The Second Story's LotR video: A Long-Expected Response

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]So, it's been a while since my last video. I've been super busy, so I haven't been able to make anything new in god, 6 months. Anyway, I wrote the script for this one back then, which means that unfortunately, it's become a bit outdated. I still stick to what I say, so I wanted to put it out anyway, but I'll come in with some corrections every now and then if something's changed since I wrote it. Great. On with the show. Hey, this is a companion video I'm making for my main video on the second story. You don't need to watch that one to understand this. I'll make sure to pepper in context so you aren't confused. But I just figured you should know since I'm going to get started without much background info. This video is a response to her video on fantasy stories. The other one has me debunking the idea that there are no good protagonists in modern writing. All right, with that out of the way, let's jump in. Hillary Lane, aka the second story, has made 11 videos in a row that are basically 30 minutes to an hour of complaining about all of modern writing.

[00:00:50]Like all of it. She really doesn't like pretty much anything new. stating in one of her recent videos that there hasn't been a good, well-written and flawed protagonist since the year 2000. Now, if you heard that and you were immediately intrigued, good. That's the point. Lane wants those clicks and that engagement because that's how she gets popular.

[00:01:07]Making big claims, giving terrible defenses that sound smart because they're controversial and play to your emotions, and then not backing them up with any decent evidence. She's also trying to push a conservative political agenda really hard. Basically, she's a terrible critic, but she's got a 100,000 subscribers anyway.

[00:01:25]This is a short part two of a two-part series I'm doing on why you shouldn't take her seriously as a reviewer. And I'm going to talk a bunch about how to write good fiction and spot bad criticism while I'm at it. So stick around if that sounds interesting. Lane starts off by talking about how she hates formulas. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with this.

[00:01:40]Formulaic writing can be a genuine problem, and a lot of newbie writers in particular make the mistake of trying to copy something they like instead of trying something new. Of course, the opposite can be a problem, too. trying to stay away from formulas so much that you write something incoherent, but I get the sentiment. This is basically the lynch pin that the whole video rests on.

[00:01:58]Lane says that all of modern fantasy, and by modern she means basically anything after the '60s, is uncreative and formulaic. All of it. Game of Thrones hates it. Michael Morco, unoriginal. Anything published by the Del Reservative.

[00:02:13]Okay, I'm pretty much all out of examples. One thing you'll notice if you watch a second story video all the way through is that Lane really hates providing examples for just about anything she says. It makes my job very hard. A critic not being able to back up their claims with examples is a really bad sign because it generally means they're overgeneralizing or saying something off of vibes, but pretending that it's some sort of undisputable truth. The next thing Lane does is play a clip of George R. Martin >> is the the father of all modern fantasy.

[00:02:39]We all >> Keen essentially created modern fantasy.

[00:02:42]>> Wrong. Lane thinks this is nonsense. In her words, "The fantasy genre was not only not created by Tolken, it had nothing at all to do with Tolken." This is a pretty weird thing to open up with since it completely contradicts her main thesis for the entire rest of the video.

[00:02:56]Her main idea is that modern fantasy as a genre was created when a whole bunch of people formulaically copied The Lord of the Rings and started pumping out unoriginal slop. Considering the thing they were copying was Tolken's Magnum Opus, it sounds to me like modern fantasy did have something to do with Tolken. Why is she doing this? Well, it's because she's going to talk a lot of [ __ ] about Martin later in the video, particularly about how he's obsessed with being the anti-Talkkin. So, she needs to set up early that he doesn't know what he's talking about. So, she lies and hopes you don't notice. Anyway, right after that, Lane starts discussing The Lord of the Rings and how she thinks it's a great book. And yeah, it totally is. It's a masterpiece. It's the seinal work in the fantasy genre. It's the first mainstream fantasy book basically ever. inspired hundreds, if not thousands of other authors and made a ton of people realize that the genre could be for adults, too. One might even say that Tolken is the father of modern fantasy. However, I think it's telling that we're not even 2 minutes in, and she's already getting basic information about the book wrong. She said it's been almost 100 years since Lord of the Rings was first published. This isn't true. It was published only 71 years ago in 1954.

