Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "ivar"

I'm reaching the middle point of my current work, Ivar Stormling of Skar. It's entirely dominated by an extended sequence involving the heroes participating (for dubious reasons) in a long and deadly high-speed death race.



This is the first thing I had in mind about the book, in fact: I've had it running through my mind, in one shape or other, for many years now, and you could even say that this entire book is written as an excuse to finally get the damn thing on paper. It all certainly formed around this thing: I thought of the race first, then far more recently started to imagine what got them to this position to begin with, what motivated them to enter it, and where they might go after the fact.

And I'm now coming to the somewhat painful realization that the race, and the plot constructed around it, actually have very little to do with each other.

Like the podracing thing in Star Wars Episode 1, the entire sequence is basically an excuse to make a new friend, then elongated into a superfluous action scene that is mostly there because the author really, really wants to add it in.

I'm rather often guilty of that sort of a thing. Many reviews of my first work, The Straggler's Mask, point out the flaw that a great deal of the book's events could be easily skipped without the story or the plot suffering at all. Since then I've taken some steps to try and curb such tendencies, but it seems it will always be a part of me no matter what I do.

Even as I write this, I'm struggling to find ways to make the sequence more relevant for the plot. There's not a whole lot that I can do to tie it to the main antagonist or his plans, for one. But maybe I'll work to develop the characters during it, let them display new sides of themselves, experience growth, and learn important lessons. I can also take it as an opportunity for them to show off new skills and abilities and equipment, things they could then use to save the day in a more climactic context - a bit of foreshadowing, Chekhov's Guns, so that it wouldn't all come completely out of left field.

But all such procedures are mere bandages on a gaping wound, and can never conceal the fact that, at the end of the day, it is pretty pointless. I could just ditch the whole thing, and scavenge all the actually important moments and put them elsewhere, to save pages and my readers' sanity. But I don't think I will do that, not this time.



So, what should you take out of this? Well, if you really enjoy death races and fast-paced action with little plot to hold it back, then I suppose you could skip the first fourteen chapters of the book to get right into the meat of things. If on the other hand you'd like your story to be tighter, each scene and chapter to actually mean things in the greater context, and were annoyed by how the previous book indulged in a bunch of pointless side tracks, then you might want to skip everything from chapter fifteen up to... twenty? Twenty-one? I'm not sure yet.

Progress on the whole is good: I've written 68k words since the beginning of the year, and if this keeps up I might get the whole thing written as quickly as Demure Sea, perhaps even faster. I doubt it'll come out this year, though. There's a great deal of backlog in between that I'd like to throw out there first.

You've got your heroes who start out weak, and overcome their challenges by getting stronger, and just keep the cycle going until the story ends with them being the strongest around and having beaten everyone up. You've got your underdogs, who start out weak and never get stronger, and prevail by being quick and clever instead, and/or by relying on stronger friends. And you've got your supermen who are the strongest around, yet are constantly challenged by even stronger foes and higher stakes, or else the story is a power fantasy where we get to feel the thrill or hilarity as they beat things up with ease...

...or they're someone like Saitama.



He's the fastest thing around, nothing can harm him, and he famously beats all his challenges with a single, usually half-assed, punch. He's ridiculously OP - nothing can stand up to him. And yet in every other aspect of his being... he kind of sucks. He's just a regular guy. He has trouble managing his finances, isn't very good at video games, and struggles with the sheer boredom and ennui that his superpowers have brought him. It's a great juxtaposition, demonstarting that just because you possess godlike power doesn't mean your life - even mundane existence - isn't without its problems, and your godlike power might even make things worse.

Sadly, One-Punch Man is quite prone to forget its greatest strength, the superhero parody premise, and all too often devolves back into your usual stock shonen fights where enormous power and inhuman abilities duke it out. It's not bad shonen stuff, by any means, but it's kind of a missed opportunity. I'd like to see more of Saitama just trying to manage his mundane life. There was the short bit with video games once, but still.



The same story also features King, who possesses the fearsome reputation of an unbeatable hero... and only the reputation. In truth he's just a perfectly regular person, barring his phenomenal skill at video games. Basically the exact opposite of Saitama, and just as compelling to me: he gets around by staring his foes down until they submit, or coming up with some bullshit to convince them out of it, but there's a good deal of tension there in that as soon as this doesn't work, he's mush.

