I FINISHED my re-read of The Battle of the Labyrinth, and I have Thoughts, and you’ll see them if you see my book reviews. Now it’s a book about writing. Playing Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, which is going okay, I guess? I dunno, I like the story, but the gameplay has never really been my thing in that one. The Odyssey is out, though I don’t know when I’ll get around to seeing it.
This Note, as will become evident, was inspired by Dead Gods.
Centuries of Practice
I’ve been watching the art videos of Matt Rhodes’s project Dead Gods, which is an epic fantasy story inspired by the story of Noah and the Book of Enoch, going absolutely hog wild with worldbuilding as long as it doesn’t contradict the source text. Since he’s drawing off of Genesis, something that comes up is the longevity of the human characters. According to Genesis, before the Flood, named characters lived for hundreds of years. There’s a lot of Biblical scholars having conversations whether this is meant to be taken literally or not–we shan’t get into that here–but Rhodes takes it as given because he’s making an epic fantasy. He very often describes in his videos about design about how different characters dress or act in relation to their age. Because if you can live for hundreds of years… you have a LOT more practice than a human today would have, and you’ll become very good at your job.
And I think this is something fantasy fiction should consider more often than it does. And science-fiction, too, though I read more fantasy with long-lived characters than science-fiction (and more fantasy in general).
The example that stood out in my mind most of all was the Obsidian Trilogy (or Obsidian Mountain Trilogy, or whatever they’re calling it now) by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory. The elves in that series live for about a thousand years, and we’re told again and again that their longevity means that they’ve mastered skillz that humans can’t match. When you have hundreds of years to perfect a talent, you get really good at it. Smithing, tailoring, art, swordplay, warfare, etiquette, brewing–they do it all. Kellen can only match elven swordsmen because he’s a Knight Mage, empowered by the Wild Magic.
The Endarkened (demons) actually use this against the elves–they were beaten back two times already in the distant past, so they employ strategies that refuse to let them meet the elven kingdoms in open battle, instead relying on diversions, skirmishes, and dividing the mortal races through political sabotage. The elves, so stuck in the methods they’ve been training in since the last war, aren’t able to adapt to this new type of war so quickly, while Kellen adjusts much better.
Dresden Files also has elements of this, “Immortals have better skillz” thing going on. There are several immortal characters throughout the series, and admittedly most of them are dangerous not just through experience, but because they’re also really stupid powerful in comparison to even a wizard. And the other heroes? They’re in deep doo-doo when one of them appears. The two thousand-year-old Nicodemus, for instance, is depicted as an unparalleled swordsman that no one can beat except Shiro, a man who is explicitly a prodigy with the sword (Michael says, “He knew swords like Mozart knew music,” and in the RPG Shiro’s stats are laid out so that if you try to fight him, you will lose). Michael does pretty well against Nicodemus in Skin Game, I suppose, but that’s a case in which Nicodemus is explicitly unbalanced by a personal tragedy that happened minutes before.
In basically all the cases, Harry or the other heroes survive when they cheat, or something similar, pulling tricks or deceptions. Loopholes are used all the time, like pulling out garlic on vampires, iron on faeries, and calling in favors. There’s a fight with another wizard at the end of Peace Talks in which the only thing Harry can do is distract and hold off long enough to get away. One notable win Harry does have is with the ancient Red Court vampire Arianna in Changes–but in that fight, it’s explicitly a magic-only duel, and Harry tells the audience that if Arianna had been able to use her physical abilities as well as her magic, he’d be dead in seconds. She’s good with magic, sure, but she’s also used to using other advantages to fight, so it gives him a fighting chance (which the one setting the duel counts on, as he doesn’t like Arianna right now).
And since I’m re-reading Percy Jackson, I thought about how that series handles this. Percy fights a lot of immortals! Most of the monsters tend to be long-lived, yeah, but they’re not particularly intelligent, so it’s not so outrageous that he outsmarts something like the Minotaur*. Heroes in Greek myths do impossible things all the time, though Riordan tones it down in some ways here. There’s the duel with Ares at the end of the first book, but Percy doesn’t actually “beat” Ares in a duel as much as humiliated him and Ares quit in a huff (which is still winning, just not through sheer skill–the TV series changes this to a duel to First Blood). And when Percy actually fights a Titan, like Atlas or Hyperion, it isn’t so much that Percy wins as much as, ‘He keeps the enemy busy long enough for someone else to handle it.’
Which leads me to… Iron Druid Chronicles.
In the first three books, there are instances of heroes fighting immortal gods and mostly winning by virtue of the Plot needing them to, or the author is clearly on the protagonist’s side. I mean, Odin’s spear, enchanted to hit anything it’s thrown at, misses when the protagonist shapeshifts, because apparently the targeting computer-like enchantment doesn’t account for that, and Odin, a warrior god who has fought shapeshifters before, never thinks to adjust his strategy every time he encounters our hero. The idea that immortal gods, especially warrior gods, would have tons of experience after thousands of years, never crossed the author’s mind. At the end of the first book, our hero wins the duel with the villain, one of the Irish gods, because we specifically learn that apparently the guy never picked up any new moves in the last two thousand years, even though we know he’s been actively plotting, scheming, and warring.
Then again, the villain’s plan in that book also involves rendering himself impotent for some reason. It’s obvious that making sense wasn’t really what the author was worried about.
I should think that for fantasy, experience trumps… well, not everything, but pretty darn close to everything. A warrior who has been fighting for hundreds of years has a leg up on our protagonist, so unless the protagonist has one heck of a power-up, then he or she shouldn’t be able to beat a long-lived character by skill alone. Characters with that much practice should be really, really good at what they do, and thus nearly unbeatable unless faced with someone of similar experience.
Because experience matters quite a lot!
—
*Readers of Court of the Dead, don’t @ me, I haven’t read it and I don’t particularly want to.
No comments:
Post a Comment