[00:04:05]That's closer to 50 years than it is to 100. Hell, there are a ton of people who remember when it came out. My grandma was nearly an adult when it was first published, and she's still going strong today. The second thing she says is that since that time, since it was published, the fantasy genre has, for one thing, come into existence, but has also blossomed into a massive phenomenon all its own. With all the fantasy works and mega works that get published every year, why has there never been one that is so unique, so genuine, so pure in terms of creativity that it became an overnight defining work of an entire civilization? And no, Game of Thrones does not count. Putting aside the fact that she's taking the opportunity to slander Martin some more, which just getting this out of the way before I get a bunch of comments, I'm not a George R.

[00:04:48]Martin super fan. I've read some of his books with my dad. We watched the show together and I liked it. But neither the books or the good parts of the show, the last two seasons don't count, would rank in my top five fantasy works in either medium. But Lane has such a bone to pick with him for what, at least right now seems like no real reason that I feel like I've got to defend the guy a bit.

[00:05:06]Also, it's kind of weird that she mentions Game of Thrones here because only the TV show is called Game of Thrones. The book series is called A Song of Ice and Fire. Just makes me less confident that she knows what she's talking about. Unless she's only referring to the first book, but I don't think that's true. Anyway, putting that aside, Lane makes two errors here that are obvious with even a bit of research or critical thinking. For one, the Lord of the Rings books were not an overnight sensation. They actually took quite a while to get popular and didn't really become mainstream until the '60s. A lot of critics were pretty harsh on it, too.

[00:05:38]Hell, that includes some members of Tolken's own writing group. Hugo Dyson apparently hated it. This first mistake isn't really vital to her argument, but like the weird way she rounded the publication date, it's indicative of not researching the video well. These sorts of things, small, easy to check mistakes, are telltale signs that you're dealing with a critic who doesn't know their stuff. Another quick thing I noticed while editing, she says repeatedly throughout the video that fantasy as a genre only came into existence after Lord of the Rings. Early on, though, she claims that Tolken was so uninvolved that while the genre was being created, Tolken was still doing stuff like raising his kids. Tolken's youngest kid became an adult in 1947, 7 years before The Lord of the Rings was published. So, which is it? Did the fantasy genre come into existence before or after Lord of the Rings? Again, this is a pretty small error, but it's another sign that she's prioritizing spinning a narrative over getting the facts straight. The other thing she claims is that Tolken's book has been completely unparalleled in uniqueness and pure creativity ever since it came out. And like, no, I'm pretty sure even Tolken himself would have admitted this.

[00:06:40]He's pretty famous for basically borrowing entire plot lines and ideas whole cloth from mythology. His dwarves are pretty much reskinned Norse dwarves, just short and with some extra world building. The one ring is pretty clearly a combination of the cursed ring and Varon in Norse mythology, which is said to bring misfortune on all those who possess it, and a ring in Vagner's operas that does the same thing. I'd also personally say he might have gotten the idea from Arththeran legend, something he references a lot, which literally contains a magic ring that turns you invisible. The same saga with Envaronaut also had Fafneir, a dragon who shares a ton of direct parallels with Smog, who was also heavily inspired by the dragon from Beaowolf. The point here is that everybody, no matter how original they seem, is inspired by somebody else. And in terms of worldb buildinging, Tolken was probably less original than the average fantasy writer is. Now, that's not a bad thing since it was his characters, writing style, and philosophy that made the book so wonderful. But saying that he was unmatched in terms of creativity is obviously wrong. There are plenty of people who have made way weirder, more out there, and frankly more creative fantasy books in the years since, and pretending otherwise is completely ridiculous. Lane does this a lot. She references something from back in the day that was genuinely good than says that it's better at literally everything than all the stuff that came out since, and hopes that your nostalgia will stop you from really thinking through what she just said. If a YouTube video is making you nostalgic, be careful.

[00:08:02]There's a decent chance they're trying to slip something by you. And then right after that, she says that actually the books weren't even that original or special. Damn it, I was just making a point. Why does she keep contradicting herself? But even the statement she backpedal to that Lord of the Rings really isn't all that creative or unique. It's just that everything that came after is even less original is still nonsense for all the reasons I mentioned. So then she explains that all the writers since Tolken have just defined themselves by being different from Tolken and uses another clip of George R. Martin seemingly from the same interview.

