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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2550 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 2, 2024

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I read the first Stackpole X-Wing novel at the beach and thought “yeah, I can see why this guy wrote for Battletech too.” Good stuff. But I haven’t found anything modern that tries to hit the same notes.

I don't know what it is. There is just this style of plucky masculine heroic adventure that is just dead. Even the people today attempting to write it just can't fully jettison the baggage of current year and give us the good stuff. Reading Robert E Howard's Conan lately, and Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter more recently, it's just so clear. That brand of story where the main character, a man, stands obviously head and shoulder above all his peers, masters new lands and cultures, and wins the adoration of all the women around him, it just really struggles these days. Even the people attempting to write it have some sort of latent inhibitions on going full, well I want to say chauvinist because I can't think of any other word. And maybe that's part of the problem of current year. Depicting that sort of unambiguous excellence just can't escape modern pejorative descriptors.

90% of Isekai is exactly this, though. For a while it's fun, but doesn't it get boring fast?

I don't think it's that readers are bored of it, it's that writers are. It's been done before. Writers, good writers anyway, are setting out to create something. Burroughs and Howard already exist, so the only things you get like them are either twists in some way or they're thinly veiled fanfiction.

I'm largely out of the anime loop, although I did watch more Baki lately, and have been pecking at Vinland Saga.

From what very little I've seen of Isekai, the protagonist is usually a loser until he ends up in another world. These are less stories of excellence and more stories of lowering the difficulty setting on life.

There are isekais (in particular the Russian brand) where the protagonist is a more classic masculine archetype (special forces, talented engineer, talented engineer with special forces background etc). Still, it is peculiar that people today rely on this plot device to such an extent to put the excelling protagonist into a setting that he can dominate. It seems that the modern world has been disillusioned of great men. Both in the moral sense and in the extent people believe a great man can make an impact.

This finally explains to me why Patrick Rothfuss hasn't finished The Kingkiller Chronicle. (The first two books definitely exhibit the "chauvanism" you're describing, but book 2 of the trilogy was published in 2011 and there's no signs of book 3 ever coming.)

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