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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8081664" data-attributes="member: 18">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.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.</blockquote>

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