You're doing the thing I was talking about, argument-wise, which is going from this place where you don't actually understand a thing, and then making really bold claims about it.
Obviously S&S isn't a setting. S&S informs the tone of a setting. And you're focusing on one aspect of S&S, just trying to boil it down, which is reductive and is stopping you from understanding, not helping you, exactly as I suggested it might a few posts back.
Right the incredibly bold claim of "I have been thinking about this idea", I am truly pushing hard and making declarative statements. Driving the envelope hard into new territory with my vague observation of an interesting pattern.
And, yes, I was talking about the one aspect of the genre that people keep point out. Since everyone is repeating it (including all the wikis I have been cramming in time to read) I figured it might be of some importance to the concept.
I won't bother asking about how it informs the tone of the setting. You won't answer anyways.
And it's not the same as noir. It's related to it, in a lot of ways - there's some significant crossover, but there's a ton of difference, not least that many S&S protagonists are powerful and self-propelled in a way noir protagonists nearly never are, and the stories are resolved in a very different way. In noir, it tends to be fundamentally "Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown", resolution-wise. Whereas in a lot of S&S it's more "Wow, that was some weird scary stuff, good thing I killed Mr Tentacles and stole his gold!". Even Elric seems pretty cheery compared to a lot of noir. Sometimes it's still "Forget about it, Elric..." but sometimes it's like "Whoa weird but that was awesome!" which is literally never the case in noir.
A lot of the stories aren't "small stakes" in the way noir consistently is, either. Noir's stakes are almost always deeply personal. In S&S, there stakes are often more about survival and profit, or simple survival, or even personal prestige (something largely absent from noir - instead that tends to focus on the inverse, being true to yourself when no-one will ever know about it). Sometimes in S&S, often partly by accident, the heroes do save the world, or end some tremendous evil.
Thinking about S&S in general, I'd say Andrzej Sapkowski hews closest to noir, which is why I felt like his stuff was almost a different, related genre, as I discussed earlier. Then you have Fritz Leiber who, in part because of his big-city setting, isn't a million miles away, but REH's Conan is a bit further away, and Elric is further still (and isn't typically mercenary, but is very much trying to survive). That's just one axis of relationship to a single genre, note, not some sort of summary of S&S.
Not sure if there is anything to really comment on here. Yes, most Noir is much grimmer and darker, an air of fighting a losing battle that you knew you never had a chance of winning. Yes, many fantasy characters tend to be active agents in their world's where Noir characters tend to be relics of the recent past.
And you kill a lot more dangerous monsters in Fantasy.
But.... none of this is about the point I was talking about, nor does it dispute the point I made. Sure, sometimes Sword and Sorcery ends up with saving the world, but most sources I've been reading make that sound like the exception. So,
in general, I don't see anything in my description that is actually wrong. There is a similarity to Noir, the similiarity seems to lay about where I said. You just wanted to point out all the differences.
Of course, you will likely say that this is just me doubling down in my ignorance, but if nothing you say actually disputes what I said... then I don't really know how I am supposed to see how what I said was wrong.
Part of the problem with this conversation is that it often feels like you’re not actually listening. I’m telling you that “redemption” in a biblical sense and in the contemporary sense of antagonistic characters who become protagonistic allies aren’t really analogous. (Could you find some examples of the latter in the former? Sure, but it’s a stretch to say that this story trope has origins in the biblical texts.)
Not all redemption arcs are about becoming protagonists, but the issue is not that I disagree with you. The issue is that you are missing my point.
Sometime around the start of written language, we got the Torah. I don't know if there is a redemption story in the Torah, might be in one of the later stories. There were conversion stories though. A person who didn't believe, finding faith and following the "right path". And you definetly had those stories during the medieval period.
And that is basically following the same formatting as the redemption arc. This person was against us, now they are doing the right thing. And the term redemption originated in religious canon.
It is not a one to one, A=B they are identical.
But is a logical progression and rework of similar ideas. Just like a chair is a stool with a back. They are different, but you can see where they are connected.
And since practically every single thing written in Europe between 1000 and 1400 AD was affected by the Bible, and the works of the current masters are based on the past great works... you might see what I am trying to say.
Greyhawk is much closer to us, 0 level humans. The heroes are not superheroes. Gods do not walk on it's soil. There is good and evil there, but many things are grey. Not every struggle is a world wide conflict. Good does not alwasy win. Money is a motivator (see early iterations of D&D). It is just the opposite of the current D&D world, that is Forgotten Realms and how things are handled there. Just a side note here, the first edition FR was the same.
See, but a lot of posters have said that the Gods do walk the lands of Oerth. Oerth is actually the source of a lot of mortals turned gods, can't get much more superhero than that (and frankly, any mage above level 5 might as well be a superhero with the things they might be able to do)
And, in a lot of other settings, not every struggle is a world wide conflict. Money motivates people more than moral righteousness
But, I think your side note is the main point. FR kept going, Greyhawk didn't. Fr has so much written about it, because people kept writing. It has more earth-shaking events, because it kept getting rebooted. The bones are more similar though.
