Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Complaining
, started by Estvyk on Feb 17th 2020 at 4:06:36 AM
In defining "thud and blunder", this page goes much further than what Anderson writes about it. Is this a common consensus matter?
In listing the "sins" sword and sorcery is prone to, Anderson noted flaws in such elements as worldbuilding and writing believable combat. But he did not note deficiencies in writing, characterization and dialogue, nor of overuse of violence as the solution to problems, nor overabundance of testosterone.
Also, Robert E. Howard's Conan stories are given as the prime example of thud and blunder "done decently", which is still a backwards compliment. Further down, it's asserted that Conan is always thud and blunder regardless of incarnation. I contend Anderson wasn't aiming his pen at Howard's Conan in his original essay. The Conan stories by other authors - possibly, even probably. But that's not what concerns me.
Howard wrote his stories in the 1930s, while Anderson wrote "On Thud and Blunder" in 1978, in response to "[t]oday's rising popularity of heroic fantasy, or sword-and-sorcery..." Is it not more likely that Anderson was taking shots at those works derivative of Howard and other authors, Conan being the trope codifier for sword and sorcery? This was the time of Conan pastiches and other Frazetta(-style)-cover books.
Besides, do Howard's Conan stories really fit the criteria imposed by Anderson and more importantly the Tropers? They do tend to have elements noted in the article like damsels in distress and evil overlords or queens. But are they guilty of the "sins" listed? I know, your mileage may vary, etc. etc.
Sacrificing characterization for action: To quote one of the forewords in one of the Del Rey Conan books:
- "In Conan we get that rarity in fantastic literature, a hero who actually changes and grows from story to story. The teenage, insecure Conan who kills a man for taunting him in "The Tower of the Elephant" is not the same headstrong bully who has his heart broken in "The Queen of the Black Coast" is not the same veteran mercenary who begins to understand that maybe he has it in him to go all the way in "Black Colossus" is not the same Conan who as king patronizes the arts (the arts, for Crom’s sake!), recognizing that poetry will live long after he is gone, in "The Phoenix on the Sword".
- Conan grows and matures, and more’s the pity that the popular view of the character is largely restricted to that of a scowling, jaw-clenched, muscle-bound killing machine. Howard wrote him as so much more. Yes, he brawls and slays, but he also reflects and laughs – at himself as well as others – loves and loses, doubts and falters, acts altruistically and empathizes with alien beings. He is, above all, totally charismatic; no outsider comes to command armies and nations without inspiring trust and loyalty and devotion. He’s no simple brute; he’s a multidimensional character..."
Sacrificing prose quality for action - To keep things short I'll just link to Wikiquote.
Most often resorting to violence - I regret I can't answer this more concretely than by quoting someone else again since this is one item I'd prefer to refute with direct quotations. I'm still in the process of reading the stories.
- "It’s rather easy to find examples of Howardian heroes hacking their way through a problem. ... Howard was in many ways bound by the conventions of the pulps in which he made his living as a writer. But there are an equal number of examples of Conan using his wits to extricate himself from situations when brute force won’t suffice, his reaver’s instinct restrained by sovereign responsibility."
Anachronism Stew - I guess this refers to Anderson:
- "Most cultures in [heroic fantasy] are based on the European, often as a mishmash of Roman Empire, Dark Ages, and high Middle Ages with a bit of Pharaonic Egypt, Asian nomadism, and so forth on the fringes."
But he notes immediately afterwards: "This is not bad in itself. Howard succeeded with it."
Another possible case of mishmash are the names in the Conan stories; I once again refer to one of the Del Rey forewords:
- "[Howard's] decision to people his Hyborian Age with Cimmerians, Vanirs, Nemedians and Afghulis, thinly-disguised names borrowed from history or legendry, was never really understood. ... By carefully choosing names that resembled those found in our history and legendry, Howard wanted to ensure that no reader would be left wondering what a Turanian looked like, or be unaware that his Vanir and Æsir lived in the northern parts of the world. By telescoping history and geography to create a universe that was new and yet familiar, Howard was deliberately striving for efficacy and stereotype, a technique that allowed him to create an exotic background with a minimum of description. He was at the same time answering his own need to have an “accurate and realistic” background for the series, while creating a method for writing (pseudo-)historical tales without the risk of anachronism or factual errors."
