It seemed to be a rant against all fantasy, including Lord of the Rings, since wizards were mentioned.
Not sure if Tolkien elves' incapability of rape is old-fashioned, after all, respecting women's boundaries is a rather modern thing (or at least George R.R. Martin seems to think so, some people say he wildly exaggerates the male on female rape), but "loose morals" certainly is not something they could be accused of.
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Well, Tolkien arguably was the beginning of modern fantasy, after all.
Before him, aside from your Robert Howards and your (arguably) H.P. Lovecrafts, there wasn't much out there. Well, there was George Mac Donald, of course. And a hell of a lot of fantasies for children, though I don't think many fans of the genre want to include those.
edited 12th Aug '16 3:18:33 PM by Aldo930
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."Omitting dark fantasy (Poe, Chambers, Hodgson, and many others) and children's fantasy (Baum, Barrie, and, again, others) there was William Morris in the 19th century with The House of the Wolfings and The Wood Beyond the World. Tolkien was a big fan of Morris, and actually cribbed the names "Shadofax" and "Gandalf" from him. H.Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Edgar Rice Burroughs all wrote fantasy, but not of the swords-and-men-in-armor variety.
There are lots (and lots and lots) of works before Tolkien that contain elements of the fantastic, but for whatever reason we don't call a lot of these fantasies. Tolkien can't even really be said to have been the first to set his fantasy in a separate world of his own creation (Howard did that too, as did Leiber).
I said tolkien set was the tools for creating fantasy, like a living world full of little details, a huge backstory that play part of the world and a sense of "we are here" even other authors tend to be more loose in ther fantasy worlds
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I think we could include George Mac Donald in there. He wrote fantasies for children, sure (The Princess And The Goblin) but some for adults as well.
C.S. Lewis is in the same boat as well, arguably. He wrote quite a bit of fantasy - as well as sci-fi - for adults in addition to the Narnia books.
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."
Oh, sure. I didn't include Mac Donald in my list because you'd already mentioned him.
Part of what irks me when you get folks who start to criticize fantasy as all being similar or all about wizards and dragons and D&D in the European middle ages is that they're critiquing a specific subset of fantasy fiction, and don't seem to accept that the other types of fantasy even qualify AS fantasy. They essentially are conveniently not considering as fantasy the stuff that would prove their critique to be wrong.
On a fun but mostly unrelated note, one of American playwright Tennessee Williams' first published works was a sword-and-sorcery barbarian story, in the Robert Howard mold, for a pulp magazine while he was still a teenager. I always enjoy finding out what kind of "low" art has been appreciated by people who are considered "high" artists.
edited 12th Aug '16 8:31:53 PM by Robbery
Of course, George Mac Donald was a huge influence on C.S. Lewis, who was good friends with Tolkien, and there's your six degrees of separation.
Normally, I would chalk such a thing up to simple genre blindness. They don't know that fantasy books that don't fit that mold exist because they never hear about them.
But if they do hear about them and refuse to consider them fantasy... Well, then they're just being jerks.
edited 12th Aug '16 8:35:58 PM by Aldo930
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."I don't think Lord of the Rings is subject to any of my critiques. From what I recall, I've said several times they don't apply to every fantasy work out there. I guess the subject line should have been made to sound more specific, like "Problems with some fantasy fiction". Sorry about that. I don't view ASOIF as perfect, just more realistic than most medieval European fantasy. Nothing's perfect. My criticism of things like loose sexual mores is it often doesn't really make sense in the context of the world we're shown, culturally or practically. If the world doesn't have that at all, then of course the criticism doesn't apply. Or it can be justified. Either way.
edited 14th Aug '16 10:25:09 AM by Fireblood
Whether or not something is realistic isn't really a criticism, it's a description. Tolkien, for instance, wasn't going for realism; he was trying to emulate some of the atmosphere of the Arthurian legends and Nordic sagas he'd grown up reading, while inserting Hobbits as stand-ins for Edwardian-era rural English village folk.
Martin, with ASOIF is going for a more realistic portrayal of medieval Europe in terms of political shenanigans and human behavior. In some ways, in terms of atmosphere. Martin goes as far in the dark direction that Tolkien goes in the light. This is typical of Martin in everything he writes, whether ASOIF or Wild Cards; he's much fonder of portraying a wide complexity of motives, of demonstrating that while in his world good and evil exist, things are seldom that simple, of huge events turning on the pettiest of actions, and of there never being perfect solutions to complex problems. But again, this is Martin's goal. If one prefers Martin's approach, fine. But you can't really take another writer to task for not achieving something that they may not have set out to do in the first place.