[00:08:36]>> But that being said, Tolkien did certain things that that are different than what I would do.

[00:08:41]>> I don't know about you, but I find all this incredibly tedious.

[00:08:45]>> This is what she's mad about. She's picked three clips of Martin saying just about the damst things you could say about Lord of the Rings. What's with this weird chip on her shoulder she seems to have about Martin? Yeah, he's saying he would do some stuff differently because he has a very different writing style. Like for example, he tends to kill off a lot more characters. Tolken writes optimistic high fantasy. Martin writes pessimistic low fantasy, or used to at least. Of course, he's going to do some stuff differently, otherwise he'd just be writing Lord of the Rings again. And yet, Lane implies that Martin wants to be the anti- Tolken, despite him clearly admiring the guy a ton. She's trying to paint Martin as if he's constantly obsessing about how he's going to be an edgier, darker Tolken, when in reality, the only person obsessed with setting herself apart from other writers is Hillary Lane. The current fantasy publishing industry is a bottomless salad of tropes and formulas and then subverted tropes and counter formulas with nothing unique or original or even just clearly the creation of its author.

[00:09:41]Putting aside again that Tolken's books were super tropey. Subverting a trope is inherently original. Like assuming the subversion hasn't been done a million times before, you're writing something new and creative. That's the whole point of subverting a trope. you know, going against the grain of what's common and expected. An unoriginal subversion of a trope is kind of an oxymoron since if it's unoriginal, it's not a subversion anymore. It's just another trope. This is around when she really gets into the thrust of the video. Talking about one couple who was publishing fantasy back in the 70s and how they, according to her, killed the fantasy genre. These folks are Lester and Judy Lynn Del Rey.

[00:10:20]Together, they managed to take over the fantasy and sci-fi publishing section of what would end up becoming Random House Books, naming it after themselves and being the people to really make speculative fiction novels popular. Judy Lynn handled science fiction while Lester worked with fantasy. This is in a weird way the most frustrating part of the video because, well, it's actually good. And by that I mean the presentation is fine. She doesn't seem to be getting anything wrong. There's not really any narrativizing and she's backing up her statements with evidence.

[00:10:50]I really tried to fact check her on some stuff because I had already caught her so many times in this video and the other one I watched before, but if there was much wrong with it, I didn't find it. This is pretty solid work. For 20 straight minutes, Hillary Lane makes a decent YouTube video. It just sucks that it's bookended with 4 minutes of nonsense at the beginning and 8 minutes of terrible and dishonest opinions at the end, which in my opinion effectively ruins the good work she did here. This part tells the story of how Lester Del Rey ushered in an era of generic formulaic fantasy. Instead of trying to create a new Lord of the Rings level mega hit like the other fantasy publishers at the time, Lester Del Rey basically went, "What if we just made Lord of the Rings again?" And so with some help from a writer named Terry Brooks, his company published The Sword of Shinara, a Tolken ripoff that ended up being a huge hit. Then they started doing it again and again and Delray Publishing developed a formula that all of their fantasy books had to follow.

[00:11:45]One that Lester thought guaranteed their success. Number one, male main character. No girls allowed, at least not in the role of protagonist. Number two, they got to triumph over evil, baby. If there's a dark lord that needs a slaying, well, they're going to win.

[00:12:00]Number three, they are the good guys. No morally gray worlds or evil protagonists. And number four, they got to have a mentor. A Merlin, a Gandalf, a Okay, well, Dumbledore wasn't invented yet, but you get the idea. That's how they got started publishing fantasy books, and they got really popular.

[00:12:18]Yeah, I'm not going to defend this. This is an insanely strict and arbitrary formula. And while you could definitely get some good books out of it, there are also plenty of amazing novels that could never be made with these sorts of rules.