Lots and lots of Did Not Do The Research, failing forever of many areas and Rule Of Cool. - now this is from Anderson, but as far as I know Howard's work is free from such sins as fifty-pound swords and fighting in the snow wearing nothing but loincloths. (Conan didn't always walk about in nothing but a loincloth either.) Anderson also said that Howard made Conan's ascension to the throne "reasonably plausible."
To quote an important 1984 essay in Howard scholarship (yeah - just like, say, Tolkien scholarship), "The Dark Barbarian":
- "Howard was of course a student of history; even when he wrote of a character in a fully barbaric role, raising arms against civilization (a Pictish king fighting Romans), he did not permit himself to forget reality." (also available here.)
And so on. The assertion that thud and blunder is:
- "...the cotton candy of the fantasy genre — it looks substantial but is mostly fluff; it can be fun, but it is not satisfying for very long; and it tends to be a Love It Or Hate It thing"
— to me, strikingly reminiscent of what then-editor and co-author of Conan books L. Sprague de Camp wrote in his introductions:
- "How would you like to go to a world where men are mighty, women are beautiful, problems are simple, and life is adventurous... And where nobody so much as mentions the income tax or the school-dropout problem or atmospheric pollution?"
- "[Sword and sorcery] is designed primarily to entertain, not to educate, uplift, or convert to some faith or ideology."
- "Fiction of this genre is pure entertainment. It is not intended to solve current social and economic problems; it has nothing to say about the faults of the foreign-aid program, or the woes of disadvantaged ethnics, or socialized medicine, or inflation. It is escape fiction of the purest kind, in which the reader escapes clear out of the real world."
De Camp included LOTR in the sword and sorcery genre. I think he didn't understand Applicability.
More than any other, this is the part where mileage will vary, since it sums up everything else about the topic. Everything hinges on whether this type of fiction is junk food or not.
As a counterpoint for "escapism", let me quote the Del Rey volume again:
- "If Howard’s Conan tales make for particularly well-crafted escapist fiction, providing the reader with colorful high-adventure stories, the best of them deliver much more. A grim undercurrent pervades the whole series, often leaving the reader with mixed emotions, the sensation of having experienced something at once exhilarating and depressing. Howard’s best Conan stories ... are also those that have a sad ending. ... dark undercurrents flow beneath the veneer of this “escapist” fiction.
- [Conan] lives for the moment, savoring each instant, not caring about the past, nor about the future. Yesterday a kozak, today a king, tomorrow a thief. It is in that sense that the Conan stories are escapist literature. ... What sets the Conan stories apart, however, is the distinct sensation that the thrill of adventure in these stories is but a mask, that it is in fact never really possible to forget the grim realities of the world.
Just fluff? From "The Dark Barbarian":
- "In Howard the unquiet surge of barbarism ever threatens to sweep the works of civilization under, the status quo is at best shaky — even when Howard’s barbarians use their swords to put themselves on the thrones of the ruling class.
- The Howardian mood and philosophy is not simply barbaric, it is a dark barbarism, a pessimistic view that holds the accomplishments of society of little account in the face of mankind’s darker nature. The famous lines at the end of the Conan story "Beyond the Black River" epigrammatize this philosophy
- 'Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.'"
I cannot speak for the John Carter of Mars tales and others, but someone else has taken issue with those stories, as well as Howard's Conan, being classified as thud and blunder under this site's terms. Checking the edit history, I see others have had much the same concerns, only not said in as much words.
Not all the Conan stories by Howard are created equal. Unlike Tolkien, for instance, Howard was writing for a living, at a much faster pace in a much different environment. But the Conan pastiches and adaptations are not the originals; why lump them together? I'd even say that Conan the Barbarian wasn't thud and blunder either while Conan the Destroyer definitely was. And if not all things Conan are of the same quality, then neither is the similar stuff, no matter how superficial the similarities.
