Discussion Franchise / ConanTheBarbarian

Removed from main page, as there is a cleanup effort on GIFT underway and I am not sure what to do with this entry:

• GIFT: A pre-internet musing on the principle comes up in "The Tower of the Elephant," where the narration muses that "Civilized men are more discourteous than savages, because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split."

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From the description: "Howard's stories frequently relied on pulp formulas, much to Howard's chagrin."

Uh, I'm guessing that the first guy should not be Howard. Does anyone know the correct name of the comic's editor, or do I just switch it with "the comic's stories"?

Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)

I've tried to expand on a few of the Zero Context Example situations on this page, but there are just too many for me. With the Howard books, the knock-offs, the comics and the movies all sharing this space, it's impossible to guess at the original incidents that prompted those ZC Es. Anybody who can, please lend a hand!

Why does this page lack a character sheet, or at least a separate list for tropes that apply specifically to the title character's person rather than to the plot of the stories that he's involved in?

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Do We Have A Trope For "forgotten eras" such as the Hyborean Age?

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Deleted the entire "Stuff inspired by Conan" section. Works that are only pseudo-related shouldn't be listed on work pages, and the list was mostly redundant with the Barbarian Hero trope page anyway.

Do we really need so many tropes pertaining to The Movie and the Comic-Book Adaptation of the same name? Wouldn't it simply be best to have separate pages for those adaptations?

I'm only asking here to see if there's an official reason from any moderators as to why that shouldn't be so; if nobody in charge gives me a reason why not, I'm pretty much just gonna do it. If they do, I'll let it lie.

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I think this page needs more delineation between "pure Howard" and pastiche, everything else. Will try to work on it.

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I think most of the material under Absurdly Sharp Blade was coversing about side issues. I streamlined this example on the main page. Here is the original.

• Absurdly Sharp Blade: Conan must have his swords custom made out of Unobtanium, they can cut through nearly anything. Hardly a fight scene goes by that doesn't have the Cimmerian casually hewing off limbs and heads, plunging a sword through chainmail like wet paper or rotten fruit or some other metaphor for softness, and occasionally bisecting still-helmeted skulls and whole torsos. In "The People Of The Black Circle", he chops through a door with his sword. And yet it's still always described as "razor-sharp". He must go through a lot of blades.
  • Conan does state at various points that he regularly changes blades, and he even breaks some on the bodies of his enemies. In his very first short story he actually breaks the magic sword he needs to kill a demon in the head of a would-be assassin before said demon appears. Not that this stops him from killing the demon anyway with what's left of it...
    • In Sword of Skelos he voices the opinion that you can never have too many back-up weapons.
  • It also helps that Conan is one of the most famous examples of Heroic Build to help make his blades cut through everything like butter.
    • It should be pointed out that Hyborian Age metallurgy is likely to be far in advance of its Medieval equivalent: "Akbitanan" steel (an homage to Ecbatana, capital of the Parthian Empire) is said to be unbreakable.
  • The sword of the film is basically either magic or of ridiculously advanced metallurgical quality. The track playing when Conan finds it is titled "The Atlantean Sword", after all.
    • The steel sword his father forged was of such high quality that the villain kept it as a treasure, and stealing such weapons is implied to have been the entire purpose behind attacking his people. The Atlantean sword cut through it like tin foil.

The Elric Saga is very probably not a decontruction of Conan The Barbarian.

• Word of God gives another target.
• The parallels between Elric and Conan are messy and unconvincing: one is brawny, the other frail. One is unprincipled, the other is too, one destroys the world, the other doesn't.

So moving this example to the discussion page:

• Elric of Melnibone was created by Michael Moorcock as a Deconstruction of Conan and the type of Heroic Fantasy he exemplified — while Conan is hardly a Cape, he's usually of good-cheer while he robs an ancient tomb blind or leads a bunch of rag-tag pirates to victory, rape, and pillaging. On the other hand, Elric is frail and amoral, traffics with dark powers, and eventually destroys the world itself.
  • Word of God is that Elric, and the Eternal Champion cycle in general, was aimed more at deconstructing the high-fantasy tropes created and popularized by Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings, which Moorcock hated.
    • This is also more consistent with the TV Tropes definition of Deconstruction

Edited by Camacan