You see how I might like this kind of heroes the best of them all? Heroes that are basically unbeatable in one thing (doesn't have to be strength, or even related to fights at all), and beat any challenge without trouble so long as it's within their comfort zone, yet have just as much, even more, trouble as a normal person in other aspects of their lives. They can tap into a lot of experience and knowledge, but they also have great weaknesses that they all too often need to get around. It's the best of both worlds - underdogs, and the occasional power fantasy!

Not to mention, it's a perfect reason to make friends: bring forth some more well-rounded heroes to support them, to play off of them, and to have great mutual character growth and friendship and romance. Perhaps these friends are also really good at something but suck at something else, giving an even greater contrast and more things to distinct them. If I didn't do that, I'd just have to rely on subtle stuff like personalities and goals and likes and dislikes... like an actual good author would. No thanks.

Let's count the guys.

There's Peal, of course. He's far beyond just your regular sneaky little rodent - he has a deep inborn insight to all matters of stealth, subterfuge, and subtlety. He can hind himself or others or things up to a vast starship, set up your internet on absolute incognito mode with like a dozen proxies, and find Waldo, all with about equal ease. And yet he tends to crumble in social situations, is easily browbeaten or charmed if you can see him and stare him down, is hard to be taken seriously what with how cute and cuddly he looks - and he's plain starved for affection and can't handle being alone, ensuring this weakness will always come up sooner or later.

His best friend, Ivar Stormling, is also his exact opposite in this regard. He's a people person - charismatic, handsome, with big presence and a loud voice, not to mention a great personality and desire for good things for everybody. He can rouse the entire kingdom to follow his lead in a pinch. Yet, he's terribly unsubtle and simple-minded, and tends to have trouble approaching challenges from any other direction than straight head-on. He's honest and honourable to a fault, less because he thinks this leaves the best impact in the world (though he does), and more because he just doesn't have the imagination to lie or cheat. And when put in a bind, he tends to default to violence: often it catches the foe off-guard and gets him the advantage, but just as often it leads to even bigger trouble.

But when the two of them join forces, they can complement their strength while eliminating each other's weaknesses. Together, there's almost nothing they cannot do.

Sadly, the next three aren't as lucky.

Mirari Aedelwine is also good with people, albeit more with individuals than with crowds. She knows how other people work, what they think, what they feel, and can with quite the ease figure out their motivations and background, just from a quick conversation. And it's just as easy for her to get under their skin, make them want to do what she wants them to do, or destroy them verbally. Good at sleight of hand and misdirection, as well. But when she doesn't have anyone to talk to or swindle, in the case of beasts or eldritch horrors or some environmental challenge... well, she's not incompetent, but she is in trouble just the same. Not quite as extreme a minmaxed example as some others here, but she definitely counts.

Keam Vitrio is the fastest man in the cosmos - no one in the two galaxies of the setting can come even close to a match. If he's ever involved in a race, all the bets concern themselves with the second place, because the first place's decided before anything even happens. And he's a smug, unrepentant douche about it. Terribly high opinion of himself. Most people can't handle his company very long. It's lonely at the top - and boring, far more so than even he himself realizes. He wins on the racetrack, but typically loses elsewhere at the same time.



Last, and the latest in my line of heroes, Toryōshi Otsugi is one of the finest duelists in the land: she learned the way of the blade from her father, a notorious sword-saint, who had no sons and therefore had to groom his daughter into the position - and she demonstrated great talent and aptitude to it, picking up his arts and then some, almost without trying too hard. And indeed she did not try too hard - because she simply did not give a shit. She never wanted to be a warrior. She's plain sick of all the wandering swordsmen coming around to challenge her, and doesn't see the point in dueling to see who's best. She would have liked to learn to do other things, but can't find enough time for it. And perhaps worst of all, she's desperately lonely: no man would care to court her, in this feudal and patriarchal world, because she's as far away from your traditional delicate wallflower as she can get.

You could almost see her as a deconstruction of your common, by-the-numbers, Strong Female Character: she can kick ass and take names, show the men what for, yet she was thrust onto that path against her will, by a man, and now everyone around her sees her as more a man than a woman. So she's hardly your independent feminist icon. Her arc involves finding agency, deciding for herself, and growing to be her own person. But... that's really a talk for its own blog post.