Where the Heart of Anti-Shurtugal Rises Again.

I don't know if anyone has heard of this, but I was just made aware of a HobbyDrama thread covering it, here. I'd try to summarize it, but... words can't describe it properly, it can only be experienced. Let's just say that, from the summaries, I have somehow managed to stumble across something that makes the likes of Paolini, Newcomb, and Greenwood look like quality literature in comparison. Dear Lord. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to be available in English, but even so... I had to share.

The person who posted the HobbyDrama thread is also doing a Tumblr liveblog here. I just got up to the part where the party's resident sexy elf assassin somehow dances herself to death (apparently, she gets better). And from the (admittedly, translated) excerpts... the scene is so much worse and so much more bizarre than that brief description makes it sound.

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?