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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Voranzovin" data-source="post: 9607730" data-attributes="member: 7020495">You're talking about something different then what I am. Of course fantasies of physical power and righteous violence haven't gone anywhere--they're basically the basis of most adventure fiction (and their appeal is hardly limited to men). What I'm talking about is the tension of civilized vs uncivilized as the theme of said violence. Spider-man punches people, but no one is ever like "then came Peter Parker, from the far-off land of Queens, New York, to crawl the spires of Manhattan with the mighty fingers he earned surviving that savage borough."If you're not interested in that particular power fantasy, you've got no reason to have an interest in Conan instead of the ten million other examples of adventure fiction where heroic figures enact righteous violence.Case in point--the only one of those characters who seems even slightly similar to Conan to me is Wolverine. Mad Max is an inverted Conan--he's more civilized then anyone else in the wasteland (note the bit where he uses the knowledge of first aid that he was trained in when he was in the police to save Furiosa). The DCEU Aquaman is doing the sword-in-the-stone thing, the man raised in obscurity who turns out to be the true king, which is a totally different trope. John Wick is the best assassin from a society of assassins. Geralt is a Witcher, a position society relies on to protect them from uncivilized monsters, even if they don't necessarily like it.Wolverine is Conan-like, in that his wildness, his berserker rage and feral instincts, are positioned as giving him advantages the other X-Men don't have. But he's a much weaker example then Conan himself, as is Jack Reacher. My point isn't that this fantasy is entirely gone, but that it holds much less appeal in the modern day then it once did.</blockquote>

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