>PLAYAN
FF4
OSRS
Reelism 2 on GZDoom
>WATCHAN
GameCenter CX
Finally giving Eva a watch
>LISTENAN
Metal playlist, currently listening to some Sabaton
>READAN
Some book about lucid dreaming, never worked but I always found it fascinating
An alternate history fanfic about what happens if nintendo did partner with sony during the SNES era
>EATAN
Garlic bread for lunch later. Gonna have some steamed salmon later tonight
>DRINKAN
Coffee. Some whisky tonight/
>FAPPAN
Not today for me, went a little hard earlier in the week
>FEELAN
Chill for the most part. I had the weirdest argument with a friend about how it's apparently wrong that I don't use programs like netflix and actively download stuff from various sources if I want to keep them around. I just don't understand it.

>>6254689
While I can't say I feel the same way, there is a massive issue with Tolkien and fantasy, namely being the "did it so good he ruined it for everyone else" thing. Tolkien codified so many fantasy elements they have become synonymous with "generic fantasy" despite it actually being quite different and unusual, especially in regards to important nonhuman characters not just being monsters or side characters, folkloric elements being quantified and presented as mundane and normalized, etc. It's quite interesting to see Tolkien's influence and its shift to the rest of the genre; reading fantasy writers from before or around the same time and it becomes totally different. I think the TRUE slopification of fantasy is actually much stronger traced from Dungeons & Dragons, so influential that even non-game pieces of media absorbed it wholesale.

The trouble then becomes; what makes fantasy you like? or GOOD? if it's authenticity and fullness to its cultural milieu, well then, it has to be explored similarly to its home culture. Not from the lens of modern story cause-effect, but more like a viking saga or aseop's fable, which lowers its ability to be presented to players as a piece of immersive media. The setting itself is alien and not akin to the "I could actually go there" without a heavy dose of making that world "real" in context of its original culture, time period, and religious/spiritual understanding of the world at the time. This is impossible to rectify for most writers and consumers, who care more about things like concrete narratives and verisimilitude in a setting that doesn't really need it to exist. Nicely, we CAN actually get fantasy settings that feel this authentic way by stepping away from medieval European folklore; I think a big cause of the popularity of Cultivation/Xianxia/Wuxia stories is because it essentially is the mythological background of the far east in fantasy fiction, without the hangups of trying to do Tolkien again. You can see this in its human primacy (beasts can eventual cultivate into having a human form, ie, the human form if special and "greater" then other life forms), worldbuilding focused on its spiritual/fictional elements over practical ones (why aren't cultivators controlling the entire world if they're so powerful? Not important, it's a different world.) and so on. Difficult to parse to the modern day "fantasy simulation" writing types (See "Break out of scientific magic systems" under "Antiscience")