[00:12:30]They're a big part of why fantasy was such a male only space for such a long time. Okay, jumping in while editing again, I came across this article which actually directly responds specifically to what Lane said about Lester Del Rey and defends the guy a bit. I don't really know enough about the history to verify that they're being honest. So, I'll leave it up to those of you in the comments who know more to go check it out and report back. I might pin a comment about it, too. All right, let's get back to it. Great. I thought for once, Hillary Lane and I are mostly on the same page. That was actually a pretty interesting story. Maybe I was being too harsh on her other video.

[00:13:04]Maybe she was just using a clickbait title and misremembered some stuff in the intro and this will end up being a solid video.

[00:13:11]And then I watched the last eight minutes. The last 8 minutes of this video have some of the worst, most nonsense arguments I've ever seen in a YouTube video essay. Okay, first of all, Lane really doesn't like it when people intentionally subvert tropes or write things in response to other things. It seems like seeing a trend in a genre and deciding to do something different is just totally off limits for her like all the time. Lane says, as is the case with Katherine Addison in her horrible, horrible The Goblin Emperor, which she herself admits was at least in part a counter response to Game of Thrones. And the clip Lane plays is incredibly tame.

[00:13:52]It is a book that is that was quite deliberately trying to do several things that fantasy right now has not been doing because so much of fantasy right now has been so influenced by George RR Martin. But it does mean that things have been very grim and bleak and pessimistic and cynical. So it is deliberately, it's not a utopia, but it is utopianist in that it is arguing that doing the right thing will win.

[00:14:26]That that if you try your best to be ethical and compassionate, you will come out on top.

[00:14:32]>> Addison isn't saying that she's going to do everything differently or that Martin's books are terrible and she's going to be the anti- Martin. She's just saying that she thought it would be a breath of fresh air if there was something different. So, she decided that's what she was going to write. It's completely reasonable. This is how people have always written books, taking inspiration and counter inspiration from various sources they liked and ones they want to stay away from. Hell, it's how Tolken wrote Lord of the Rings. Acting like this is some insane appalling statement is ridiculous. Oh, and by the way, in the 2 months since I recorded this video to me publishing it, I actually went out and read the Goblin Emperor audio book. And you're never going to believe this. It's actually totally fine. Like, it's not amazing.

[00:15:17]It's not brilliant, but it's okay.

[00:15:19]Pretty good. In fact, I think the Shakespearean English it speaks in is kind of cringe, but it's a pretty good story. There is no reason to act like it's the worst book ever made. Lane says this attitude is ruining fantasy by creating a bunch of formulas and counter formulas. But even if you just read the Wikipedia synopsis, no. A Song of Ice and Fire is a series about a large cast of main characters all coming into conflict and attempting to gain supremacy over a massive kingdom through their own personal blends of subtrafuge, manipulation, and might.

[00:15:51]While The Goblin Emperor is about a single young man completely unprepared for his role, suddenly becoming king and learning how to be good at it. They are neither conceptually the same nor conceptually opposites. Conceptually, they honestly don't seem related at all.

[00:16:05]The only true opposite is tone, where A Song of Ice and Fire is very pessimistic and the Goblin Emperor is quite optimistic. But if that were the criteria we were working on, nobody would ever be able to make an original fantasy book again since they would just be copying Tolken's optimism or countering it. And then about 26 minutes in, she gets on Game of Thrones case some more. Is Game of Thrones progressive and intelligent just because it's so different from the sword of Shinara? Does that really make one good and one bad? First of all, okay, for one, only the first book is called A Game of Thrones. The series is called A Song of Ice and Fire. But for two, yeah, kind of. I mean, being different from something doesn't make it intelligent.

