Apparently An Eragon Series Just Isn't Enough

[mara_dienne459]

 Apparently Lionsgate Television is hard at work making a revival TV series of Twilight. According to the article I found, they're super serious now, guys. Even though the idea was pitched a decade ago, they're only just now announcing that it is indeed a thing, even though there's nobody attached to work on it. They're just super serious about getting it done. It seems Meyer is supposed to be involved, but how much nobody knows. That's about as much information as the article had, too. It's happening, but that's it.

The fact that someone is suing the Tolkien Estate isn't even the strangest part of this

[masterghandalf]

Okay, I know this is a bit outside this comm's usual wheelhouse, but it does involve bad fantasy fiction (and good fantasy fiction, tangentially) and is just so utterly bizarre that I had to share:

So, uh, has anyone else been reading about this bizarre little kerfuffle? To make a long story short, a guy is suing Amazon and the Tolkien Estate for claiming Rings of Power ripped off a bunch of plot points from his own self-published novel without crediting him. Where it gets really weird is that, despite the fact that said novel is available for purchase on Amazon itself, it's literal LotR fanfic. No, I don't mean a Shannara-esque LotR-clone fantasy novel, I mean it's literal, honest-to-Iluvatar fanfic starring Elanor Gamgee and Prince Eldarion a generation after LotR (even Dennis McKiernan had the decency to file the serial numbers off his Tolkien fanfic before publishing the damn thing!). If you want to see for yourself that this is real, it's here; apparently the author did send a copy of it to the Tolkien Estate a while back, and when he never heard back from them took it as approval (instead of the rather more likely "we're not giving this the time of day"). And I read the preview on the Amazon page as far as I could before I couldn't take it anymore, because it is eye-wateringly bad. To top it off, the name of the thing is The Fellowship of the King. Yes, seriously. And apparently the author thinks he can milk a seven-book series out of this, despite it being both terrible and, from my amateur viewpoint, a clear copyright violation. And I'm not making any of this up, but just... why?