Conan was a thug

[Vondy]

8 hours ago, Mr. R said:

I also remember a What If comic where Conan is sent to Modern New York.  He starts as a street thief, becomes a gang leader and eventually tussles with Captain America.  His only redeeming feature is his code of honor.  Otherwise, he's a thug.  Place him in a Champions Campaign and play him as written and soon you players will be hunting him down.

 

 

True! However, Conan doesn't belong in a Champions campaign. And, Champions morals and mores don't belong in Hyboria.

 

Different genres and settings have different operable moral baselines and mores. The play groups should be comfortable with those, of course.

 

Not every genre is for every group, or even for every reader. It boils down to different strokes for different folks.   

4 hours ago, Alcamtar said:

I think what makes Conan tolerable is he is essentially a Robin Hood type character: he mostly preys on corrupt sorcerers, nobles, and other neer-do-wells. But he is honorable towards women; in Beyond the Black River he is protective of the settlers; when there are two sides he almost always ends up on the right one. I don't recall him ever preying on ordinary people. On the other hand he doesn't give his unjust gains to the poor either; he just takes them from other people who don't deserve them either. He's also a mercenary and a lot of what he does is either fulfilling a contract, or climbing the ambition ladder. Again not the most honorable profession, but he pursues it in a generally honorable fashion. When serving a good Lord or Lady he's loyal, and twin serving a wolf he follows the wolf's code. Basically he double crosses those who double cross him, he baits them into it often enough but their own corruption is always their downfall. You root for him because you know he's not going to cause much collateral damage among innocent people, but he's going to ruthlessly clear out everyone else who is similar to himself. And really as Lords go he wouldn't be such a bad one because he's relatively benevolent and disinterested, he just wants to be top dog but has little interest in throwing his weight around, or indulging in foul degeneracies.

 

This isn't super-redeeming, but he also gives the victims of his piracy and armed robbery the chance to surrender and comply without violence, too. He'd rather not murder you for your loot... (facepalm!).

[Lord Liaden]

18 hours ago, Vondy said:

 

 The one contrary case we see is in The Frost Giant's Daughter, which occurred when he was but a youth, and is written in a surreal maybe-it-never-happened fever dream motif, meaning it may have all been in his cold-cocked head, or not. We don't know and neither did he! I suppose its possible, but I think its a stretch to just throw that out there as a given when he is otherwise depicted as being a benevolently asinine sexist who looks askance at men who act that way.

 

Ymir's daughter was literally flaunting her nearly-naked body at Conan, tempting, taunting, challenging him to catch and take her. It was really a Siren gambit, in which she led him to her two giant brothers so they could kill him and serve his heart at their father's table. But Conan killed the giants, and only "divine" intervention kept him from raping her (which at that point, I think it fair to say she had coming).

 

And maybe it was a dream, brought on by cold and battle-injuries... except when Conan regained consciousness, he was still clutching the gossamer garment he tore from her body.

[Lord Liaden]

10 hours ago, Alcamtar said:

Basically he double crosses those who double cross him, he baits them into it often enough but their own corruption is always their downfall. You root for him because you know he's not going to cause much collateral damage among innocent people, but he's going to ruthlessly clear out everyone else who is similar to himself.

 

When Conan agrees to work with or for someone, if he's treated fairly he sticks to the agreement, not only literally but in its spirit. But on several occasions I can recall from Howard's fiction, if he falls in with someone who tries to rule his subordinates through violence and fear, said leader soon finds his own men turning against him, because Conan is tougher, smarter, more charismatic, and treats his men better.

[Vondy]

3 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

 

And maybe it was a dream, brought on by cold and battle-injuries... except when Conan regained consciousness, he was still clutching the gossamer garment he tore from her body.

 

Right. Its written in a surreal maybe-maybe-not sort of way and, even if yes, how reliable is his delirious recollection of the purported events? This was one of Howard's earliest stories, written when he was very young, and its possible he was still just experimenting and exploring the final version of Conan he wanted to portray as he developed the character and his world. People often forget that authors are often just feeling their way with characters early on. In this case, Conan may have matured along with Howard. That the early story has an escape hatch is pleasantly convenient. It may also, however, have been a sociocultural escape hatch for Howard. Writing about rapey barbarians in the 1920's, let alone in the land of Southern Belles and the Queens of the Ball, was transgressive then and there, too.

