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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tonguez" data-source="post: 9799508" data-attributes="member: 1125">Okay we can link the discussion of Howard and Conan to the idea that Players will use their heroic characters as proxies of what they see as 'ideal' traits, traits which they might well aspire to - Conan is certainly that and players of cunning dextrous rogues might well idealise those traits too, just as Fighters aspire to the traits of the skilled athletic swordsman etc etc.But derailment might come if I posit that Conan isnt a Mary Sue or Howard’s wish-fulfilment fantasy rather it Howard’s mythologisation of his own ancestors.   [spoiler="the rest of this thought. spoilered so it can be ignored"] Conan isnt a Mary Sue, he struggles and earns his reward, because that's the ideal "work hard, play hard - Toil the Soil and Conquer the Land". Howard wasnt writing himself with muscles; he was elevating his ancestral ideal, the heroic wild spirit that drove the 'eternal champion' embodied in King Kull, Bran Mak Morn, Soloman Kane, El-Borak, the Texas Cowboy. It’s the same tradition that gave us Tarzan and Aragorn and even Beowulf and Cú Chulainn before themThe Cimmerian barbarians of the Hyborean Age are identified as ancestors of the Gaels (Irish/Scots), they represent that Northern peoples before they were softened by the depredations of civilisation (honest barbarism vs. decadent civilisation is a major theme). They were an idealised form of Howards own heritage.Conan is the heroic spirit of Howard’s imagined history: the distilled essence of the frontier, the warrior, the outsider. Part heroic ideal, part critique of modern decadence. [/spoiler]</blockquote>

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