/lit/ - Literature

>>22028207
the problem with the wheel of time, aside from its huge length, is that it's the regurgitated vomit of the whole host of shitty LOTR ripoffs like sword of shannara which was itself a regurgitation of LOTR, which itself took a lot from previous fantasy written before that
Try one or two original fantasy novels (pre 1900s) like George Macdonald or William Morris or rider haggard, all of which wrote novels that are only about 300 or so pages
Then read LOTR and the conan stories, both of which add up to less than two thousand pages. Reading LOTR will give you a taste of epic fantasy and reading conan will gave you a taste of sword and sorcery.
So with about eight books that add up to about 2 thousand and something pages you'll know the basics and origins of early fantasy without reading anything really esoteric and you'll have read less than if you read four of the wheel of time books.

>>21334376
>>21334396
>>21334468
>>21334470
>>21334482
Fantasy, like everything else that had soul and passion put into it, is dead. It's a commercialised, bland, neoliberalised product designed to appeal to as many consumers as possible. The dying days of fantasy were the 90s. Now it's just nothingness, a sick, degenerate world where critical role has replaced Conan. The world is in the thrall of a group of vampiric globalist vampires and there's nothing we can do about it. Subcultures are dead. Originality is dead. Social groups and movements are dead. The ones that break the mould and seek to do something that challenges the neoliberal elite are crushed with impunity. These people won't stop until anything that people enjoy belongs to a globalised consumer friendly mass. Modern fantasy is a golem; a Frankenstein's monster that has only the basic trappings of fantasy, but none of the deeper messages that auteurs like Lovecraft and Howard put into their work.