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2026-May-20, Wednesday 12:53![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
I've been watching 真の仲間じゃないと勇者のパーティーを追い出されたので、辺境でスローライフすることにしました (shin no nakama ja nai to yūsha no pātī o oidasareta no de, henkyō de surō raifu suru koto ni shimashita, "Because I was banished from the hero's party for not being a true comrade, I've decided to live the slow life in the countryside", Eng: "Banished from the Hero's Party, I Decided to Live a Quiet Life in the Countryside") because it's not an isekai, but the background is very similar because they're both drawing from the same well.
In Banished, everyone in the world is born with a 加護 (kago), which Weblio defines as:
Now, there are some cool worldbuilding side effects that result from this. We're told that 加護 are assigned completely randomly with no regard for the parents' 加護 or the child's station in life, so the son of a farmhand can get the 加護 of the shōgun and the daughter of a woodcutter can get the 加護 of the archmage, but by the same token, a princess can get the 加護 of the thief. It makes me wonder how hereditary nobility even developed in this world--surely they'd have some kind of caste system that your 加護 sorted you into, right?
Well, maybe that comes into play late in the story, because I'm not that far in, but at the point I'm at we've learned that the reason the main character left the hero's party is because his 加護 is the 導き手 (michibikite, "Guide"), and you might think, "Oh, so he's good at tracking or wilderness survival or-" but you're wrong. The effects of that 加護 are basically "You gain +30 levels when it manifests but you can't gain any extra XP", so his 加護 is literally that he's the overpowered tutorial character you get in the early parts of the RPG but who eventually leaves your party, either because the story makes them or because their stat growth is low enough that relying on them too much will eventually handicap you.
And that's why I'm writing this post, because even in a pure fantasy series it's just based on video game tropes. Anime like KonoSuba literally have people carry their character sheets in their pockets and Banished isn't that bad, but it still has a character that people in the discussion I read kept referring to with a Fire Emblem term because it's such a well-known character type over there. And I think the reason for all of this is that people don't read the original sources. The author of Banished did not grow up reading classic fantasy, they grew up playing video games and reading books inspired by video games (specifically Dragon Quest and games based on it), the same way that modern D&D designers did not grow up reading Fritz Leiber and C.L. Moore and Robert E. Howard, they grew up playing D&D and reading D&D books and modern D&D reflects that--it's based on D&D, not on pulp adventurers. The biggest problem I have with isekai series--and maybe with Banished, we'll see--is that they'll often set up a really cool background and premise and then go absolutely nowhere with it in favor of relying on standard video game tropes. Even Frieren, as good as it is with its exploration of mortality, is still like, "Oh, we need a priest so we have a healer" at one point.
And it's easy to look at the development of fantasy in Japan and say, well, that's just how it is, since they got their idea of elf-dwarf-orc fantasy not from The Lord of the Rings, but from Dragon Quest, which got it from Wizardry. But there are plenty of old Japanese fantasy series like Escaflowne or Magic Knights Rayearth that don't rely on video game logic. Hell, Record of Lodoss War is literally based on a Sword World tabletop campaign and it still doesn't have characters talking about their classes and levels! This is a modern development and while I occasionally look at one of these series and think about playing a game in that setting--I'll admit, Banished reminds me a lot of how Earthdawn took a lot of D&D tropes like classes and monster-filled dungeons and levels and memorizing spells and worked an explanation of them into the world--but I'm getting a little tired of this popping up everywhere. We'll see if Banished does anything interesting with it as the series goes on.
If anyone has any recommendations for recent Japanese fantasy that's not based on That Summer the Writer Spent Playing Dragon Quest III (or worse, reading books by people who spent a summer playing Dragon Quest III) let me know.
In Banished, everyone in the world is born with a 加護 (kago), which Weblio defines as:
神仏が力で衆生を守り助けること, "The protection extended by the gods and the Buddha to all living things"but the English subtitles translate as "Blessing." Now when I first heard that, I thought back to that passage in Tanakh:
"See, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah; and I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, to devise skilful works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, and in cutting of stones for setting, and in carving of wood, to work in all manner of workmanship. And I, behold, I have appointed with him Oholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan; and in the hearts of all that are wise-hearted I have put wisdom, that they may make all that I have commanded thee."But it's not, it's literally RPG classes. You are Assigned Fighter At Birth and it makes you want to go punch things. Seriously, it's a plot point that if your 加護 relates to fighting and martial prowess your personality changes so you become more likely to reach for fighting as the first tool to solve problems.
