![]() ![]() There’s plenty of speculation with regard to the actual cause of the changes. While the nineties were almost uniformly noxious, I suspect the real damage was done in earlier decades. It compelling, no doubt, but it quickly devolved into something else. There is a wonderful raucousness about the literature that inspired the earliest role playing games that is even more remarkable when compared with today’s standard fare. The way that we’ve allowed our most cherished myths to be neutered like this really betrays just how wrongheaded what passes for culture today has become. Fantasy back then was actually… fantastic. It just wasn’t the kind of world where Greedo would need to shoot first, where vampires and werewolves would be tamed into overwrought boyfriends, or where anyone would feel that Frodo had to be reduced to mere baggage at the Ford of Rivendell instead being able to turn and face five Nazgul as he lifted his sword, and cried, “by Elbereth and Lúthien the Fair, you shall have neither the Ring nor me!” ![]() ![]() We’ve seen science and myth collide, elves fall back at the sight of a crucifix, and medieval knights subdue an interstellar empire. We’ve seen clerics boldly face down alien marauders, secure in the knowledge that demons and devils cannot harm them. In just a few short weeks of reading influential books from fifty years ago, we’ve seen magic that could reduce civilizations to chaotic wastelands just on the basis of the incentives it created. ![]()
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