The maniac

Tolkien also created complete Languages for each race of his stories.

Sometimes I think he just liked world-building, and writing stories about his world came second.
- From reading his biography, it seemed he mostly liked creating languages and then crafted stories and worlds based off them.
  Tolkien's the GOAT.
- They are called Paracosms. He was writting languages during his teens long before he got to stories.
  Middle earth is the first item on the list of examples on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracosm
- It’s not impossible! It’s fairly niche and finding others who appreciate it before the age of the internet would’ve been tough.
  Modern Tolkien would’ve probably been part of the various conlang communities, doing challenges and whatnot.
Not only the languages but also an etymology for them to explain, how they developed.
Wish he was better at naming characters though. Not every son needs a name that starts with the same letter as his father's.
- What, you aren't a fan of Aenor, son of Agenor, son of Agenar, son of Agenup, son of Ageflip, son of Agintur, Slayer of B'Thal'Muun?
- Tell that to my 2nd degree aunt

Frank Herbert: ... and dogs that are also chairs... rips bong... chairdogs
Duncan, Duncan, Duncan, Duncan
- lol Herbert had some weird fantasy about a guy named Duncan from Idaho. Only explanation for some of that stuff.
Frank Herbert is what happens when a genius writer takes too much shrooms while studying dunes. Like that is literally what happened.
- Calling him a genius writer is probably being a bit too generous, what with all the beefswellings and all that
Fuckin Herbert just decided to write philosophy disguised as a sci-fi story lol

Tolkien is clearly the best, but I don’t have a problem with Martin borrowing from real-life history. History is incredibly cool, and full of amazing stories. Stealing from other authors is bullshit, though.

To be fair the children's story came first. In that regard Tolkien and Rowling had something in common, their first books were written for a much younger and simpler audience. It wasn't until they took off commercially that the more adult and deep lore was developed.

EDIT: I'm wrong

What? No. First was the story of Arda in a prototype version of the Silmarillon and Unfinished Tales.
- Huh, interesting, I didn't realize Tolkien had started writing portions of the Silmarillion in 1914. I had to do some looking based on your response and learned something.
Upvote because somebody online admitted they were wrong.
- No they didn't!

Then you have the author of Twilight that started world building after the first book, created a number of characters with interesting background lore, then proceeded to do nothing with any of it.

It's even worse than that - Twilight was originally fanfic for Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles series, so it's all just Lestat with a fake mustache and sparkles.
- And 50 shades was a Twilight fanfic...
I read that series out of spite when it was popular, and actually started getting interested in the lore and world when she started introducing fucking X-Men powers. Huge build up, huge hype, and then... fucking nothing. I shouldn't have been surprised, but alas.
- Same.

George Lucas: Let someone else handle it.

George Lucas: I like money
- “There's no underwear in space.”

Also, fun fact: Tolkien converted C.S. Lewis to Christianity, who almost immediately disappointed him by adopting Anglicanism instead of Catholicism and then decided Tolkien's stories weren't Christian enough, so he basically wrote the Narnia books out of spite.

Steven Erikson: here's a world that contains millennia of anthropologically grounded cultures that got spiced up by some interdimensional elves, orcs, gods & dragons that me and my buddy use to play D&D in, have fun reading through the eyes of over 1000 characters lol

Erikson ruined fantasy novels for me. Book of the Fallen was the most challenging and rewarding read of my life. It made almost everything else feel like YA fiction.
- Seriously. I only finished the main Book of the Fallen series this early this year and just can't get interested in anything else fantasy now.
  It's one thing to make you feel something when a character you've been with for 10 books dies, but when an author can do the same with a character you're with for a handful of pages, it's something else.
  !Abasard's death in Reaper's Gale still resonates with me. !<
- Felt the same when I finished that series. Didn't feel that I could read fantasy again.
Not a native english speaker, but these books are so hard to read.
Currently in book 9. Moving ever so slowly so it doesn't end too quickly, cause then what will I read? 😭

Tolkien is the best ever, but a lot of his stuff is inspired or ported directly from Catholicism.

This but also various mythological bits and pieces from England, because Tolkien wanted to create an English mythology akin to the Odyssey, Edda or Niebelungen.
A lot of that Catholicism stuff is just Christianity with local gods and figures retconed in using saints expansions.
And that whole Christian thing is just a Mediterraneanised/Latinized Zoroastrianism.
- ... And Zoroastrianism is just hyped up druidism. The Persians were part of that Indo-European world.
Yeah, Martin learned the "cribbed from history" trick from Tolkien
- Its good stuff. We dont know history anyway.
It's all fanfiction all the way down from the original cave drawings anyway

GRRM wrote "Sandkings" which is one of my favorite novellas ever. He gets a pass from me.

I think he stole this from an episode of Outer Limits.
- The novel is ~15 years older than that show..?
- He might have written that ep of Outer Limits, he worked a ton in TV back in the day.

And people wonder why I have no respect for George R R Martin. Why I have no respect for JK rowling, destroyer of her Legacy is self-evident at this point

I respect Martins approach. Not every fantasy writer has to be a Tolkien.
- Tolkien: Writes a complex, multifaceted story set in a rich universe in a single elegant novel across three volumes.
  Martin: Is five books into his trilogy with at least two more to go and still has no idea where the story is going.
  I think I know which approach I respect more...
- Not every writer has the fantasy that Tokien had.
GRRM is great at giving input and following the formula, as evidenced by Elden Ring. Not so much with creating an enormous, generational body of work.
- Elden Ring was Namco, not GRRM....

Yeah the Hobbit was the first book I ever read, at six years old, lucky me I became a lifetime nerd

"Then write a children's book in it."

That is exactly why Stephen Colbert, king of LOTR trivia, does not like The Hobbit.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
does not like The Hobbit.
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"Damn the boy"

Didn't he write the Hobbit first and then everything else around it?

No, not really. It was his first book that was supremely popular, but it was written for his children. His main body of work (which was later published in part in the Silmarallion) was started in WWI and was never really completed. The Hobbit and then to a far greater extant LotR were pulled into the preceding work.
He already hada lot of stories and ideas about Middle Earth before. When he wrote the Hobbit for his kids, he placed it in this world and it became the first book to be published. Lord of the Rings he wrote as a sequel to the Hobbit, but added a lot of hints and references to his other stories of his world.
He set The Hobbit (which he wrote for his kids) in the world he'd already built... not because he particularly enjoyed worldbuilding, but because a culturally complex fantasy world with a rich history and mythology was a prerequisite for the epic poetic sagas he felt needed to write in order to properly develop his fantasy languages, which is what he really liked to do, as a philologist.