I am seeing so many books in which characters, to me at least, seem to have the emotional maturity of 14-year-olds, and in which individual success and satisfaction is presented as the only real goal. Which I find faintly sinister.
Me too, to both. There really aren't many fantasies of the renunciation of power. Tolkien, obviously, as you mentioned, Jan Siegel/Amanda Hemingway made it explicitly the theme of her two fantasy trilogies and Sarah Rees Brennan's first trilogy had it too. The first book, "The Demon's Lexicon", was to my astonishment actually analysable as 'The Lord of the Rings' told from the point of view of the Ring. But apart from those, I think that only the horror genre may still have real loss and sacrifice as a regular story element. That may have something to do with why horror is pretty much dead as a commercial proposition.
Japanese and Chinese film and anime have quite a lot of serious sacrifice in them, but that may simply be because of different definitions of what constitutes a happy ending. To stay with LOTR for the moment, a wuxia LOTR would have had the Fellowship searching for Celebrimbor's lost treatise on how to make and unmake the Rings of Power and the Ring would have been destroyed but everyone would have died at the end except Arwen, who would have chosen mortality and gone off into the desert to live out her lifespan in meditation (or if played by Carina Lau would have taken the crown of Gondor as Ruling Queen), and Sam, who would have sailed away over the Sea by himself (comic relief always lives). As the Andy Lau vehicle "Three Kingdoms" demonstrates, dying gloriously is a perfectly acceptable happy ending in Chinese cinema.
When I saw the film of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", it brought home to me suddenly why it was the Narnia book that I had liked least as a child. It was because Aslan cheated. He did a deal with the White Witch, and died, and then suddenly he wasn't dead after all, for no good reason that I could see. It was very unsatisfactory.
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Me too, to both. There really aren't many fantasies of the renunciation of power. Tolkien, obviously, as you mentioned, Jan Siegel/Amanda Hemingway made it explicitly the theme of her two fantasy trilogies and Sarah Rees Brennan's first trilogy had it too. The first book, "The Demon's Lexicon", was to my astonishment actually analysable as 'The Lord of the Rings' told from the point of view of the Ring. But apart from those, I think that only the horror genre may still have real loss and sacrifice as a regular story element. That may have something to do with why horror is pretty much dead as a commercial proposition.
Japanese and Chinese film and anime have quite a lot of serious sacrifice in them, but that may simply be because of different definitions of what constitutes a happy ending. To stay with LOTR for the moment, a wuxia LOTR would have had the Fellowship searching for Celebrimbor's lost treatise on how to make and unmake the Rings of Power and the Ring would have been destroyed but everyone would have died at the end except Arwen, who would have chosen mortality and gone off into the desert to live out her lifespan in meditation (or if played by Carina Lau would have taken the crown of Gondor as Ruling Queen), and Sam, who would have sailed away over the Sea by himself (comic relief always lives). As the Andy Lau vehicle "Three Kingdoms" demonstrates, dying gloriously is a perfectly acceptable happy ending in Chinese cinema.
When I saw the film of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", it brought home to me suddenly why it was the Narnia book that I had liked least as a child. It was because Aslan cheated. He did a deal with the White Witch, and died, and then suddenly he wasn't dead after all, for no good reason that I could see. It was very unsatisfactory.