[00:16:46]Being intelligent makes it intelligent, which it is. Martin's books are insanely complicated and have literally hundreds of interlocking pieces. They incorporate incredibly historically realistic royal politics and political maneuvering. It objectively took a ton of smarts to write and takes a good amount of brain power to read too. And the same thing applies to the books being good. They're just well-crafted. But in terms of if being different makes them progressive, I mean, it kind of does. Progressing a genre comes from doing something better or doing something new. And A Song of Ice and Fire is both better and more original than The Sword of Shaara. That sort of minute, detailed medieval political drama just wasn't all too common or popular before Martin came along. Most fantasy was a lot more about heroes and magic and quests. So, yes, George RR Martin did genuinely do a lot to progress the genre. And it doesn't end there because Hillary Lane makes another two comparisons that frankly are ridiculous. This is when I finally stopped taking her even remotely seriously. She says that both The Goblin Emperor and St. Camber and From Blood and Ash and Dracula in Love are very similar. She's trying to claim that both of these new books are just derivative, uncreative copies of these old books, which themselves were formulaic and bad to begin with. So, just to check her claim, I decided to actually look up what these books are about. St. Camber was a moderately popular second installment in a trilogy published by Del Rey. In the first book, former priest King Haldane managed to overthrow a tyrannical king and has now taken his place as ruler. But uh-oh, he's now the young and inexperienced ruler of a kingdom on the brink of war. Camber, on the other hand, uses magic to impersonate one of the king's old friends to prevent the outbreak of racial conflict between humans and a group of people called the Darini. The book is mostly about this former revolutionary fraught relationship with God and religion while he tries to manage a kingdom that could collapse into conflict any second, all while one of his old friends is desperately trying to stop him from doing something rash and is personally struggling with becoming both a bishop and a saint when he doesn't really feel he deserves either. The Goblin Emperor, on the other hand, follows a prince living in a time of peace who is the rightful heir to a throne and is simply inexperienced and is mostly about him surviving assassination attempts and trying to become a truly good king. It has no plot significant magic, no shape-shifting, nothing to do with religion, and a whole bunch of steampunk technology. Hell, the main character's family literally dies in a Zeppelin accident. So, to answer your question, Hillary Lane, yeah, they are pretty far removed. And let's not forget that neither of these stories seem much like Lord of the Rings at all or like the opposite of that for that matter. So that whole thing about how all modern fantasy books are formulaic because they're either derivatives of or responses to Lord of the Rings, well that's clearly not true. The other book she mentions is from Blood and Ash.

[00:19:30]Here's how she describes its connection to Dracula in love. For that matter, how far removed really is this from this? So let's figure that out. From Blood and Ash is about a young woman named Poppy who's been raised her whole life to be sacrificed to a bunch of basically vampires where she'll be handed over to the gods and have to live with them forever. Anyway, turns out Poppy really doesn't want to do that and doesn't want to deal with her insanely restrictive home life anymore. So, she learns to fight, sneaks out, gets into a bunch of romantic shenanigans with a strapping young bodyguard. And without spoiling it, there's a lot of drama and intrigue about who's telling the truth. It's a fantasy romance set in a madeup world with a bunch of classic monsters who all work a bit differently from their classic counterparts in small ways. I can't speak to its quality. I haven't read the book, but people really like it. So, that's from Blood and Ash.

[00:20:21]Okay, now get ready. We're going to talk about one of the weirdest books I have ever heard of. The one novel that made me lose faith that Hillary Lane will ever be a good critic.

[00:20:39]Dracula in Love is the story of Vlad Rescuhiliac who gets contacted by actual Dracula who is also his dad. Then he gets contacted by the actual devil who asks him for help in killing his serialist father who just recently raped a woman and inspired a massive wave.

[00:20:51]Turns out the only reason Dracula got in touch with his son is because he wants to use Vlad's computer hacking skills.

[00:20:55]Because this story takes place in the 1970s to, I kid you not, take over Brazil. He is going to distract the Brazilian cabinet by meeting them in a submarine while Vlad goes and hacks into a US State Department program so that it gives the Brazilian government money if they kill revolutionaries and are fascist. But Vlad betrays his father and installs the circuit board upside down so that it actually stops giving the money if they're fascists. Dracula tries to go and kill his son, but immediately falls head over heels for a journalist named Margaret, who's the actual devil sent to help Vlad. Dracula tries to break into a hospital, but he's stopped by Vlad's Tibetan manservant, who uses magic yoga powers to make Dracula start fighting himself, and he becomes paralyzed from the waist down. Then Margaret joins Dracula's side, feeds him a bunch of bunnies to help him regain his strength before revealing that she is actually the devil, absorbs him into her, and Dracula becomes one with the universe. As the book ends, Dracula also has a sentient.

