Shakespear vs Poe

[Montmorency]

Tolkien is lame too. When entire nations -nations! - are judged and found wanting unto death, put to the sword and tooth and claw in the midst of great lamentation and gnashing of teeth, pregnant women carved open and then penetrated through their new openings for the infinite lust of bestial half-breeds, resistance flailing in the face of towering waves of nihilistic force, and - extinguished - coming to naught, should feel... tragic, not sterile.

The hearts of men should be laid bare in all their avarice, cruelty, wantonness, and sniveling fear, not idealized and glorified. Kings should flaunt their arrogance and impunity in the name of pride, even as impending annihilation stares them and their people and their race in the face.

Our bones should vibrate with the shuddering of the earth beneath violent thousands, heaving and snarling in the name of a pitiful and forlorn cause. We should hear the ejection of viscera and the crack of bones, smell the unwashed anuses and the rancid armpits and the trampled earth stained with bloody bowel.

The dying inhuman races whose forebears were ancient even one-thousand generations of men ago should not be anthropomorphized, they should be revealed for the mad things they are - for no such soul could be anything but utterly insane in our parochial eyes.

A good story has you rooting for the "villains", or else weeping in horror and despair.