[Lord Liaden]

But even then, like all forbidden fruit it was consumed in secret, and all the more savory for that. 😈

[Ninja-Bear]

Its been a long time since I’ve read Conan but I think that the story where he ends up on the isle of the colossus he purposely swim to the ship to take over the ship. He followed the captain unto the island to kill him and take the ship over. 

[Lord Liaden]

Hmm... the way you describe that story doesn't ring a bell. Sounds closest to Howard's short story, "The Devil in Iron," but that wasn't Conan's motivation for going to that island.

[Ninja-Bear]

1 hour ago, Lord Liaden said:

Hmm... the way you describe that story doesn't ring a bell. Sounds closest to Howard's short story, "The Devil in Iron," but that wasn't Conan's motivation for going to that island.

Been a long time since I read it. The plot though was the colossus had a pool which they dipped living things into and it shrunk them and made a statue out of them.

[Lord Liaden]

Ah, yes, "The Pool of the Black One." I was thrown off by the "colossus" designation -- there were a number of black-skinned humanoids, very tall but I wouldn't call them colossal.   Conan went to the island with the captain and whole crew. He didn't set out to kill the captain, but met him alone in the jungle and took advantage of the opportunity. The captain was one of those "violence and fear" leader types that I mentioned earlier -- admittedly Conan had little tolerance for their ilk.

[assault]

On 9/19/2022 at 7:58 PM, Alcamtar said:

IBut he is honorable towards women; in Beyond the Black River he is protective of the settlers; when there are two sides he almost always ends up on the right one.

 

I missed this one.

 

"The settlers". How American! Or Australian, in my case.

 

The ancient feud between Picts and Cimmerians, and Conan being on the Aquilonian payroll, justifies him seeing the Picts as the enemy. 

Of course you can always spin those points different ways, where the Picts are the good guys - as Howard himself did in other stories.

 

[Lord Liaden]

You could certainly point to a number of examples illustrating that the Conan stories were written by a white man from a century ago.

[assault]

The Pictish Wilderness stories are of course early American frontier stories with the serial numbers filed off, and a bit of magic added. The roles of "good" and "evil" are determined by this. The genre is based on the viewpoint of the colonizers, not the colonized, although exceptions are possible (and doubtless exist).

Strangely enough, this actually sits a little awkwardly with the character of Conan himself - who was noted as having been part of the Cimmerian "horde" that sacked Venarium. In that case, he fought against the settlers, not for them.

Then there's all the blather about barbarism being the natural state of mankind etc.

The reality is that Conan's allegiances were situational.

[Lord Liaden]

Indeed, but I think it would be more precise to say that Conan supported "his people," however he defined that at the time: his fellow Cimmerians, his crew, his troops, his subjects. Right or wrong didn't really factor into it. If Conan saw you as part of his tribe, he was on your side. Within that parameter he was actually very loyal.

[GDShore]

What I am about to say my tick some off, but say it I will. The present world spends all too much time judging persons of the past by the mores of the present, and usually getting it wrong. If you try to judge our ancestors by the lights of today one will always be disappointed. If what they did then was right then by our mores it may be wrong today, if it was wrong then it is always wrong. If you judge those of the past by the present, you give permit to those of the future to do thus to us. All we can do is to try to correct the failures of the past and hope we commit no new ones of  our own. We play what we play because of the stories told to us by our modern bards and some are good and some are bad. Conan was created of and for the era in which it was written, Howard did not stoop to pander to the lowest denominator his Conan was if not noble at least not ignoble.

[Ninja-Bear]

On 12/24/2022 at 2:24 AM, assault said:

 

I missed this one.

 

"The settlers". How American! Or Australian, in my case.

 

The ancient feud between Picts and Cimmerians, and Conan being on the Aquilonian payroll, justifies him seeing the Picts as the enemy. 

Of course you can always spin those points different ways, where the Picts are the good guys - as Howard himself did in other stories.