[00:21:42]What the [ __ ] was that?

[00:21:44]So, give me an answer to this question, Hillary Lane. How in the actual [ __ ] are these books even remotely similar?

[00:21:55]Putting aside the obvious quality difference, one is a fantasy romance about a young woman living in a fictional world escaping a cult and finding true love, while the other is some sort of rapfilled erotic horror story set in the 1970s where the son of Dracula is also a computer programmer and Dracula gets reverseborn into the actual devil. Just about the only things just about the only things they have in common is that both of them have 18 plus scenes and both have something that at least kind of resembles vampires. That is it. Hillary Lane obviously had no actual idea what Dracula in Love was even about because otherwise she would have compared from Blood and Ash to literally any other vampire story ever written. This was the moment I stopped taking anything she said seriously.

[00:22:44]Hillary Lane is not a real critic. She's a serial complainer and has no idea what she's talking about. Whether that be through willful ignorance, willful dishonesty, or simply having the media literacy of a sheep. She doesn't want to provide legitimate criticism. She doesn't want to actually help out the medium or point out real problems. She just wants to complain about modernity and will use any excuse under the sun to do so. I don't even know why she picked this vampire book specifically. Like, did the D raise just not publish any vampire books? This didn't even come from them, and it wasn't all that popular for what I think should be obvious reasons. I really do think she just picked out an erotic vampire book at random and slapped it up on screen for a moment, hoping nobody in the audience would check. It's a pretty common tactic for bad video essaists.

[00:23:30]The existence of this novel also kind of undermines her earlier point about how formulaic fantasy got after Lord of the Rings, because I I mean, what even is this? if this was meant to be harping on or countering Lord of the Rings at all.

[00:23:43]I mean, maybe I just haven't read Lord of the Rings in long enough. Also, just to give some credit, I got most of that info on Dracula in love from an article by a guy named Grady Hendris on his website. The book is pretty obscure, especially in the modern day. So, this was pretty much the only in-depth review of it I could find. I checked it with the other sources just to make sure he wasn't making anything up. And yeah, it's all legit. Just wanted to give some credit as I personally didn't read the book. Well, there's a bunch more time in Lane's video, but that's kind of where it peaks for me. The rest of it is a gradual downhill tumble into pain and suffering. Let's go. So, despite everything, Hillary Lane is still doing what she did before, pretending that writers like Martin have some sort of primal urge to make their books nothing like Lord of the Rings, and in doing so fall into another tired formula. She doesn't acknowledge that a book can be not like Lord of the Rings in a million different ways, like being set in the modern day, having a darker tone, having different sets of monsters with different social structures, and by focusing on things like personal fulfillment over an epic quest, but you're a smart cookie. I know you already figured that out by now. She seems to think that before Tolken, nobody followed trends and just wrote whatever they wanted. And now they just copy whatever he did or do the opposite of that. Actually, that brings me to another thing I forgot to mention earlier. Lane seems to imply that genre trends and people copying other authors is some sort of modern thing driven by a profit motive. And like, no. I mean, the profit motive definitely made it a lot worse, but this has always been a thing.

[00:25:12]The Lord of the Flies was written because William Golding was getting real tired of books where little British boys land on deserted islands and everything turns out fine. And that book came out the same year Lord of the Rings did.

[00:25:22]Golding responded to an annoying trend and in the process ended up creating a masterpiece. and the book every Gen Xer had to read in English class. Hell, we can go way further back than 1954.

[00:25:33]Welcome to Greece, Allah 150 or so CE.

