Not just fantasy. Look at the folks trying to pick apart every movie by claiming plot holes. Just because an author chose not to explain everything like an encyclopedia, doesn’t make it a plot hole. 
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Sometimes a glaring omission can ruin an immersive experience.
Take the Max Max films, for example. They are dumb, popcorn munching fun, but they fall apart with just a little scrutiny:
World building doesn’t need to be excruciatingly detailed, but it should make sense based on our understanding of our own world. Take Tatooine from Star Wars: it’s a dessert world. How do they eat and drink? A throwaway line about Luke’s moisture farm and needing droids for the evaporators does the heavy lifting, and the audience can fill in the gaps.
My daughter has started picking up on this, and asks questions in movies and shows, with her usually saying “movie logic” before I do.
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It might also be worth considering that Tolkien wrote entire books worth of notes on the backstory of minor places, characters, and objects, so asking questions like “wait, what’s the deal with this?” is hardly something contrary to the author’s purpose. He measured how many days and how much bread the hobbits would need to walk to Mordor, and added delays to match other characters’ timing, for heaven’s sake.
You want to know why Isildur only has one heir? Kindly check out the entire detailed history of the royal houses of Arnor and Gondor in the appendix.
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Completely devoid of entrées! 
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And full of unsavory characters.
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Tolkien used his stories and their backstories to explore and expand on the entanglement of language and mythology. Now, we explore his stories and their backstories for their (and his) entanglement in societal and cultural norms. Works for me. In both cases, it’s something which you do at leisure - and at your own peril.
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Many of Tom Holt’s fantasy novels give at least a nod to economics. How does one profit from a cheap labour force in a parallel universe? How does gentrification alter a universe? How do elves base an economy on publishing magazines of literary criticism?
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The kingly caste tries to condense their mojo into one scion, rather than diluting it. The elvish heritage makes conception less likely as well.
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Second breakfast is very hard on the arteries.
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“Do you know how many economists you need to kill to get 1 pound of brains”
-Old joke punchline
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Basically after the 2nd one, they went into grander fantasy on the lines of various rip offs. (Much like George Romero did with his latter Dead films). Mad Max 2 depicted a run down resource exhausted world. The plot revolves how rare gas, water, food and ammunition for firearms is.
Fury Road’s world makes no goddamn sense. Its a resource rich world with feudal level access to it.
What is the point of all those cars and doof warriors for a society which is at relative peace with its neighbors with distinct feifdoms cooperating and trading with each other?
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Anyone who feels that the problem with Tolkien is a lack of encyclopedic explanation of the world his characters inhabit is going to really struggle with the vast majority of the world’s literature.
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Ah, so vaporators ARE very similar to binary load lifters in many respects! All this time I thought C3PO was just trying to pad his resume.
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@jkga came back to thank you for posting that unused audio commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky.
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Well, yeah, that’s the “because the author wrote it that way” category. I was alluding to the niche of fandom that insists there must be some kind of logical explanation of how such a thing is possible, when there just…isn’t. And that’s ok, is my point. Not every aspect of world-building must stand up to strict scrutiny.
In my opinion, there is a difference between exploring the history of Glamdring within the legendarium on the one hand and on the other insisting that the agricultural policy of Gondolin under Turgon must be logically consistent and explainable. Tolkien gave us a world filled the former category, but in my opinion the latter tends to clip the wings of beautiful world-building. YMMV.
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I suppose everyone thinks that world building must comport with what they personally find important and beautiful.
Funny old world, innit?
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In Martha Wells’ stories of the Raksura, the raksura are shapeshifters. When one character starts to ask how it works, the mentor character says “it’s just magic. Don’t think about it too much”. And that’s my idea of the perfect explanation for how fantasy worlds happen.
I think one motivation for this kind of explanation/exploration of fantasy worlds is wanting things to make sense when too much of our world does not. You can argue hobbit economics and never have to get into difficult, painful discussions about real world economics, and that can be a relief, because real world economics are difficult and painful and take up a lot of brain space/energy for a lot of people.
Phillip Pullman once said that in reply to a query about how something worked in Lyra’s London he said “I haven’t needed to know that yet. When I do, I will tell you.”
We live in a world we can only imperfectly describe-even with the mass of information available to us. It is made up of imperfections and contradictions. Wanting a world where the rules only exist because someone made them up to be fractally examinable and consistent can be comforting.
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Exactly! That’s why we know a hell of a lot about the history of pipe-weed, and nothing at all about Aragorn’s tax policy. And I kind of like it like that.
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