Archived Discussion Franchise / ConantheBarbarian

This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.

Henry Hankovich: The following doesn't seem to make sense:

"Not at all influenced by the concept of the 'Noble Savage', Conan represented the ever-present danger posed to civilization by humanity's warlike nature. "

If anything Conan represents Howard's masculine ideal—primitive, incorruptible, powerful, and self-reliant. His letters and writings often lament the loss of manliness and purity caused by civilization and technology; he wrote of wanting to have lived during the settling of the American frontier, or of "barbaric" Germany or Gaul.

And, while most characters in Conan are despicable in some way, it's the "civilized" folk that are given the worst treatment: fat rulers, city-dwellers, merchants, priests and wizards. Cimmerians and other [white] barbarians are the noble, "good" folk.

• The Elfman Effect: The first Conan movie provided "O Fortuna" for all of those Romans/Barbarians/Vikings movies. (Technically, this also connects it to Final Fantasy VII!)

"O Fortuna" is not featured anywhere in the first Conan movie, which has an entirely original soundtrack by Basil Poledouris. The track "Riders of Doom" is clearly influenced by "O Fortuna," and Conan the Barbarian came out within a few years of Excalibur, which did feature "O Fortuna."

• Unfortunate Implications: So, so many. Howard's understanding of evolution was, at best, misinformed and bordering on Lamarckian (which was the style of the time), and his theories on "racial purity" are simply embarrassing in this day and age. The upcoming MMORPG Age of Conan will probably gloss over these.
  • Age of Conan may gloss over these ideas or actually go back to Howard's texts, the better to discover that his ideas on evolution were neither Lamarckian, nor concerned with notions of purity.
    • He might be thinking about Lovecraft.
    • However, Age of Conan is glossing over the sexism (women in Howard's stories are rarely anything but trophies, and the few who do anything but shriek generally come to violent ends, with the exception of Valeria from "Red Nails") and the racism (Conan, who's white, is pretty much a Noble Savage, but black guys are generally just savages).
    • His racial ideas were, to be fair, pretty typical to the average white American or European of the time.
    • Really, the only actually savage savages prominent in the Conan stories are the Picts, and they're explicitly described as a "White Race". Most of the "civilised" characters that appear in the stories are bastards irrespective of race.

• The white/black race stuff isn't nearly as big in the stories as this makes it look. Conan is consistently described as brown, for one. Sure, a lot of the black characters are nasty, but pretty much everybody is nasty in these stories (not quite [1] level, but some stories are heading that way.)
  • Speaking of which, were all of Conan's sexual exploits with non-white women written by other authors? I know that he clearly prefers whites and has been very clear about filed teeth being a no-no, but he's been around the block in Koth as well as Aquilonia.

• Incidentally, in Wolves Beyond The Border it is specified that 'white' as a racial term is used to mean Hyboreans only, which means that in common parlance Conan is not white.

Michael: Unless somebody comes up with an argument not to, I'm going to replace the Ancient Africa description with simply: Kush and the "Black Kingdoms" to the south of Stygia where Conan managed to lead a tribe for a few months, and under Mighty Whitey I'm going to replace "Most" with "A few" - sorry to upset anyone but most of Conan's enemies were of either white or middle-eastern ethnicity. As the article stands it's simply inaccurate.

I'm not trying to be a wiseguy here, not trying to start a fight, but it seems odd to me that I'm seeing an argument about whether a guy from Texas, who died in 1936, had personal opinions that 21st Century Americans would consider racist. Probably he did, though if one reads more of his work, it comes across as rather muted, even nuanced—by the standards of the place and time in which he lived. One of his last published stories, "Black Canaan," had Klansmen as villains and black sharecroppers as sympathetic victims, which might or might not have gone against the grain in Texas in 1936.

Howard wrote about other characters, like Solomon Kane, who was a sort of 17th Century Knight Templar, an angry, alienated, Puritan intellectual, formerly of Cromwell's army, living as a traveling adventurerer and mercenary all over the Old World. Solomon Kane was written to be a brooding, angry, kind of disturbing loner; by 21st Century standards he's a rather frightening protagonist, considering himself God's wrath personified, traveling the world to smite the wicked. Solomon Kane hated slavery, slavers, and also anyone who harmed children. Did Howard? I don't know, we can't ask him, he's dead. It may or may not also be worth pondering that the most sympathetic recurring character in the Solomon Kane stories, aside from the women and kids he'd occasionally find, was N'Longa the Ju-Ju Man, a West African witch doctor who seems quite a bit saner, and possibly brighter, despite his fractured English, than the crazed Kane.

As an aside, I find Solomon Kane endlessly fascinating for what else it shows us of how Howard viewed the world. Kane is like Conan, a traveling swordsman, a very bright individual who lives by his wits and does battle against evil men and unearthly beings, yet unlike Conan, soft-spoken, perhaps even seeking a glorious death in battle against nameless evils because the Lord Protector has died and the Stuarts have retaken the throne. He is certainly more introspective and pious than Conan, more cerebral, less inclined to use "smash it with a big axe" as his preferred first method of problem-solving, more literate, more pious in his odd unorthodox way.

Oh, and in one of the short stories, Conan boasts that he has never taken a woman against her will.