-Exodus 31:2-7
Now, there are some cool worldbuilding side effects that result from this. We're told that 加護 are assigned completely randomly with no regard for the parents' 加護 or the child's station in life, so the son of a farmhand can get the 加護 of the shōgun and the daughter of a woodcutter can get the 加護 of the archmage, but by the same token, a princess can get the 加護 of the thief. It makes me wonder how hereditary nobility even developed in this world--surely they'd have some kind of caste system that your 加護 sorted you into, right?
Well, maybe that comes into play late in the story, because I'm not that far in, but at the point I'm at we've learned that the reason the main character left the hero's party is because his 加護 is the 導き手 (michibikite, "Guide"), and you might think, "Oh, so he's good at tracking or wilderness survival or-" but you're wrong. The effects of that 加護 are basically "You gain +30 levels when it manifests but you can't gain any extra XP", so his 加護 is literally that he's the overpowered tutorial character you get in the early parts of the RPG but who eventually leaves your party, either because the story makes them or because their stat growth is low enough that relying on them too much will eventually handicap you.
And that's why I'm writing this post, because even in a pure fantasy series it's just based on video game tropes. Anime like KonoSuba literally have people carry their character sheets in their pockets and Banished isn't that bad, but it still has a character that people in the discussion I read kept referring to with a Fire Emblem term because it's such a well-known character type over there. And I think the reason for all of this is that people don't read the original sources. The author of Banished did not grow up reading classic fantasy, they grew up playing video games and reading books inspired by video games (specifically Dragon Quest and games based on it), the same way that modern D&D designers did not grow up reading Fritz Leiber and C.L. Moore and Robert E. Howard, they grew up playing D&D and reading D&D books and modern D&D reflects that--it's based on D&D, not on pulp adventurers. The biggest problem I have with isekai series--and maybe with Banished, we'll see--is that they'll often set up a really cool background and premise and then go absolutely nowhere with it in favor of relying on standard video game tropes. Even Frieren, as good as it is with its exploration of mortality, is still like, "Oh, we need a priest so we have a healer" at one point.
And it's easy to look at the development of fantasy in Japan and say, well, that's just how it is, since they got their idea of elf-dwarf-orc fantasy not from The Lord of the Rings, but from Dragon Quest, which got it from Wizardry. But there are plenty of old Japanese fantasy series like Escaflowne or Magic Knights Rayearth that don't rely on video game logic. Hell, Record of Lodoss War is literally based on a Sword World tabletop campaign and it still doesn't have characters talking about their classes and levels! This is a modern development and while I occasionally look at one of these series and think about playing a game in that setting--I'll admit, Banished reminds me a lot of how Earthdawn took a lot of D&D tropes like classes and monster-filled dungeons and levels and memorizing spells and worked an explanation of them into the world--but I'm getting a little tired of this popping up everywhere. We'll see if Banished does anything interesting with it as the series goes on.
If anyone has any recommendations for recent Japanese fantasy that's not based on That Summer the Writer Spent Playing Dragon Quest III (or worse, reading books by people who spent a summer playing Dragon Quest III) let me know.
"the overpowered tutorial character"
Date: 2026-May-21, Thursday 15:23 (UTC)I remember reading an interview, probably in Starlog, with then-riding-high fantasy author David Eddings in which he said that he didn't read any contemporary fantasy lest it influence his writing. It was Tolkien and before for him. That is ... a choice. Regardless, I've always thought it showed an interesting instinctive awareness of intertextualism (though a fearful one, unfortunately not a dynamic one).
>"he's the overpowered tutorial character you get in the early parts of the RPG but who eventually leaves your party"
This pithily described situation definitely exists for game-mechanics reasons! Yet this observation brought to my mind its parallel ancestry in folktale and fiction storytelling. There, too, mentor characters are routinely left behind or killed off in order for the hero to progress in the story.
I'm sorry to say that I don't have any recommendations. Good luck!
I will contribute that about two years ago, I realized that I had somehow completely missed reading true sword & sorcery as a genre -- I'd grown up entirely over the border in high fantasy -- and had only encountered sword & sorcery in its movie, television, and game incarnations. So I set out to learn what it really was, what made it different from fantasy, and read some of the parents of the genre... and I quickly discovered that I don't personally much like true original pulp sword & sorcery. Ouch! I suppose that it's because, no matter how well written and imagined, the hallmark structural focus (as I observed it) is utterly on one protagonist, to the exclusion of any sidekicks or companions or loved ones as fully formed separate characters. The protagonist might command armies and be surrounded by advisors and relatives as easily as be a lone wanderer, but in most of the sword & sorcery I sampled, everyone but the protagonist (and maybe the villain(s), if the writer is very good) is almost as flat as paper and only the protagonist matters (to himself/herself, to the implicit author, and therefore to the reader). I came to imagine that the movie, television, comics, and games that I knew that had descended from those originals had evolved toward the border with high fantasy specifically to pick up group dynamics, interpersonal interactions, community stakes, and, well, dialogue.
