I wondered whether he was wearing underwear, but I'm sure the damsels didn't. And the mills of capitalism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity, an industry. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude.
Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits.
Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. If anyone has a right to be so snooty, it's Le Guin. She really does deliver those universal truths she goes on about, beginning in A Wizard of Earthsea . Ged, the novel's arrogant hero, becomes a great mage only after fleeing, then chasing, and finally naming his own shadow. If Narnia takes its power from Christian allegory and Middle Earth from Norse legend, Earthsea draws its strength from the blend of Zen and Native American mythology that flourishes among the redwoods.