u/AsFarAsISay

a few months ago I asked what kind of king Conan was, and I just came across this passage. it seems his time as a thief, pirate and pillager softened him to the plight of common people. i like this.

so amber is *the* One and Only Place and all other realities proceed from it. and if that's true, then all other people across the infinite variations on amber are just shadows of the amberites.

and yet these immortal beings, presumably as old as the universe since theirs is the One and Only Place, still talk about omens and destiny and things they don't know about. dworkin has a magic none of them understand but where does it come from?

it's like if heaven had politics.

I'm two stories in and they're wayyyyy different than I expected. so far, the Conan comics magazines and the movies were my only

experiences with the character, and they're what you expect from s&s: the bombastic language, the moral ambiguity of the antagonist, the mild sexism and of course violence. and also they're probably why I think of Conan as being a bit of a dumb jock.

first of all, he's not a dumb jock, which took me by surprise. he's articulate and displays reasoning, reads the room, and yeah he's also a strong guy with fighting skills. so where did the dumb brute barbarian stereotype come from? and not just for Conan but in general too. thundarr the barbarian was dumber than a box of hair as I recall.

the other major difference was the language. howard uses a diverse vocabulary that's still snappy and crisp. he's not at all the "twas the greyest of mornings when Twyla, adventurer , miscreant and known across the seven seas as a generous lover in spite of the cruel smirk which never abandoned her visage, awoke to discover she was a cockroach." two-a-penny shakespeare sentences that I really associate with this genre. lieber does this a bit, but not enough to be annoying. roy thomas is incredibly guilty of this in his writing, but all comics were like that at that time it seems. lots of exclamation marks. and he did write the second Conan movie. i imagine it's a Leftover from the pulps.

What are other good Conan books?

i just finished sign of the unicorn and it was incredible! young me did not pay enough attention to this book when he read it.

also i was recommended in another post to check out modern s&s periodicals so these arrived today. i'm eager to read them.

i'm about 14 books deep and I really really like the chronicles of amber better than all the other series i've read. i don't think it's the best exemplar of the genre but I love the prose. i just ordered a few more books -a gor title, conan, some dagar comics, and the next fafhrd and the grey mouser book- to kinda round out the season.

throngar of lemuria was just the worst. I got maybe 25 pages in and it was a bit too much.

i'm still of the mind that s&s doesn't exist as a genre anymore, and mostly because of .... mmm, cultural tastes. i think the Conan movie did it, you know? it's a great movie and great s&s but the good guys are kinda not good. i think if the movie genre was going to survive, it had to have good good guys, so when beastmaster came out (also great s&s) he was virtuous to a fault. and the literature would have to follow suit to survive as well, right?

also, s&s seems to be relatively small in scale compared to the "heroic fantasy" genre we have today. like, while they may be globe-spanning, the individual stories are just "this one time, this one thing happened" and kinda don't connect to a larger story. larger in the sense of the apocalypse. my sample is still pretty small so if I'm not considering something please let me know.

magic has also been scaled up. everyone is a magician -if not *the* magician- these days and it doesn't seem to cost anything to use to say nothing of the area of effect.

and I wonder how the expanding popularity of d&d and power fantasies played into this.

anyway, I would love to talk about this!

the drink is brazilian limeade and I encourage you to give it a try!

my favorite summer ice cream is orange sherbet soft serve with chocolate dip. i probably should have gotten just a quart of that, but I also wanted to bake. it's a bit sloppy because I didn't wait for it to completely cool haha

does it still have this bombastic sensibility with mild sexism?

I ask because as I read, I'm starting to form this opinion that sword and sorcery as a genre doesn't exist anymore as such. I mean, there are "fantasy adventure" stories but "sword and sorcery" as such is done. much in the same way that "film noir" doesn't exist anymore. it's probably something like "neo-noir" imitating the style but with the same sensibility as the original.

it's been wonderfully temperate so I didn't mind having the oven on to bake lasagna and a lemon blueberry pound cake

this was the edition I had as a teen. it wasn't that much on ebay and I love the cover art.

hey everyone! I have another question about pulp. so I watched Conan the Destroyer last night and today got a package of old Conan magazines and as an adult I am really stunned by how much I did not understand this movie when I was a kid. like, when we were playing ad&d (just to give you a timeframe) Conan the Destroyer was kind of an exemplar movie of how we wanted our adventures to go and the kind of characters we wanted to play. I 100% remember thinking Conan and his friends were good guys, but they are *not*.

yeah, they're great protagonists, but they are literally criminals. and yeah there's an argument to be made that those were uncivilized times but also there's castles and trade so there must be laws, right? and even if your king is an evil cleric of the masked one hastur, thievery is still a rotten thing to do.

Conan is very unconcerned about Jhenna's fate because his reward is his lover being brought back to life. selfish. but after he learns there was never going to be a resurrection, he's like "well, time to rescue the virgin". is this because he grew to like her? because it'll fuck up the Queen's plans? because if he succeeds, there's a reward and maybe a virgin with a kingdom like he was promised? the text is unclear.

and in savage sword of Conan, he steals a boat, beats up the owners and then is like "hey, here's payment for the boat." but two pages before he lost his entire crew to privateers and swam away in the opposite direction from where they were taken, like "oh fucking well". rude.

so I guess my question is, do modern depictions of Conan retain this roughness from his character, this amoral barbarism with a sense of fairness? or is he morally upright?

ETA: i'm trying to formulate a ttrpg question, but I don't have it yet. something related to min/maxing.

this week my treat to myself is a pineapple upside down cake, which had to be bundt-shaped. I'll give most of it away to friends and my nephew but at the moment, it's just warm and waiting for me to cut it.

I want to get my brother a clay tavern pipe for our birthday, but I've read about the difficulty people have cleaning tobacco pipes that are used with weed. can anyone tell me if this is a good idea or not? it really goes with his current aesthetic but I don't want it to be a pain to use. thanks, ents!

so I decided this is going to be the summer of pulp starting off with Nine Princes in Amber. I'm kinda taken back by what an absolute sociopath Corwin is. does he develop feelings at any point in the series? does he ever get his ego deflated?

I don't mind nihilism when it comes to self-destructive heroes like Elric, but Corwin just leads over half a million men to their total obliteration to seize a throne he has no interest in beyond "I don't want Eric to have it". he had several opportunities to withdraw but wouldn't.

Conan's not like this, is he? Nor John Carter?

Could you imagine how life would be if we had places like this built in our cities?