[Nerwen]

Interesting articles. I do think Leo Grin's going overboard though, in basically saying, "this IS modern fantasy", and "this IS the liberal mindset". That's such a huge generalization in both cases that it's close to being a strawman argument.

Ideology aside, it's actually natural that when the conventions of a genre become too obvious, people try inverting them or otherwise playing with them as an "instant originality, just add water" recipe. And actually, there's nothing wrong with that– at first. Then, if everyone does it, it becomes a cliché in its turn; also it can become a bit of a dead end, since it depends on those same earlier conventions, and on the reader's awareness of them. On that note, even if there was a period when the kind of thing he's talking about was the only game in town– I suppose you could say it was getting that way a few years back– I don't think it's like that anymore.