“Tolkien wasn’t anything special.”

Yeah, I kind of wasn't sure what to make of that statement either. I agreed with almost all of what she had to say, and I thought it was a really cutting diagnosis of why the speculative fiction genre went from being so wild and inventive up until sometime in the 70s, with literary merit and wonderful to read, into being a pretty boring cash cow with formulaic stories that killed the genre. But yeah Tolkien was special.

I also didn't like how she set up GRRM as some kind of antagonist to Tolkien. "Game of Thrones" was a little bit of an outlier into the "standard fantasy formula" territory compared to a lot of GRRM's fiction. I would actually hold him up as an example of one of the old-school speculative fiction authors that's just telling his own stories without really being hemmed in by convention or boring-ly adhering to it.

But yeah those issues aside I thought it was a really informative and important piece. Oh well, looks like I am the only one maybe.