Ruse de Guerre

It's a trick!

I like clever heroes. Or at least sophisticated heroes. But I don't like Honor Heroes. Amongst the reasons that I (for the most part) don't read Epic Fantasy is that the Honor Hero often gets to be the main character, whereas I relegate the Honor Hero to, at best, the (amusingly incompetent) comic relief. For those keeping score at home, that's a mere one step above where I put the Good Is Dumb Hero.

But, you might ask if you were familiar with my reading habits, amongst your favorite characters is Horatio Hornblower. Isn't he an Honor Hero? No.

Let's define our terms. Honor is an external expectation, and an Honor Hero is a hero driven by external expectations. Honor Hero Aragorn had that sword (that stupid sword...) and rightful heir to the throne Duty and all those But You Must leadership building exercises from Gandalf. I'm not familiar enough with any other Epic Fantasy to give any other examples, but that's probably enough (read: to make everybody mad but still get my point across).

Horatio Hornblower is a Clever Hero who doesn't believe he's especially competent, and a Good Guy despite feeling, most of the time, that he's a terrible person. That is to say, he's internally motivated by his own tragicomic high expectations that make any external test easy to overcome by comparison.

Combine my distaste for Honor and my lack of verbosity, and I'm obviously ill-equipped to write Epic Fantasy.

But I can live with that.

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I woke up at two in the morning today with a sequel to 'Jeremiad', my previous monologue of a lounge lizard revolutionary. I'm fleshing out a few things that the character mentioned off-hand in the first installment. I like the challenge of writing a monologue, and it's also my favorite type of story

Oddly, this pictures the relationship but not the actual characters.

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2000 words? Yes
Short Story "Pure Humanity" - in progress (~1/2)
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Reading - "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" (Susanna Clarke)