Contributor
- Joined
- Jan 18, 2018
- Messages
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@Galouz:
Soooort of. Sword King still treats his overwhelming power as this cool neat thing. It addresses that the way he got it was traumatizing. But while I can respect what the series is doing with that, at the same time, as I still feel it's still very firmly in the realm of self-insert fantasy
Besides, Sword King's protagonist doesn't have a massive ego problem so you can't explore the consequences of it. Nor, likewise, his propensity to resort to violence too quickly, because—normally—he doesn't. He's fundamentally a nice guy. Which is not to knock the whole series-acknowledging-PTSD-is-a-thing, of course.
Soooort of. Sword King still treats his overwhelming power as this cool neat thing. It addresses that the way he got it was traumatizing. But while I can respect what the series is doing with that, at the same time, as I still feel it's still very firmly in the realm of self-insert fantasy
and in that vein, a lot of his trauma takes a sort of chuunibyou-ish direction—"I shall be sad and stoic and live a life of brooding stoicism as a contruction worker, only to be summoned unwillingly back to the battlefield!"—"Oh I am Lord of Trauma, look at my mental hellscape, I might go out of controoool!". It's written more elegantly than that, of course, but those are the sorts of appeals it seemed to me to be making at its core in that vein (which is not inherently a bad thing, to be clear). I mean, some of it is following the logical consequences of it's own world-building, which is cool! It's just not what I'm talking about here.
Besides, Sword King's protagonist doesn't have a massive ego problem so you can't explore the consequences of it. Nor, likewise, his propensity to resort to violence too quickly, because—normally—he doesn't. He's fundamentally a nice guy. Which is not to knock the whole series-acknowledging-PTSD-is-a-thing, of course.