Why I tend to favor Lancers over Heroes.
This is a literary blog post about my writing style and also may explain a bit about the types of characters I prefer. To get to the point at hand, the stereotypical idea of the Hero, especially the Chosen One, is a character type that I cannot stand. especially if the Hero is an idealist. Perhaps it is a reflection of the type of person I am, but I have always preferred the Lancer, the counterpart to these goodly heroes.
While most root for Luke Skywalker, I’m rooting for Han Solo. Riku instead of Sora, Kain instead of Cecil, the different characters are as endless as fiction itself. But for those of you who are not familiar with all these characters, they are all foils of one another. The ones I favor are the darker and edgier characters, most of them have been villains at some point in their stories, mostly due to them flirting with the morality line a whole lot more than the regular heroes.
This brings me to my next point. For those of you who have been reading The End of Utopia, you may notice that there are few idealistic characters at all. Arken and Rolfien are certainly the closest to true Lawful Good, but even they make some ambiguous choices. Arken for one revels in combat and desires conflict over peace.
But to really hammer how I feel about goodly characters, my hero, Orsas, is a Dark Mage and uses a sentient weapon called Apathy that is clearly evil. He is also dressed not too different from the Lich King from World of Warcraft and I would be lying if this was not at least partially intentional. Of course, whether Orsas follows in Arthas’ footsteps remains to be unseen by my readers (although as the author, I do know what happens) but being that his greatest foil and ultimate lancer, is his weapon, the super blood thirsty Apathy, this is my fair take on the idea of “Hero” In fact, one of the early ideas for the story was a what if scenario which was “What if the main character uses evil magic?” and it has evolved into the story that it is today.
There are far more contradictions than just involving the Hero in my novels, but I will elaborate on those in future blog posts.