Oh Azh, this was powerful. Thank you for sharing it with us!

The position that genre fiction is somehow lesser has long baffled me, when it has been the vehicle for such profound insight into human experience. You are right: these are not little stories! They mean so much. They are deep and important. I think your short essay demonstrates this well, as it grapples to understand complexity through the lens of these two characters. 

I feel for you. 

And what you say resonates.

I am not sure, sometimes, whether it is realism itself or something about a wide-spread attitude to reality, but it seems that there is something that wants to cut our tragedies down to size and narratives like Tolkien's help us to resist that. If that makes sense.