 

Or it could he the Delaware Indians versus the Iroqouis ? Or how about when Hawaiian people went around to unify the islands? Or the Incas or Aztecs or or the Carib? Colonizing is as old as well as the Fall.

[assault]

The colonization in this case is obviously based on the early North American frontier. There's no if, but or maybe about it.

A whole bunch of Howard's Conan stories were basically stories from other genres worked over lightly - pirates, Crusaders, colonial adventures of various sorts (Africa, the northwest frontier of British India...).

 

It's remarkable that he didn't manage to write Conan the Cowboy.

[Lawnmower Boy]

20 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

You could certainly point to a number of examples illustrating that the Conan stories were written by a white man from a century ago.

Crazy talk!

[FenrisUlf]

On 12/25/2022 at 8:18 AM, assault said:

The colonization in this case is obviously based on the early North American frontier. There's no if, but or maybe about it.

A whole bunch of Howard's Conan stories were basically stories from other genres worked over lightly - pirates, Crusaders, colonial adventures of various sorts (Africa, the northwest frontier of British India...).

 

It's remarkable that he didn't manage to write Conan the Cowboy.

Howard kind of did in several of his Westerns, save for the Breckenridge Elkins stories which were deliberately broadly comic. Or at least he wrote characters who were as amoral yet honorable in their way as Conan.

 

There are also the El Borak stories, in which a gunfighter from Texas ends up in Afghanistan somewhere around the time of the First World War (which is depicted like something from a Kipling story, only with more people getting their heads lopped off) and gets into all sorts of blood-soaked adventures.

[Lord Liaden]

I was always intrigued by the contrast between Conan and Howard's other barbarian-turned-king, Kull. They both come from similar backgrounds, with comparable physical stature and prowess. But Conan is resolutely focused on the practical concerns of survival and profit. He wants to enjoy life to the fullest, and rarely gave thought to life's meaning. But Kull was the opposite. He thought about and discussed deep questions of philosophy and theology. As a king Kull would sometimes agonize over the morality of his decisions, over the "right" thing to do for his subjects. He was also less of a loner than Conan, having a small circle of trusted comrades and advisors.

 

Conan may be the archetype of the fantasy barbarian, but Kull shows that Howard didn't consider depth and complexity to be antithetical to that archetype. Then again, Howard wrote more about Conan than Kull, and the former is the more popular character. I guess there's a strong appeal to the straightforward, easy to understand protagonist, with an attitude of (as Roy Thomas once wrote for comic-book Conan), "Gird my loins, draw my sword, and roll the dice!"

Edited March 12 by Lord Liaden

[Ninja-Bear]

On 3/12/2024 at 3:47 AM, Lord Liaden said:

I was always intrigued by the contrast between Conan and Howard's other barbarian-turned-king, Kull. They both come from similar backgrounds, with comparable physical stature and prowess. But Conan is resolutely focused on the practical concerns of survival and profit. He wants to enjoy life to the fullest, and rarely gave thought to life's meaning. But Kull was the opposite. He thought about and discussed deep questions of philosophy and theology. As a king Kull would sometimes agonize over the morality of his decisions, over the "right" thing to do for his subjects. He was also less of a loner than Conan, having a small circle of trusted comrades and advisors.

 

Conan may be the archetype of the fantasy barbarian, but Kull shows that Howard didn't consider depth and complexity to be antithetical to that archetype. Then again, Howard wrote more about Conan than Kull, and the former is the more popular character. I guess there's a strong appeal to the straightforward, easy to understand protagonist, with an attitude of (as Roy Thomas once wrote for comic-book Conan), "Gird my loins, draw my sword, and roll the dice!"

Interesting fact about this is that REH submitted some stories as Conan and Kull and the editor didn’t like them and when he resubmitted the story with the other hero then they were approved.

[assault]

1 hour ago, Ninja-Bear said:

Interesting fact about this is that REH submitted some stories as Conan and Kull and the editor didn’t like them and when he resubmitted the story with the other hero then they were approved.

 

With some serious rewriting.

[Lord Liaden]

I doubt either his editors or Howard himself expected people to still be reading his work a hundred years later, let alone discussing it. They were just trying to make a buck doing what they enjoyed.