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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 2120076" data-attributes="member: 6533">I don't know that I'm surprised, in fact I believe my sense of order has been affirmed.  Particularly given that I'm living in the town Sean was born in.<a href="http://www.eos-press.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=3" target="_blank">http://www.eos-press.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=3</a> It's about five down from the top and entitled, "How I learned to stop worrying and love the plate mail," there's also some on Kung Fu Homer and Kung Fu Lord of the Rings.  I think Homer works better than LotR but only if you play both gods and heroes in the same game.  LotR has got problems, but only about as many as you have when you go DnD with it.Somehow that explains something to me. There's much I might disagree with in that, but then again I'm very genre minded so when I deconstruct a genre I don't so much arrive at a different structure as simply another genre with a different set of rules.  Lateral movement is thus much easier for me.  So I see the laundry list in hagiographies, thank-you for bringing that up in the cleric thread BTW, and I don't think, ah this has to do with the exceptional nature of miracles, so much as, ah, super-heroes.  Though I wonder now if we're actually considering the same laundry list in the genre.  Or maybe I'm just reading earlier or more southern hagiographies than you are. huh.Personally I find the life of St. Anthony the Great to be a superior version of Sandman in character.  So you might call it a sort of intellectual synaesthasia.Anyways I'm not looking for a monk equivalent. I'm looking for a genre breakdown of the knight. So if the monk demonstrates bad assitude by being lighter than the dew, than how does the western knight do it?  And all right, you can't answer it, but this could be an interesting answer:And I don't think it's wrong generally, but I may have to rephrase the question.  Cause there has to be a laundry list for that moment.  It's there for the 'monk' - and that's in quotes cause at this point we've made the term so generic it's becoming dangerously loose in meaning - and for the saint, it's gotta be there for the knight.Plus that answer does seem to take me in a direction I think I'm heading.  I think for the armored warrior, the knight or cavalier, the basic movements are complemented by the tone or mien with which they are performed.  That's true of Kung Fu heroes as well, but in the west I think that tone or mien is actually a big component of the feat itself. So that at level one you get on and off a horse in a manner that noone could mistake for anything other than a noble knight and level seven you're Achilles where noone could mistake you for anything other than the reaper of men and none can oppose you.  And somewhere in there you're someone who just obviously is experiencing some form of transcendant emotion in the midst of battle.  BTW, there's an interesting work out that posits that the descriptions of Achilles' rage may be an early depiction of battlefield PTSD.Somewhere else in there you've got to have the armor trick, the great breath, the fearsome mien, the charge through opposition, and the burst through obstacles.  Not too mention variances in armor according to use.On somewhat of a side note: do Achilles, Sampson, and Beowulf really deserve to be on the same list, particularly one apparently defined by Christ?  Achilles doesn't have a final heroic act, his epic stops at the point where Sampson slaughters thousands and Beowulf is Achilles in reverse bringing in order and then collapsing it through his death.  Christ is doing something else entirely.  Which is why you end up with Arthurian knights who just sort of run into him and don't know what to do.    Most western Christian knights past the early ones like George or Martin seem to be constantly stuck in the story of Peter pre-keys.  They've got good hearts, but they just can't get it.Which you could make a really interesting argument out of in terms of Western treatments of the culpability and toleration of power, but then again this conversation is interesting enough.Another question, how would you explain the monk in western terms?  It strike me that you could kill him and then use our dynamic for the perfection of the body coming from the outside.  The technology angle is still hard to deal with, though, unless you want him to be inhumans.  Inhuman things never have good tech.  Even Tolkien elves are just great craftsmen not great tinkerers.Excepting Dwarves and tinker gnomes, of course, they have awesome tech they're just horrible at using it.</blockquote>

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