Across games, books, movies, etc... what is your favorite fantasy story(s)? And what do you love about it?

Not sure. The various Discworld books are certainly up there near the top, but I enjoyed R.A. Salvatore's Forgotten Realms books as well. The Wheel of Time was good for quite a while, but started to drag on towards the last few books. Of course there's The Lord of the Rings.

Discworld is much thanks to how it twists and bends common concepts in order to look at them from a different point of view.
Salvatore's Forgotten Realms and The Wheel of Time due to the adventures and relationships.
The Lord or the Rings has such a fantastic world.

There are several.

Quantum Deep

A Clockwork Orgy

Whore of the Rings

and of course

Playmate of the Apes

Bookwise:, I've always been a big fan of the original trilogy for Dragonlance, as well as the Legends trilogy that takes place afterwards. An epic journey that spans the continent of Ansalon and time. Heroes die, and you get the thought process of why evil doers are the way they are (most of them at least). Most of the books outside of those two trilogies are hit and misses as you have multiple authors that write them.

The World of Xanth is a pretty fun read. A lot of puns in the real world get turned into something strange in that magical world. Everyone has a unique magical gift, that can be used creatively.

Wheel of Time. Just started this series (on second book), and it has a nice mystery surrounding what's going on. Group of young adults get thrown into a situation where they must rely on themselves, and a few veterans they meet to survive some evil guy wanting to kill them for a reason they don't know.

Night Angel Trilogy. Quite bloody and graphic, though the main character is more than a bit overpowered.

Lone Wolf. The gamebooks by Joe Dever back in the early 80's. Magnamund has very thorough history with the creation of the world, the Darklords, the creation of the Kai. Some of the gamebooks were novelized years later.

I am definitely a Lord of The Rings fan... although I will always prefer The Hobbit. But as an adult, I'm fascinated by the source of so much modern fantasy -- both Northern Germanic tales and The Ring of the Nibelung.

Probably Brandon Sanderson's Warbreaker. Great characters, twisty-turny plot, interesting world without having to do a ton of exposition dump ... I really enjoyed it.

Really thinking about this made me realize how little I care about the story in fantasy, the world building is what tickles my fancy. In my opinion, most fantasy stories are full of tropes and marketed towards teens/tweens. I would love to be proven wrong though because I really enjoy good world building.

First four seasons of Game of Thrones are great, The WItcher 3 is great. After that my mind goes blank.

I'm thinking another drop for Discworld.

This is really the main reason I collect pen-and-paper RPG books. Not primarily to use the information within them as background for campaigns, but to read about the worlds.

I have used Numenera to some extent, but what little I ran of D&D was entirely freestyled. And there are ones I have a buttload of extra books for but haven't run at all.

I liked the Magician series when I was young, by Raymond E Feist. I enjoyed the theme of an unwanted orphan and later slave, managing to become powerful and find his own place, even if he was alone.

I also liked The Last Unicorn, by Peter S Beagle. Another lonely story of a single unicorn searching for the rest of her kind, and being altered by the search.

Fond of the Lone Wolf series also. Combat which-way books where you explore different countries and fight to avenge the massacre of your order.

As I've gotten older however I've become more and more bitter about all forms of media, so I haven't really enjoyed anything since adulthood. Are you aware the books are online now?

IMHO tropes are great. It's only when they populate poor stories that they become tiresome. But yes, there are a lot of terrible and derivative writers of fantasy.

Sorry, didn't plan to offer recommendations but...

With the kinds of worlds in the works you listed, you might check out The Blade Itself and The First Law trilogy... and possibly the graphic novels in the Artesia series.

The Hobbit (book, not the movies): because it's a series of smaller but exciting adventures around a very peculiar character and because I like how the world and the fantastical creatures are presented through his eyes with awe, horror and wonder, instead of everything being taken for granted or as trivial. I also enjoy the children's book / fairy tale tone of the narration. The Lord of the Rings is good, too, but to be honest, I mostly like the more small scale or personal parts that are either Hobbit-like or eerie, and less the epic parts that are supposedly more Silmarillion-inspired, the stories of human kingdoms and battles and great evil and such.

Astrid Lindgren's Ronja rövardotter, if that counts. I guess I just prefer fantasy settings to be explored with childlike wonder and relatable characters. I think I generally prefer children or young adult fantasy because to me it seems more imaginative and character-focused. I'm a sucker for fictional creatures and the eerie, too, and this book has both in good measure. Of course, I read both this and The Hobbit as a kid, they may have been my introduction to fantasy, so that might explain my preferences a bit as well. I haven't found a lot of adult fantasy that I would read with the same interest and enjoyment, sadly.

I guess Game of Thrones is a good one, too, but it's tricky to judge, as I only watched the show (without the last season) and didn't read the books, the official story of the novels isn't concluded yet and the series' conclusion, from what I've heard, seems rushed and in part badly written. What makes it good is how character-driven it is and that the characters are vulnerable and fallible. I don't really like heroic fantasy, I guess. GoT has this typical big evil threat plot, too, but it's more of a backdrop to all the characters' stories, the politics and intrigues. It's not a clear-cut good vs. evil epic.

I like (most of) the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett, too, but they went from parody of fantasy novels to parody (?) of our world and comparatively modern things, so they don't feel as much like 'serious' fantasy stories, whatever that is. And I enjoyed reading Harry Potter, but more so the first books when it was on a smaller scale and more personal than the later ones where it became a bit of that typical epic battle of good vs. evil nonsense with wizard ex machina twists again.

I fear that's it, for the most part. Not a very original list. I haven't tried that many different adult fantasy novels, but when I've tried some they seldom managed to draw me in and hold my interest. I'm rather put off by epic tales in lands where everything seems kind of familiar but has silly new names and draws heavily from Tolkien, D&D or other overused tropes. I don't really want to read about elves, dwarves and orcs anymore (or about [insert new names for elves, dwarves and orcs here]). I'm very aware that those are heavy prejudices that might not be true for a greater part of fantasy novels, but still, I haven't really found a lot to convince me that fantasy novels can be as much fun as I would like them to be.

Oh, Rumo, by Walter Moers was a good one, too, IIRC. But the books by Walter Moers aren't dead serious, and his new silly fantasy names are often funny and don't sound as far-fetched or alien at all in German. The novels also have a bit of that light children's book tone, even though Rumo is pretty brutal at times.

I listed picked up Dragons of Autumn Twilight at a library sale. Look forward to reading it. Very interested in Lone Wolf, but haven't read anything. First I heard the name was the game that rel;eased a few years back.

LOTR, The Hobbit, anything by Brandon Mull, and the Ranger's Apprentice series by John Flanagan.

Then you came to fantasy as many do -- feeling alone and somewhat alienated from modern society. ;)

You say that you've become more bitter and media. Could you expand on that fo rme?