Well, the cover blurbs are the movies' fault and the media. There weren't as many Tolkien comparisons being done on covers for a long while until the LOTR movies hit and did so well. Those movies brought in a wave of potential new fans who were reading LOTR and looking for others, so it made sense to throw Tolkien's name on just about every secondary world novel in hopes of attracting their attention. It was also a way to sell to booksellers and vendors -- here's something the Tolkien fans will like. (Because, altogether now, fiction is symbiotic.) With the reissue of Tolkien's story recently, that keeps the impetus going, but it will probably fade again in a bit.
And the other problem is that non-genre media is often familiar with Tolkien and not much else in category fantasy, so when they review a secondary world fantasy novel, they look at whether it is Tolkien-like, and then the publisher uses the quote from the reviews because it helps them out. Which again sort of argues against the claim that Tolkien's influence has dropped, in favor of his having become Coca-Cola, or, as has indeed neatly been brought up, Elvis.
And then there's the genre media, who keep the whole thing going in their reviews; the genre media, which are still obsessed with Tolkien and which has set all the standards of judgment of secondary world fantasy -- and really only secondary world fantasy -- around Lord of the Rings. Genre media is fixated when it comes to secondary world fantasy on originality versus derivative, whether it's good and evil versus darkly amoral, whether it is pastorally Tolkien-like or Moorcock-urban, etc. And so Tolkien's name is brought up again and again -- is it Tolkien-like? Yes, and that's good. Yes, and that's bad. No, and that's good. No, and so it's too weird. And publishers take the positive quotes from those reviews too, that have Tolkien's name.
The endless comparisons -- is this one ripping off that one, is this a clone of Tolkien or some other big name, does it have this cliche that we've decided we're tired of, or this cliche that we've decided we like and is cool -- mean that secondary world fantasy is caught in a conversational time loop. Even SF and other types of fantasy, that do some whining about derivativeness, are nowhere near as crazed about this issue as the secondary world community, which seems to feel that the future of everything has to do with the sub-category's relationship to Tolkien, for or against. We're unique, though I'm not sure after listening to this argument for 25 years, that this is necessarily a good thing. It seems to indicate a great deal of insecurity, as if we're constantly arguing about whether such fiction has the right to exist or not.
