Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tuft" data-source="post: 5482436" data-attributes="member: 60045">IMHO, fantasy literature handles it by simply *not* being reduced to merely "killing things and taking their stuff". Combat is used now and then as plot points, but it is rarely the main theme in the stories.Just watched some of the "Oh my Goddess" anime and read some of the manga. There you have three goddesses (who can summon one just as powerful angel each), and a guy that is good at riding motorbikes and his friends. Now, does anyone else get reminded about a certain overused and rather trite strawman video? How does this story handle it? By not being about fighting. There are fights, true - some plain motorcycle races, some earth-shaking power battles - but when it comes down to it, it's all about moral choices; recognizing the right thing to do, and having the strength of will to do it.   "Harry Potter" was mentioned. I've not read them all, but to me they are more about learning than fighting. It's about describing the day-to-day life at the magic school, inter-pupil intrigues, and the basic, surprisingly mundane, legwork in discovering this volume's dark secret. In the "Belgariad", we have a wizard protagonist with two wizardly advisors, accompanied by a bodyguard party of various archetypes (the Knight, the Viking, the Thief, the Bratty Princess...), traveling across the world in order to fulfill an (unbearably chatty and annoying) prophecy.  It's all about discovery - discovering the world, discovering the history, and the protagonist discovering his powers. When various challenges appear, one person that is amazingly uniquely suited to handle that one steps up and handles it, and it is seldom the protagonist.) And that suitability is just as likely to be because of that character's connections or place in the world, as it is about pure power. Another anime/manga combo I've recently watched/read is "To Love-Ru". There you have a cast of half amazing aliens (a genius galactic empire princess who can invent incredible things, an assassin that can turn any part of her body into a weapon T2000 style) and half regular students... and the plot works by concentrating on mundane, everyday challenges (and your regular ecchi moments). You have fight scenes now and then as foils to highlight the various persons, but they are not the main thrust of the story. The "Tenchi Muyo" anime is similar, but has a larger percentage of cosmic-scale battles. In the "Dresden Files" book series we have a wizard protagonist who fancies himself a hard-boiled detective. He is surrounded by allies both mundane and fantastic, who usually joins him for his battles. The battles are rather frequent, but still the major plot is about the uncovering of the mystery, not the battles as such. It has had an interesting development - in the beginning the Protagonist was rather condescending and not informing his mundane allies "for their own good", but those very persons have pulled more and more weight as the series has progressed. In Glen Cook's "Garret" series we have another hard-boiled detective in a fantasy setting. Here the protagonist is mundane, but has a very peculiar ally - a genius mind-reader telekinetic undead fey elephant man. It handles it by nicking the whole setup from Rex Stout's "Nero Wolfe" mysteries: the legman and the amazing armchair detective. In the "Zero no Tsukaima" ("Zero's familiar") anime we have a mundane protagonist dropped into a Harry Potter-like magical school, and bonded to a bumbling mage as the only human familiar in that school's history. It's a world where magic talent is a requirement for being nobility, and basically mages rule the world. The protagonist is given an  instant crash-course in fighting Matrix-style (You know, "wow, I know kung-fu") due to his bond, but he fights mundane style, and does that victoriously du to being both faster and more durable than the mage opponents. A musketeer-style "Queen's Guard" are similarly mundanely bad-ass. But, as in the other examples, the fighting is not the main point; world discovery, evolving inter-person relations, gathering allies, and uncovering conspiracies and mysteries are instead.I think I can go on and on forever - I love books/anime/manga with fantastical and/or magical protagonists - but I'm afraid I'll turn this into a TL;DR, so I better stop...</blockquote>

Verification