[00:25:37]This is Lucian, and he hates how so many Greeks back then were making up all these insane tall tales and passing them off as real. So, he decides to write a book making fun of them. He calls it a true story or true history before writing in the very first chapter that nothing in the book is true. And by openly admitting that, it has become the only true story ever written. It opens with the heroes finding a river of wine surrounded by lethal woman vines. The heroes then travel to the moon via a Wizard of Oz style storm where they get caught in the middle of a war between the aliens on the moon and sun over who should colonize Venus. They also get swallowed by a 200-mile long whale, find a civilization full of fish people inside, and go to war with them before killing the whale from the inside. From there, they visit an island of cheese in an ocean of milk and later meet the heroes of the Trojan War on a holy island. That's also where they find the worst kind of sinners being punished, people who lie in their books. After delivering a love letter from Adysius and escaping an island of donkeylegged cannibal women, they sail off into the distance and presumably shipwreck in America. It doesn't specify where, but I like to imagine that's where they ended up. So basically, this absolute clown man got really fed up with all the writers at the time passing tall tales of adventure off as truth and decided to make the most insane book ever written just to mock them. It's basically a massive higheffort screw you to all of his contemporaries. And fun fact, arguably the first science fiction book ever written. I mean, there's a whole huge section of it where two groups of aliens are engaging in interplanetary warfare over the colonization of Venus.

[00:27:09]And the way the sun people eventually win is by blotting out the sun's light to the moon. I'd personally give the title of first science fiction writer to Mary Shel, but this is still insanely cool for an ancient Greek dude. This book single-handedly disproves everything Hillary Lane said about how genre trends are new and how subverting genre trends just gets you stuck in a new and predictable formula. Because in one relatively short story, a writer from the second century satarizes the genre conventions of his time and writes a wildly creative book that arguably invents an entirely new genre by being completely insane and unpredictable. But again, Lane doesn't want to actually critique modern fantasy writing. She wants to baselessly complain about it.

[00:27:49]That's not even getting into how Americaentric this video is, too. Lane talks about how all fantasy writing has been stuck in boring formulas ever since Tolken. Yet, besides Lord of the Rings, she only ever references American books and writing trends. She never brings up any of the books written in Chinese, Japanese, German, Spanish, Italian, Hindi, or any other language, and yet still insists that the actions of a single American publishing company have ruined all fantasy since the '60s. This is something you may not pick up on if you're not paying close attention. I didn't even notice until I went down into the comments of the video. But general rule of thumb, if a critic is complaining about the degradation of something worldwide, but only cites works made in English, they're not actually talking about something degrading across the entire world. They just wanted to make what they said sound grander and more important. After a bit more restating that all modern fantasy is formulaic and some more condescending to the audience, she proceeds to condescend to basically everyone who's watched a TV show in the past 10 years.

[00:28:47]We've entered an era where all western entertainment is corporate formula slop, she says, while putting these images up on screen. Have you enjoyed literally any art made by a corporation in any western country in the past 10 years?

[00:29:01]Well, congrats. I guess you love slop.

[00:29:03]Now, I'm fully willing to admit that some of the stuff she showed is genuinely terrible, and I'm not going to defend them. However, there are a handful of genuinely incredible pieces of art on that list, too. White Lotus, Andor, The Last of Us, The Handmaid's Tale, Succession, and the early seasons of Game of Thrones. These don't deserve to be thrown in with the rest. But in particular, I'm going to defend severance. Severance should be exactly what Hillary Lane wants. It's not formulaic in the slightest. Here's a challenge. What genre is severance? Is it an office comedy, a horror show? Is it a science fiction or a thriller? a dystopia, a mystery series, a deeply emotional story about loss and grief, and a commentary about how corporate culture is far more like a cult than we would like to believe. The answer is it's all at once, and none of them. It combines about a halfozen seemingly contradictory genres into one and makes it work. It stitches together all of the tropes and cliches of the things it takes from, subverts a few of them, and makes something entirely new and unique.

[00:30:04]There is nothing else out there like it.

[00:30:06]And it doesn't end there. Severance also doesn't follow the formulas when it comes to structuring episodes. Chai Bardau is one of the most beautifully tragic stories I've seen in my entire life, and it's told by weaving together three interlocking stories Christopher Nolan style, all culminating in its gut punch ending. This show is not normal.

