The more you talk about S&S, the less sense it seems to make. You are saying that Sword and Sorcerery can be low stakes, personal vendettas, or high stake save the world quests. The heroes can be entirely ammoral, or have secret hearts of gold.
What makes it different than Epic Fantasy or Heroic Fantasy then? Epic Fantasy is generally defined by having epic-scale stakes, but S&S also has epic scale stakes sometimes. Heroic Fantasy is more focused on the characters, Mercenaries and soldiers struggling with their flaws and sometimes being heroes and sometimes not being heroes.... it is even something S&S is compared to in some of the articles I read, which is how I learned about it.
At this point it seems like S&S is less of a useful definition of a genre and more of a shorthand for "Conan and some other very specific stories written around the same time as Conan." it seems more like a transitional period, where the genre was in the middle of evolving and now it is something else entirely.
I'm not really sure what to say to you here. You're rather continuing to prove my point that if you don't understand a thing, and try and argue about it, you may get confused.
It's not correct to say it's a transitional period, because that would suggest one thing turned into another. Rather it's a parallel kind of fantasy, that exists before Tolkienian fantasy, and after it, that influenced RPGs, computer games, and so on more than it did literary fantasy post-1990. S&S was massively influential on D&D and thus fantasy RPGs in general, Warhammer (and thus Warcraft), and via those sources massively influential on how fantasy computer games are.
I'd say it's extremely useful and
important because it's a major influence on fantasy, particularly non-literary fantasy, that does not relate to Tolkien at all. There's a strong tendency in writing about fantasy to essentially attribute almost everything to Tolkien. I saw a very literal example of this in the NYT or some such paper not long ago, where it was being claimed "all fantasy" owed a debt to Tolkien. That would be true to say of epic fantasy - as a genre it barely exists, if at all, before Tolkien, and literally all the examples I can think of since have at least some influence in the terms of approach to world-building. But it's not true of all fantasy, and it's particularly less true of the kind of fantasy we find in RPGs, which typically picks up some of the world-building and aesthetic elements from Tolkien, but very much leans towards the spirit in actual play of S&S.
Epic fantasy is defined largely by being extremely long - literally epics. Maybe this is a difference that is more obvious? Virtually all S&S is short stories and novellas and the like. Even normal novel-length is rare. Giant fantasy novel length is unheard-of with S&S (I can't think of a single example), whereas it's routine/expected with epic fantasy.
Heroic fantasy is rarely-used term with far less of a consistent definition than S&S. S&S at least has a clear canon, a clear body of work - it's pretty clear what works are S&S (even if there's some debate, compared to other genres/subgenres, it's well-defined!). It's unclear what "heroic fantasy" is - it seems like it's a term people use when they think S&S is too "trashy", and seems to be a subset of S&S. I see L. Sprague de Camp literally said it was a synonym for S&S, and he's the originator of the term. His definition of S&S seems more purely escapist than a lot of S&S though, so perhaps you could say heroic fantasy is "particularly escapist S&S"?
Popped this out, because this is a tangent, but what exactly do you want Kaladin to have done?
He is a low-born man, a slave, and branded a violent criminal and traitor during the war. And most of that is from him being wronged by a high-born nobleman, who has spent decades convincing everyone that he is the most honorable, kind and generous person in the entire kingdom. The type of man who would never stoop to such tactics or do something like that to another man.
What exactly is Kaladin supposed to do about that? Tell them the truth? No one would believe him. Fight? He tried that. Foment a rebellion? He tried doing that a few times too, to get his fellow slaves to escape, it usually ended up with the other slaves getting killed while he got viciously beaten.
By the start of the story he has been a slave for years, constantly beat down and oppressed and every time he fights back, it only makes things worse and gets other people killed. This is exactly the type of person who is going to struggle with "doing something about it" when he is treated unjustly or unfairly.
The issue for me isn't him being beat down (that's plausible) a number of moments when Kaladin
does get it together to actually do something about what is happening to him and others (and usually that thing would at least have a chance of being effective), overcoming the being beaten down and so on, and then one of two things happens:
1) He just suddenly goes from being angry and righteous to being a Boy Scout. The anger and righteousness is believable. As is not wanting to risk others. But at least a couple of times he suddenly and inexplicably develops a ridiculous milksop attitude as he's about to do something which would put him in opposition to one of the other "good guys", even though morally, it would be righteous. It feels rather artificial and is something characteristic of Sanderson's work.
2) His ridiculous spren (probably the most irritating character Sanderson has ever written, yes even beyond the various talks-in-riddles-types!) just straight up Author Insert/Deus Ex tells him not to do something, and he just obeys. With the bloody flimsiest of explanations (if any). It's some Jiminy Cricket stuff which is very out of place. Rarely has it looked so much like the author getting in the way of his own character.
I will say Sanderson did at least once criticise himself for doing this kind of thing, and large sections of what is being published today by Sanderson was actually written a decade ago (which I think adds to the confusion, because Sanderson has developed as a writer, but a lot of what we see being published now is from when he was less developed, and mixed in with more up-to-date stuff).
There's also a lot of frustrating equivocating from the author (via Kaladin and particularly Dalinar) over whether all this slavery and what is essentially genocidal colonialism is wrong or "just a misunderstanding" and then most of that is swept away by events and conveniently left un-examined.
But hey as frustrating as Kaladin is, nothing will ever be as "What is wrong with you Sanderson?!?!" as all the weird lap-sitting in book 2 of Mistborn (I think it's book 2 where that's a "thing").
Anyway I mostly moan about Sanderson because I think he has a lot of talent but I'm not sure he's developing it fully.
Note, there are other elements as well, but, those four are probably enough to keep things in mind.
Is that clear enough?
Man, how did you miss arguably the most important defining characteristic of epic fantasy? The length of the story in real-world terms! I.e. a dead minimum of three books and many hundreds of pages per book or even thousands of pages (Stormlight Archive is over 1000 pages each book!). Remember when 350 pages was kind of a long book? Pfffffft.
I joke slightly but only slightly. All those things can potentially lead to a long story, but epic fantasy, thanks to Tolkien, is almost unique in the literary world in that it produces these incredibly connected series that are very different from the "same character, different story" books of a lot of genres. We've mentioned Butcher and Dresden Files, and they're much more akin to traditional genre series (indeed a lot of urban fantasy is like that), in that you could potentially read and enjoy any one of them, and they're all a sensible length (some of Adrian Tchaikovsky's stuff is similar).
It's got to be the only genre in the world where an author can essentially come out of nowhere and drop multiple 500+ word novels and be successful.
It is also notable that some epic fantasy doesn't hit all 4, as you said. For example, somewhat hilariously, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series is set over what, three years? If that. I think someone said it was 2 years 10 months. But it arguably does have the epic timescale in that we're constantly told about or shown stuff from the past via visions and so on (literally from page 1).
But anyway the length and interconnectedness is a particularly clear difference from stuff like S&S and Urban Fantasy.
S&S is rarely anything but short stories, novellas, and the odd novel. They're often interconnected but each piece stands alone. You don't need to have read other Conan or Lankhmar stories to "get" the one you're reading. Whereas with epic fantasy, if you didn't read the book before, you'll be lucky if you have much of an idea what is going on (and people get some amusing misunderstandings as a result), and it certainly won't have the intended emotional impact and so on.
Urban fantasy tends to be like a lot of genre works, particularly spy and detective fiction, in that it's normally reasonable-length novels, and whilst they have the same characters, and often a linear time progression, they're not usually required to be read in order, and don't tell a single story over multiple books.
