I am unsure as to whether I will have time to write a Saturday Note for next weekend. There is a small chance, but I will be busy on Friday and Saturday, so it’s entirely possible that it will fall through the cracks.
I am almost finished with the “Hidden Ones” DLC for Assassin’s Creed: Origins, and it’s worth noting that Assassin’s Creed: Mirage comes out next week!
This idea kind of floated in my head because I just rewatched Conan the Barbarian, and there’s also a new Percy Jackson book that just came out, which has some relevance to the topic of the Note.
On “Book Dumb” Protagonists
Sometimes, fiction uses protagonists who are “book dumb”. For clarity: this does not mean a hero who is dumb. That’s something else entirely. This refers to a character who, while not necessarily dumb, is not especially educated in the ways of books–mathematics, science, literature, or history.
The classic example, to me, at least, is Conan. Robert E. Howard’s Cimmerian hero of the Hyborean Age is explicitly not a well-educated guy. He couldn’t tell you that much about the histories of the peoples he teams up with or fights, he couldn’t recite poetry, and he doesn’t have a lot of knowledge of things that he can’t use on his adventures, mostly involving fighting and stealing. However time and again, we’re shown that Conan is incredibly intelligent. He picked up most of his sword skills through practice, he’s cunning enough to both set and see through traps, has a strategic mind, and he can create and pull off complicated plans.
[The movie with Arnold has it so that the people who owned him when he was a gladiator, his masters taught him to read and to memorize poetry. Why they did this is beyond me. This isn’t part of his backstory in the original Howard stories, as far as I know.]
Not only is this a good setup for a fighter character in genre fiction, this is a pretty great approach to a story where you’ve got to have a lot of worldbuilding that you need to communicate! You can believably have your character ask questions about the history or politics of a fictional country because he doesn’t know! It’s really handy. With a well-traveled character like Conan, he can maybe rely on knowledge he’s picked up on the way, only to have it clarified when he gets somewhere new. There is at least one Conan book which begins with Conan show up somewhere and have the situation explained to him.
Having a character who doesn’t know all that much about the history or politics of a world is also an easy way to make the character more relatable to the audience (even if it’s set in the real world!). If your character already knows a bunch of things about how the world works, stuff that the reader or viewer may not know, the audience might feel a bit left behind or confused. Sometimes you can trust audiences to pick up a lot more than what is explicitly said–this is more common than people think, I suspect–but a lot of times it’s easier to be around the same level of knowledge as the character you’re reading. At the very least, it certainly makes it less clunky. In the first chapter of Hounded, for instance, there’s a bit where the protagonist stops the action to explain to you, the reader, the worldbuilding for the people trying to kill him right now, and how his magic works.
There is the problem that this can be exaggerated as the story goes on. Percy Jackson of Percy Jackson and the Olympians is a bit of a “book dumb” hero–though it’s worth noting that in the first book, he shows a lot more knowledge of Greek mythology than you’d think, because that was his favorite class in school the year before. He doesn’t know that much about the mythological world works in the modern world, however, and details about monsters and such elude him. Despite that, he’s remarkably clever, and can figure out things about mythology through context, even in the middle of a combat scenario.
As the sequel series develops though, he becomes…kind of dumber? Part of this is because Riordan is leading with eight main characters now, so he doesn’t have as much time to be in Percy’s head. And to give everyone something to do, sometimes Percy has to dial back how competent he is, and have things explained to him that he should be able to work out on his own. I get it, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying–he’s book dumb, not dumb-dumb!
Which is a difficult balance to try to walk, especially when you’re trying to paint someone other than the main character as intelligent and a contributing member of the heroes’ team! But making characters arbitrarily dumber is never the right way to go.
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