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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Particle_Man" data-source="post: 1706033" data-attributes="member: 892">Wow, I guess I missed the part where King Arthur and his knights gang-raped that maiden.  Oh wait, that never happened.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Look, the fact that few of them were completely flawless does not change the fact that they pursued an ideal of being completely flawless (a prerequisite of getting the Holy Grail).  And their character flaws, when there, were singular (that is, the knight was brave and noble, courteous to ladies, etc., except for X, which was that knight's tragic undoing) and did not include rape.  Heck, that very willingness to pursue the moral ideal might be the quality to emulate, if one is seeking a role model.  Think of these guys as more like Spiderman than Superman (the Percival of the comic book world).  Spiderman is more of an Everyman hero, and he does make mistakes, lose his temper (ah, those comic book hero on hero fights...<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  ), gives up on being a hero for a while (a sign of the reluctant hero that is way more enjoyable to consume than the Thomas Covenant version), etc., but is still a hero in the same sense of trying to do the right thing.With Saints, I think a lot of them had rough pasts, and then became good, approaching the ideal, etc. That is when they became heroes.  The point of Saints, partially, was the "if they can do it with their pasts, there is hope for you too to become morally good". But more importantly, people later (but before the american novel) looked at these guys as role models because they were seen as heroic, pretty close to morally flawless, and pursuing an ideal of being morally flawless.  The "Man of la Mancha" is an example of a man who pursues this ideal of goodness as a knight, because he has read of and been inspired by these knights.  He was portrayed as mad, but that is hardly a moral flaw.I also think that the old concept of hero, if it includes rape, should be retired from literature, quite frankly, and would hope that the modern hero, if in fact it is a modern hero, should completely replace it.  I don't want my heroes raping anybody.  I don't even want my anti-heroes raping anybody.  (Han Solo was an anti-hero in the first version of Star Wars...he shot first -- but he never raped anyone).  There are many people who feel like me, and I would bet that over time our numbers will grow, not shrink, as a proportion of the population that consumes stories (in whatever form they take).  So, given all of that, it is not surprising that some people, even if they understand that Donaldson is trying to resurrect a old concept of "hero" that includes a "hero" that can rape people, is not interested in that kind of story.Frankly, if any kind of "hero" is still a "hero" after raping somebody, one wonders if there is a meaningful distinction between that sort of "hero" and villains.  There surely were people that wanted their heroes to be in the mould of at least King Arthur, Galahad, Lancelot, etc. (in the sense of pursuing an ideal, sometimes failing, but certainly not raping people, torturing babies, or other "villain" stuff), that lived before Superman and other American heroes were invented.  The classic "White Knight" hero is a genuine hero, as much if not more so than any "From the Fire" hero.So I think that King Arthur, and his knights, are a heck of a lot closer to Superman than to Thomas Covenant, or even Achilles.  And since King Arthur stories predated the American heroes like Superman, it is arguable that heroes as moral ideals (even flawed heroes trying and sometimes failing to achieve those moral ideals, but still pursuing *moral* ideals), including the moral ideal of attempting to achieve moral excellence, existed before the American Hero.If "the point" is that Thomas Covenant the rapist is meant to be a "From the Fire" hero, bringing back an old trope that has fallen into disuse (the rapist hero?), then in my and others' opinions that point is not sufficient to justify reading that series of novels.  I and others are not interested in that particular type of hero being brought back into the foreground of our minds.  I think that the King Arthur is a better type of hero, hands down, and I think that his pursuit of moral ideals makes him different from the "from the fire" guys.This is one place where D&D alignments actually make more sense.  Rape is evil.  I and others don't want to read about evil heroes.  We don't mind lawful good heroes, chaotic good heroes (Robin Hood?) and anti-heroes, and some neutral heroes and anti-heroes, and some reluctant heroes and anti-heroes are fine if done well, but no rapists, please.  The parallel for "from the fire" guys would seem to be high-level characters.  But some high-level characters are villains.And if you want to read about reluctant heroes who sometimes do terrible things for the greater good, try L.E.Modesitt, Jr.  He has his heroes sometimes level entire continents in order to save the majority of innocent people in the world.  While I find Modessitt's novels repetitive as a canon, any one of them standing alone is a book I would like to read.  And he did it without any non-villain raping anybody.</blockquote>

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