Yah know how a lot of people really love the cool concepts Lovecraft came up and use them in cool books, movies, video games and RPGs, despite the fact Lovecraft himself was an awful human and a pretty meh writer?
This is how a contextualize the works of JRR Tolkien, the only saving grace for JRR being that he had some actual writing talent unlike Lovecraft. He really was a pioneer in the concept of “word building”, he actually built a whole fucking world with volumes of content that most readers would never find but snippets of. Making whole languages, histories, maps and and mythologies for the world his stories took place in, that was really amazing stuff, and it’s part of the reason he is so famous today. That inspired a lot of people to do the same but with their own stories. A lot of world building heavy fiction that exists today probably wouldn’t exist if JRR hadn’t spent ludicrous amounts of time making twenty different dialects of Elvin. Table top role playing games were pretty much invented by LoTRs fans.
But truth is while he’s better than Lovecraft he’s still not a great writer, his stories are formulaic and love going on stupid tangents. Really the movies tell a better story than his books did. Also he was a grumpy racist British man, like pretty much anyone who’d spend years of his life alone in his office making his own fanfic version of Finnish.
Yah know how a lot of people really love the cool concepts Lovecraft came up and use them in cool books, movies, video games and RPGs, despite the fact Lovecraft himself was an awful human and a pretty meh writer?
This is how a contextualize the works of JRR Tolkien, the only saving grace for JRR being that he had some actual writing talent unlike Lovecraft. He really was a pioneer in the concept of “word building”, he actually built a whole fucking world with volumes of content that most readers would never find but snippets of. Making whole languages, histories, maps and and mythologies for the world his stories took place in, that was really amazing stuff, and it’s part of the reason he is so famous today. That inspired a lot of people to do the same but with their own stories. A lot of world building heavy fiction that exists today probably wouldn’t exist if JRR hadn’t spent ludicrous amounts of time making twenty different dialects of Elvin. Table top role playing games were pretty much invented by LoTRs fans.
But truth is while he’s better than Lovecraft he’s still not a great writer, his stories are formulaic and love going on stupid tangents. Really the movies tell a better story than his books did. Also he was a grumpy racist British man, like pretty much anyone who’d spend years of his life alone in his office making his own fanfic version of Finnish.