Honestly, I think lots of people aren't aware of just how powerful the setting is
I wouldn't exactly call it a powerful setting..The strongest character in the setting tops out just below Odin from Marvel at his absolute nastiest. The second two strongest characters are solar system wreckers at their highest upper limit and even that requires a generous helping of "taking prophecy at face value". Granted Tolkien's explanation as to why is pretty solid. The rest of the big dogs are casual continent wreckers who at their greatest extent helped shape a relatively small universe by creating the laws of physics and shit in a gigantic heavy metal concert that spanned an "age of the world" and everyone else just goes down from there.
That's nice but its hardly impressive...compared to some of the other stuff we analyze. I think what happens is, they're the biggest rat terrier in a junkyard populated by Chihuahuas basically? They're the big guys in the low tier bracket for fictional settings..and can give good odds against mid tier settings but that's about it.
And people tend to have trouble with understanding that.
It doesn't help that as I said, its hard to find debatable matches for a fiction like that.
It reminds me of the old Charmed vs Harry Potter fights from the mid to late 00's when people would get monstrously asshurt that a bunch of soccer moms could smoke the Potterverse like a cheap blunt at a PTSA meet up.
Me, thinking both settings were equally mediocre never really had the personal investment so the matches were always amusing for the reaction they caused.
Maybe not helped if you only ever watched the movies
Hilariously even there...Galadriel creating shockwaves that cover a country, Gandalf darkening Rivendel and causing a fucking earth quake..etc etc.
Also, what about all the implied alien races that may exist here? There are Deep Ones and I think the oily blackstone maybe of interest
The featless things who don't appear?
I've no opinion at all because they don't do a damn thing..So I can't analyze them
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