Edited by Mabalasic Hide / Show Replies
I'm aware that what Anderson wrote was strictly derogatory and strictly limited to "Failure in research in the world-building phase". But the term has broadened in general use, as the description notes, to become a term used for the Conan-esque style of writing that is the target of Anderson's wrath — and more importantly, this page isn't about the essay, it's about the style that the name has become attached to.
The Shorter Slang Dictionary defines it as
a jocular spoonerism for ‘blood and thunder’ (describing a melodramatic film, play, novel, story, etc.). Since the mid-20th century.On his word-usage site, World Wide Words, Michael Quinion traces the term used in the way that this page uses it, rather than Andersion's definition, back to 1894:
In Brook Farm, by John Thomas Codman (1894) appeared this exchange: " 'Well, how was Drew’s play?' said one wag. 'All blood and thunder, eh?' 'No; all thud and blunder,' was the rejoinder.”In an essay on the RPG Vampire, and why he doesn't thin it works as 'Horror' most of the time, a very articulate fellow who goes by Oddsod Blok'd, writes this:
But gamers don't like playing up the frenzied-but-not-in-a-good-way drug craving or realizing that their super-special undead killing machine has the moral compass of a puff adder. Instead most of the time the "horror" is one of two things: Gamer Nerd Horror or Modern Thud and Blunder Horror.
...
Modern Thud and Blunder Horror is the sort of thing you get from the sort of person who focuses on all the wrong things in fiction or the movies. Everything is Painfully Dramatic And Overwrought. ... The amount of horror something is supposed to cause apparently is directly proportional to the amount of overwrought gibberish built up around it. And from "Dr Gafia's Fan Terms", a glossary of fanspeak that has been compiled by suggestions from the fandom itself, and "including only terms that were coined and used in sf convention and fanzine fandom or net terms that have won acceptance by the people active in those areas. Specifically deliberately excluded are (1) terms that come from sf rather than the community of fandom and (2) "net" language except where it is relevant to "fan" language."
SPACE OPERA
To sf what "horse opera" is to westerns, coined in 1941 by Bob Tucker in his fanzine Le Zombie. Best represented by the work of E.E. "Doc" Smith, a good deal of science fiction from the 1930s and 1940s fits into this category. Also called, at times, "Blood and Thunder" (if good) or "Thud and Blunder" (if not).
In saying that Thud and Blunder can't be done decently, you are ignoring the two lines earlier in the description: "...but it has since then come to be adopted as vaguely affectionate term when used by people who acknowledge the shortfalls of the type but still enjoy it," and "It is the cotton candy of the fantasy genre — it looks substantial but is mostly fluff; it can be fun, but it is not satisfying for very long; and it tends to be a Love It or Hate It thing. "
If your objection is to including Conan in general in the examples, then note the stories that don't fit the mold. I don't pretend to be a Conan scholar, much less a Howard scholar, but from what I recall of the ones I have read, character development takes place over a series of stories, rather than within a single one, and even the quote you use to support your position indicates that this is the case: "a hero who actually changes and grows from story to story." Pointing out that a character grows over the course of 21 stories written over four years is no evidence of character growth within each story.
And finally, saying that something is junk food is not saying that it's also necessarily bad. I think cotton candy is wonderful. But I'm not going to claim on that basis that it's an elegant dessert — it's junk food; utterly delicious, wonderful junk food.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Zzzzzzzzzz
Two quotes added: one negative, one positive. As much as this is a very Love-it-or-hate-it genre, I figured they'd form a nice balance.
Edited by Madrugada ...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it. Hide / Show Replies
Page consists entirely of bitching about how terrible the alleged genre is. Does this really have any value?
Did you even read it? It's hardly "entirely bitching about how terrible [it] is" just because it isn't slobbering about how wonderful it is.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Cut per TRS:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=17052020620.84999100&page=1#comment-21
You can't always get what you want.