u/DJJonahJameson

Cynthia Ward follows up on her essay on Reactor: Bored of the Swords: The Rebirth of Sword & Sorcery and the Death of the Weird with a review of Battleborn #1 for Black Gate Magazine.

"The excision of the distaff half from S&S. The male-only contributors. The putdowns of the female-coded cozy fantasy and romantasy subgenres. The invocations and semiotics of the modern military.

With Battleborn — if I have it right — [editor Sean CW] Korsgaard is presenting S&S as men’s adventure.

It is not.

Men’s adventure is a different category (“genre” would be the wrong term here).

To conflate S&S with this category ignores a fairly significant chunk of S&S work, S&S history, and the S&S audience.

To be sure, S&S is read and created more by males than by females or by enbies. I’d never cavil at anyone who said so. S&S does appeal more to men.

But that’s a very different thing than positing S&S as “men’s literature.”

I have many feels over this, O my comrades-in-arms.

But you know what my dominant emotion is?

A feeling of betrayal by a sword-brother."

I don't mean just that there aren't enough stories that could be mistaken for Manowar songs, I am talking about the main reason why heavy metal and S & S are often linked together in the days of yore, there was a similar aesthetic. An aesthetic that valued excess, and had relentless intensity, and knew the primal power of black magic in darkened tombs with only a blade for protection against. Personal struggles, sure, but struggles on an operatic scale.

I am talking to people who get heavy metal, get sword & sorcery, and I think the best sword & sorcery is written by people who aren't necessarily listening to metal 24/7, but who get what heavy metal is.

Nice to see a work of fan art that's a sincere attempt to hit that level of operatic angst that makes the Elric stories so awesome, without collapsing into apologetic deprecation.

I first read this observation in an article now lost to me, but it reflects my own memories at the time is this:

At bars & clubs that were playing alternative rock at the time, people who went up to dance usually danced by themselves or in groups of friends, but the idea of asking a stranger to dance with you as a couple had fallen to the wayside.

The rise of swing music in that scene allowed people to once again approach someone they found attractive and invite them on the dance floor, and back then, everybody was having a good drunken laugh dancing silly to the music and being able to proceed from there to maybe asking for a phone number after.

However, as Swing Revival got popular, Swing Music Nights were gradually taken over by University Swing Dance Clubs and the like, and the original kids who'd dance to Zoot Suit Riot found themselves displaced on the dance floor by people showing off how hard they practiced The Lindy Hop, and those Dance Clubs generally only drank water while they were there, and if bars learn the crowd they're attracting on those nights are not drinking alcohol, then what's the point of holding those nights?

So it obviously didn't kill the Swing Revival by itself, but once the Revival lost the people who were having fun with it in the first place, that definitely accelerated the end of it.