No Time For Downtime

It's pretty common for long-time stories, comic books, and novels, to only focus on the important and exciting bits. Their heroes never get to rest. Their suffering, and that of their loved ones, is constant. Even when they try to go on a vacation or something, take it easy, some terrible danger will threaten them and possibly the whole world. I feel like I'm falling to this trap myself.



Take Conan the Barbarian for instance. Pile together all the original stories, many decades' worth of Marvel and Dark Horse comics, and I'm pretty sure there'd be enough adventure put together to last several lifetimes. How could he pull it all off? How could he survive so much bullshit thrown his way? And what kind of a world is he living in, if it can afford to constantly threaten its greatest champion... and what would the world look like if he suddenly carked it, or didn't happen to be around to save the day one time on the other side of the world?

I feel like this tends to really wound an otherwise good setting because it makes it feel like nothing they ever do matters, and that the world is always in peril, and who would want to live there anyway if some grave threat drops down from the sky every weekend? What kind of psychological wrecks would it leave the characters, if they had to jump from one danger to another, if we never saw them relax at all? We can often assume that they get a few days off from time to time, but we can never be sure if it's never shown.

So, you know what? To hell with it all. Peal is going to get some time off. I'm going to write a story where nothing bad at all happens. Maybe even several. Poor guy really needs it. If you think The Straggler's Mask put him through the wringer, you ain't seen nothing yet.