I got much further with C.L. Moore's sword & sorcery than the random other people's bits I sampled before her work! Yet it still came up as not-for-me. However, I am currently reading her sci-fi novel Doomsday Morning on my lunch breaks, and it's fantastic so far -- definitely demonstrating that it's the genre, not her writing, that I didn't chime with.
Re: "the overpowered tutorial character"
Date: 2026-May-21, Thursday 20:17 (UTC)This reminds me of how The Sword of Shannara is just a retelling of The Lord of the Rings and so all the Shannara fans tell you to just start with the second book where Brooks actually starts to do his own thing.
As much as I love sword and sorcery I'm not going to try to convince you to try it again, but I think the aspect you mentioned is a consequence of its roots in short stories for the pulps. There's at least one Conan story where Conan doesn't even show up until like two-thirds of the way through the story, but that's okay because you've presumably read previous issues of Weird Tales and know who this guy is. Otherwise, any character has maybe a couple dozen pages to exist in.
Re: "the overpowered tutorial character"
Date: 2026-May-25, Monday 17:16 (UTC)If you would like to recommend a classic sword & sorcery short story or novella, I'll be happy to look it up and give the genre another chance. I was disappointed to find it so uninviting! When I decided to poke my nose into the genre, I was specifically inspired by the announcement that the vintage Saturday-morning cartoon Thundarr the Barbarian (think of it as a mash-up of Star Wars and Conan; TPTB certainly did) would be getting a comic-book series for the first time this year. I did not happen to choose to read any Conan; perhaps I should have started there.
And perhaps I skirted around my chagrined feeling in my description above...
If you choose to accept this wholly optional recommendation mission :-) here's my request: What I would most like to sample is a sword & sorcery story in which the protagonist cares about at least one other human being. Present or absent, living or dead.
The stories I sampled had protagonists who not only operated strictly solo, but were highly self-absorbed, with near-zero care for anyone else -- not children, parents, lovers, mentors, comrades. And as the story was entirely from such a self-absorbed perspective, it seemed narrow and often uninteresting to me: it seemed to me to lack stakes. I read just a few essays about the genre, and those essays told me that this was a feature, not a bug: that one of the defining characteristics of classic sword & sorcery is self-centered protagonists charging through worlds of faceless NPCs for either survival or self-aggrandizement.
Maybe that's a back-construction -- an interpretation superimposed much later, when folks came to want to academically (and marketing-ly) differentiate sword & sorcery from fantasy?
Re: "the overpowered tutorial character"
Date: 2026-May-26, Tuesday 19:25 (UTC)that one of the defining characteristics of classic sword & sorcery is self-centered protagonists charging through worlds of faceless NPCs for either survival or self-aggrandizement.
I wouldn't put it in so many words but one of the main things about sword and sorcery and the big difference from fantasy is that it's usually similar to a picaresque--there's not a lot of personal development in the hero and the plot doesn't have deliberate themes or much development, it's usually structured as "here's some stuff that happened." That's why they were so inspirational for TTRPGs, where no one knows the endpoint of the story and characters might die ignominiously instead of fulfilling their personal arcs is a feature, but you definitely have to take them as they are. It's part of what's interesting to me watching the development of D&D, in that modern (non-OSR) players have read fantasy and not sword and sorcery and so they come to D&D wanting epic plots and character arcs and none of that "save vs. poison or die" arbitrary old gameplay, and D&D has changed over time to accommodate their wishes.
I would say the Conan stories do have more interesting themes--"Beyond the Black River" is famously basically a Western--but Conan doesn't really change over the course of the stories. His career does as he cycles through mercenary, thief, pirate, steppe raider, bodyguard, and eventually king, but he's essentially the same person throughout.
Re: "the overpowered tutorial character"
Date: 2026-May-27, Wednesday 14:39 (UTC)Moore's "Black God's Kiss" was one of the first I tried -- possibly the very first? or second? -- and I enjoyed it enough to happily continue with the Jirel of Joiry stories as far as partway into the fourth, "The Dark Land," when I peeled off. Not every genre is for everyone, yet I would like to understand and appreciate sword & sorcery on its own terms. (And maybe I will love it at a different time in my life; that's happened with genres before.)
Agreed on the interesting evolution of D&D. I think I have a beat-up module from the '80s (which kid!me could barely make heads or tails of at the time, but tried to play with a neighbor kid nevertheless) sitting next to my Pathfinder manual on the shelf. :-)