In terms of sexual mores, are you talking about a specific work (if you've already mentioned it, then I apologize for missing it). You may just be dealing with a bad writer, or a writer loosening up the sexual situation just for the titillation factor. These are generally works of commercial fiction, remember. If said mores don't make sense in context, then that would be a matter for criticism. I recall in The Wheel of Time the sexual mores depended on where they were, naturally, but were generally what you'd expect (the official stance being no sex before marriage, but of course it happened, and fairly often). There was also some kind of herbal tea women could drink to prevent them from getting pregnant (convenient, that).
edited 14th Aug '16 10:54:47 AM by Robbery
Realistic is the wrong word, I'm realizing. "Logically consistent" is more the term I think. It can be a problem at times.
The sexual mores thing is pretty common in fantasy really. Wheel of Time has been good about it so far (I haven't read it all). It's just most fantasy is set in a medieval world with cultural aspects that don't match up well in some cases. Not making sense in context is the problem that I have with all this stuff. It can usually be justified if the writer tries. I'll accept an effective herbal contraceptive or whatever, if they would just mention it. A lot of times though it's just free sex with no pregnancy or STDs (granted, this isn't unique to fantasy at all).
edited 14th Aug '16 4:52:51 PM by Fireblood
A thought came to mind...
Are the books you have a problem with ones that you feel are badly written? The author can't get you into the story, or you feel bored after 30 pages, or some such stuff?
Because then I think we may have an explanation.
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."![]()
That sounds more like a writer who just doesn't want to deal with the consequences of sex in his or her story. As you say, that's not exactly unique to fantasy fiction.
Remember, too, that pre-marital and extra-marital sex have always happened, to one degree or another. They just weren't always talked about.
edited 14th Aug '16 5:21:01 PM by Robbery
Aldo 930: No, not necessarily. Some were quite good aside from this stuff. In fact one of them is among my favorites-I even started the page for it here. Talion: Revenant.
Robbery: Sure, of course. It's just when they do it quite openly and so on while having a culture that doesn't seem to support this which gets me.
edited 14th Aug '16 6:29:18 PM by Fireblood
When it comes to fantasy I enjoy, if I have problems with some of the ideas in them they don't really bug me; I just move on.
I only really have problems with ideas in fantasy I don't enjoy. You can overlook the flaws in a good work, but when you don't enjoy something, the flaws are more noticeable...
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."
Here's a definition I found -
"One of the more popular subgenres of Fantasy now (there’s debate as to whether it’s a legit subgenre or just an artistic category) but one can hardly argue its prevalence in the fantasy genre).
What is Grimdark? Take what is good about the world and humans, then grab a bucket of shit and dump it all over both. Toss in a horrific amount of blood, even more dry sarcasm, shove in a cast of morally ambiguous, emotionally tortured heroes that probably hate each other and the world at large, and you are aiming in the right direction.
This 'style' of fantasy has been around for more than a decade now with the grandfather of it all arguably Glen Cook's (fabulous) Black Company books which helped map out the edges of the current grimdark expression. Martin, too, helped define this genre. Perhaps the biggest influence to the current shape of grimdark (and arguably writer of the quintessential definition of it) is Joe Abercrombie who pretty much single-handedly shaped it to what it's become now with his First Law trilogy and on the vanguard of the movement with every book he releases (the man's twitter is "lordgrimdark).
Of course, there's more than a few writers who have since taken up the standards of grimdark and are marching with it such as Scott Lynch, Bakker, Mark Lawrence, Richard Morgan, and the most recent authors being Luke Sculls, Jeff Salyards, and Richard Ford.
The grimdark movement does NOT look like it's going anywhere any time soon folks, so learn to enjoy it because aspects of it have influenced most new fantasy books, which if are not strictly grimdark, are at least take elements from it."
edited 1st Dec '16 6:27:09 AM by WolyniaBookSeries
You could make a case (and Tolkien did) that Frodo failed in Lord of the Rings. He ultimately failed his moral test, and Sam failed in that he was unable to talk Frodo down or physically stop him. It's only through Gollum's actions that the Ring was destroyed, which was entirely accidental. When asked about it, Tolkien said that the quest succeeded, while Frodo failed. His opinion was that God took a hand, which is in character for Tolkien, if a mite unsatisfying really. Even so, we're left with a very interesting ending, from a structural and thematic perspective, in that the heroes manage to succeed and fail at the same time.

No, no one in Lord of the Rings has an anachronistic attitude towards sexual mores. In fact, some of Tolkien's writings on elves indicate that they only have sexual relations with the elf to whom they are married, they only marry once (except in very rare cases), and they are in fact incapable of rape. Very old-fashioned mores, if anything.
I think the original poster wasn't considering ''LotR'' to be "modern" fantasy, since it came out originally in the '50s.