Quote:
Originally Posted by Morsul the Dark
I realize some of you have said you’ve become more private about it as you’ve gotten older, but I’ll pose this question, not as an argument, but out of curiosity. Do you feel Game of Thrones had any effect positive or negative on your stance?
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I guess my overarching question do you protect yourselves from people knowing you like LoTR or from liking Fantasy in general.
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Game of Thrones is enough outside my sphere of interest, as either book or show, that I really shouldn't say it has had any effect on how I feel about Tolkien. But you also asked about fantasy in general...
And
Game of Thrones was the very least the nail in the coffin of me calling myself a "fantasy" fan. As a teenager, I would have said I was a fantasy reader--obviously, Tolkien was the driver of that, but he wasn't alone: I chased all sorts of authors off the library bookshelves in the hopes of recapturing that thrill. Of course, nothing ever really measured up, but I enjoyed enough things in different ways that I still thought of myself as a fantasy reader generally.
I don't really think that way anymore, and my attempt to make it through
A Song of Ice and Fire in 2012 basically ended it. I burned through two and a half books in about a week, and the strongest emotional response was somehow exactly halfway between the enchantment high l was chasing and being completely rubbed the wrong way. In other words, Martin soared high enough on the exact register I was looking for, but did all the wrong things and two things sort of clicked:
1. (Which, really, I already knew but could never quite admit) There is no other Tolkien and if you look for "fantasy" when what you really mean is "Tolkien," then you'll ALWAYS be disappointed.
2. I understood better than I ever had what Tolkien and Lewis meant when they made their not-entirely-successful deal: "no one's writing what we want to read so we'll have to write it ourselves."
All of which is not to say that I haven't read any other fantasy since, but when I have it's like watching Star Wars: I enjoy it, but I enjoy it (or don't) on its own terms, rather than chasing Tolkien.
And I probably would say that the cultural impact of the HBO
Game of Thrones has made me a bit more reticient to reveal I'm a Tolkienist, if it's had any effect at all, since it has sucked up enough cultural oxygen that people, when they think of fantasy tend to foreground that in the zeitgeist, and it just... isn't... part of my experience. I don't bear GoT any ill will, but when the other person's reference point is excitement over that show and they're trying to get to book-Tolkien me, it's a giant case of conflated terms and it's just easier to avoid it.