I seem to have had a way higher tolerance for blatantly Tolkein-inspired Fat Fantasy when I was a teenager than I do now

I was just thinking about that the other day--I definitely had that higher tolerance. I remember how excited I was about the first three Sword of Shannara books when they were new. And I can faintly remember why, which was this enormous hunger for More Tolkien, which I wasn't gonna get. (And I hadn't discovered fanfic yet.)

Eventually, the blatantly-derivative-fat-fantasy genre stopped coming within a mile of scratching that itch, and my yearnings redirected themselves.