[00:30:26]It's not formulaic. It's bizarre and creative and fascinating and funny and sad. So, when Lane disregards it as slop after advocating for all of those things throughout this video, I don't know. It gets to me. I know there's going to be somebody down in the comments who says something like, "All movies made by corporations are terrible. There hasn't been anything good in decades." And to that, I say an important part of criticizing corporations is recognizing that some of the stuff they put out is genuinely good. That's part of what makes how they operate so tragic. A company like Disney will allow a thought-provoking critical Darling like Andor to be made only to cancel it after two seasons because it wasn't making them the money they wanted. It didn't have lightsabers or Jedi or Sith or any of the other things that made Star Wars really recognizable and a money maker.

[00:31:14]It's sad because you know that if these corporations didn't value profit over people, they could consistently make great art. We have proof of that. But because of how our economic system is set up, they are encouraged to put out profitable slop over interesting stories that you can't merchandise as well.

[00:31:31]Finally, we get to the end where for the first time, Lane recommends some things she actually likes. If you're a reader, maybe now is the time to expand your horizons a little. Fantasy literature had unimaginable breath before Lester Del Rey got his hands on it. And one final time, Lane's own example contradicts her point. One of the books she recommends is The Worm Aroaros, a book about kings, dwarves, elves, goblins, pixies, imps, demons, and witches, all divided along racial lines into different kingdoms. They must find a rare artifact, the egg of an enormous bird, which they will hatch and ride it to the peak of a fiery mountain. Sound familiar? This was her example to showcase the variety in fantasy before the age of Del Rey. And while you may decry this comparison, call it unfair, let me just point out that these two worlds and plots are far more similar than basically everything on that list of corporate slop sheed was to anything else on that list.

[00:32:27]I want to end this video by talking about a book I read recently. It's called The Failures by an author named Benjamin Liar. It's his debut book and it's really good. This book is set in a weird little post-apocalyptic fantasy world where everybody has been forced to live underground. Below an enormous mountain so large entire civilizations rose and fell on its slopes. It is three different types of magic which all intertwined in interesting ways. Magical machines, a whole complicated civilizational history, and a dozen different major factions and power players. There are gods, monsters, heroes, both true and fallen. And above them all, the giants, invincible beasts, hundreds of feet tall, bent on nothing less than the complete and total destruction of humanity. But there's more to it than worldb building. It's also a very thematically interesting book. All of the main characters are struggling between two fundamentally opposing ideas, their feelings of responsibility and their hedonistic desires. Sophie was a bright-eyed child hero straight out of a kid's fantasy novel. Now grown up and having to struggle with trauma from the war she ended. She's drowning her responsibilities as a folk hero in alcohol and one night stands. And yet she can't shake the feeling that she needs to do something to save her friends and city. The behemoth effectively gods have a similar problem.

[00:33:42]Jackie and Gunnar want to care. They try to, but when they travel to this fantasy world from Earth, like real world Earth, they become unbelievably powerful and have a hard time resisting the selfish desire to abuse their abilities. And then there are Queen Jane and Winter, two women who have fully given up on trying to do the right thing, manipulating the entire world for their own gain. The novel takes the time to delve into moral complexity and give each character a solid arc. But what really makes the failure special is the presentation. Structurally, this might be the weirdest book I've ever read. It takes place in four entirely different points in time. Each of those times having more than one perspective going at once. One of them came after Apocalypse number one, but before number two. Another is set a few years after that. One is set two decades before the present. And the last one takes place in the present day. It should have been a complete mess. It shouldn't have worked.

[00:34:35]But Liar did a fantastic job of tying all of the timelines together through immortal characters, aliases, the book's themes, dramatic reveals, and the catalyst behind them all. The dream of trees. The dream that has appeared to the main characters in each timeline.

[00:34:50]The dream that someday they will be able to reverse the apocalypse and allow their people to once again walk free on the surface where the sun shines. When I read this book, I realized something fantastic. It was special. I'd never seen something like it done before in fiction. There were stories about kids growing up too fast and magical godly world hoppers and even ones where two different timelines came together by the end. But I had never seen anything like this before. The failures managed to weave together a story that took place over centuries and hundreds and hundreds of pages and even more impressive gave it a satisfying conclusion and the potential for a series. I think there's something we can learn from this novel.

[00:35:30]This clever little epic. There's a fundamental truth here that we can glean. And that truth is Hillary Lane is full of [ __ ] That was the point of the video.