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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8085696" data-attributes="member: 18">Sure, but he's still jaded and mercenary in his outward attitudes and behaviours, and doesn't always behave that well (c.f. kidnapping the queen in the first place), he just has a "heart of gold" underlying that, like so many characters cutting across so many genres.Not really, no.S&S has a wide range of stakes. Noir has a narrow range of stakes. That seems like a fairly clear distinction.S&S heroes are typically lawbreaking, jaded, and selfish, but often have a heart of gold - though not always, particularly not if crossed. Some are more moral, but I struggle to think of one which would reach "righteous", or even the moral standard of your average YA novel lead or the like. There's definitely some similarity to noir, but there's less broken-ness to them, typically.You might make a stark contrast with Brandon Sanderson's leads. Almost all of them are extremely morally righteous, sometimes sickeningly so - one of the worst examples being Kaladin (no accident it rhymes with "Paladin" imho) - who is utterly grotesquely wronged and mistreated by the system/society, by his superiors, and by individuals, on a wide variety of levels, understands this, processes this, and whilst he considers actually doing something about it a number of times, pretty consistently but unbelievably decides not to (or limits himself in implausible ways). It's totally out-of-character with the entire vector of his personality, and really seems like the author stepping in going "WHOA THERE!" to one of his characters, rather than just writing the character - this is one of limitations Sanderson possesses, and whilst the murder of the end of book 2 (not related to Kaladin, no spoilers), suggests he is capable of moving past it, book 3 is full of this kind of righteous behaviour. But anyway Sanderson's limitations aside, the point is that's full of "morally righteous" fantasy characters (Shallan is a lot more consistent and plausible than Kaladin, I'll give him that).When we're saying Conan has morals, it's more in that he agrees to be part of something bad, or does something greedy and risky, and then somewhat reluctantly ends up doing the right thing (usually it also feeds his ego massively, which I think is no coincidence). Even the baddest "good guys" (and hell, some "bad guys"!!!) are overall a lot morally brighter/clearer - they're also think about morality when they do stuff a lot, whereas S&S characters rarely consider actual morality - i.e. extrinsic rules of behaviour, but rather personal codes of honour, or instincts, which are frequently at odds with the societies they dwell in (sometimes violently so).There's also a difference in tone that I don't know if has been mentioned, in that in noir, people's best days are almost always past them (even if they're like 28 or something!), and the general attitude is that life is a alcohol-hazed downslope after some early peak, at least for the characters involved. Sometimes the motivation for the main character is a perception of an escape from this downslope. Whereas in S&S, that's much more rarely the case, indeed, much of the time, the heroes are in their prime and perhaps on an upslope (Conan certainly seemed to be much of the time). There's a Lankhmar story specifically about an older, past-their-prime-seeming Fafhrd  and the Grey Mouser, but part of the point of it is the juxtaposition with the other works. Within this there is sometimes a sense of melancholy for things lost, but it's not the same as the "dead end" vibe of the lives of a lot of noir main characters.</blockquote>

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