[Draconus1990]

Not sure if this is the right place for this thought dump.

6 years I began reading MbotF. When people at work asked me what I was reading I would often deflect or make up an answer as I would’ve been seen as weird. Blame my insecurities if you want but this was how I and many others felt.

Fast forward 6 years. GoT and stranger things as key examples have made niche fantasy culture far more mainstream than it has ever been. Board game cafes are the norm and ‘normal’ people want to play D&D

Now I am actively encouraging people st work to read MBotF. It is more relevant than ever and there is an untapped potential fan base which I believe to be in the millions.

If MBotF was released today it would generate much more hype than even a few years ago let alone when it was initially released.

So - should there be a re-release or a PR drive to get people reading MBotF? For me it is the most important series I have read and has an active influence on my perception if the world around me and my place in it. It is making a better and less naive person.

[LinearPhilosopher]

Its surprising the venn diagram of friends of mine who play DnD and have read MBotF

[nicetrout]

I've been thinking about this a lot. In regard to a fantasy bubble, I feel, like we are about to enter. The Witcher series is about to come out. Amazon Prime is making both a massively financed LOTR series as well as making a fucking wheel of time show. I mean, I'm here for it. Pete's going to watch, at least a bit probably. For most of them, but I can't help but feel like they're not going to pan out. At least not as the stakeholders in these respective companies feel like they will. I mean Game of Thrones was tremendously popular, the first fantasy TV show to really break through. But to me that doesn't prove there's a huge appetite for epic fantasy TV.


Star Wars is popular, but you know Science Fiction isn't that popular, it's a sub genre. Just because it's a movie in space with crazy shit, doesn't mean people are there for it. There's some people, they're into it, and shows/tv are made at a scale to cater to that level of an audience.


I feel like the lesson of Game of Thrones television success was not, let's make a tv show about complicated characters with entangled relationships. You know, they're chasing after the dragons and the lore of it all. I'm here for dragons and lore, truly I am, but I the whole world isn't it. I feel like that's already proven. If the whole world was really into dragons, fantasy books would be much more popular than they are. And they are modestly popular! Just relatively so. Not let's spends all this money to make a Wheel of Time tv show?

I mean, it's not even a beef against Wheel of Time just...I don't think that's what people want.

Hell, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe, we're about to enter a high fantasy Renaissance and my extended friend and family is going to become as interested in the minutia of world building as I can be. But it doesn't feel like. It feels like it was a love affair with fantasy, like Lord of the Rings. Maybe in a decade they'll be something else that blows up again, but I don't know...I guess we'll see.