Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Set" data-source="post: 4925556" data-attributes="member: 41584">I never read enough of the Dying Earth stuff to even notice these details, as the story itself bored me (granted, I was like 12, but considering that I'd read the Silmarillion, the Illiad and most of HP Lovecraft by then, I had a pretty high tolerance for dry reading). I did read the Thomas Covenant stuff, and that was a huge turn off for me. It was bad enough that he did it, but it became increasingly obvious that the event (which seemed out of character at the time) only existed so that he could feel bad about it afterwards. Having characters maimed, assaulted or killed to advance someone else's storyline is lame, IMO, even when it's Frank Castle's family, who are faceless un-people who have to die tragically so that he becomes the Punisher. Still, the genre is filled with non-heroic heroes. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser were unrepentent thieves, and occasional hit men. Conan stole everything he couldn't have sex with or kill, and a few things he did. Elric of Melnibone was never a nice man (even if his enemies were worse), and had no problem devouring the souls of people to 'power up.' There's the occasional Three Hearts & Three Lions type character as well, but they aren't exactly the norm. Our modern media goes a step further, with movies that celebrate ultra-violent assassin characters (Wanted, Pulp Fiction, The Replacement Killers, Kill Bill, Pitch Black/Chronicles of Riddick, even James Bond, to an extent) or cops / agents / lawmen / soldiers who take the law into their own hands to 'get the job done' (John McClaine, Jack Bauer, half of John Wayne or Clint Eastwoods characters) or even primarily 'good-guys' who come from morally gray backgrounds (Seely Booth from Bones, former sniper, Ziva David from NICIS, *hawt* Mossad assassin, Wolverine, psychotic manimal dwarf ex-assassin/samurai/lumberjack, etc.). And those are the (generally) tame examples. At the far end, we have 'protagonists' like Dexter, serial killer of serial killers, or comic book characters like Venom (who was suggested to be *eating people* in earlier appearances, although they seem to have backed off on that...) becoming superheroes. It seems like, to be a 'hero' in today's stories, one has to have a shady past and be unapologetically good at (and prone to) threatening, hurting and / or killing people, as well as willfully ignoring any laws or oaths one has sworn to uphold in the performance of one's duties, as nothing says 'good-guy' like 'liar with no code of honor.' Note that this is *not* a 'things were so much better in some mythical golden age, society is declining!' hand-wringing. Heroes of myth and legend (and even the gods) behaved terribly, sometimes striking people dead for even looking at them funny. We've pretty much always glorified people who take what they want and scoff at restrictions that we have to follow, whether they were named Hercules, Conan or Riddick. My biggest pet peeve with the rape issue mentioned upthread is when it is used to *empower* a female character. Red Sonja (or the movie I Spit On Your Grace) is the shining example of this trope, but it's pretty much disgusting no matter where it shows up. It's arguably a step up from using a woman's rape to empower or advance the characterization of a male relative, since that makes her victimization purely ancillary *to her own character,* but still, ick.</blockquote>

Verification