, the world-building thing will have less impact, because we'll have had decades of SF which did it in a much more low-key way, and it's just going to seem kind of weird and excessive. It'll attract fans, but I don't think it'll drop like a bomb. There also probably won't be an accidental counterculture-Tolkien meeting of minds where like, hobbits (hippies) are all like chilling and smoking pipeweed (weed) with wizards (wizards) and Tom Bombadil is a utopian anarchist (which he actually totally is in the books), which really served to boost their popularity.Plus there's the Dune question. Was Dune influenced by Tolkien? If so, it probably looks very different, but if not, it probably still exists and is basically the same (it was massively inspired by a <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-secret-history-of-dune/" target="_blank">travelogue</a>, I know that). If it isn't, Dune probably fills basically the same place LotR does, and probably spawns huge waves of imitators like Tolkien did, just with sort of fantastical sci-fi instead of tree-loving fantasy.And I think if the author is the same age in 2021 that Tolkien was when he released LotR, relatively as liberal as Tolkien was by the standards of his day (pretty liberal, despite a conservative aesthetic/concept), then yeah, the characters are going to look pretty different. Yeah probably half of them will be female. Probably Welsh/Celtic and/or Arthurian mythology will be picked over Scandinavian mythology (because people feel far more connected to that stuff now in Britain than Beowulf or the like, and I think it's a reasonable argument that the reverse was true in 1935 or whatever), which will give it a very different vibe. Elves may well be more Sidhe-esque and there are likely no dwarves. If there are - they definitely won't clumsily use Jewish stereotypes as their basis (please Google this before arguing). Hell, if it's England 2021, the author may well incorporate some other mythology for ideas, like Afro-Caribbean and South Asian (particularly the Mahabharata), because England in 2021 is not England in the 1930s. Also the bad guys are way less likely to have working-class accents/speech patterns. I could see the same anti-industrial, anti-materialist, pro-utopian-anarchy (seriously LotR is very keen on that - the hobbits are basically close to utopian anarchy and Tom Bombadil is all about it), pro-environmental and so on sentiments though.Thinking more, I would put money down that Arthurian myth would be the key basis of a modern LotR in terms of aesthetics. I know Tolkien thought of it as "mostly French" (somewhat correctly), but I don't think that would fly in the modern era, and definitely the idea that Scandinavian mythology was "more English" would absolutely not. Plus the whole "Anglo-Saxon" thing is kind of dead now, both thanks to outbursts of Celt-o-mania but also genuine stuff like not being supported by genetic analysis (looked like it might be in the very early '00s but then it wasn't - whether indigenous Brits are really "celts" - whatever those are - is another question - but we ain't "Anglo-Saxons", we're something early than that, genetically).Tieflings are, however, not likely to appear. There's nothing much like that in any of the relevant mythologies.The OP specified Universe 2 in his post though. He's very clear.</blockquote>

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