![]() He’s the villain you understand, and should be ready to forgive the instant he stops and turns around – if he ever does, which you suspect he won’t. His fall is a tragedy, and the world owes him a goddamn apology. Redcloak is not the villain you should hate. ![]() Not coincidentally, it’s the story arc that Burlew is most proud of. Start of Darkness explores his past, and details the circumstances that put him in an impossible spot, but doesn’t flinch away from the choices he made. Considering he’s a fantasy villain (and in a stick figure comic that began as a spoof of D&D rules, no less), he’s simply unique. Redcloak might be, though.”ĭespite appearances, Redcloak is an amazingly rich and complex character. There are people in this world who are driven to evil because of what their life has forced them to endure Xykon is not one of those. Xykon is completely and wholly unapologetically Evil, but more to the point, he’s kind of a dick. Burlew says about it: “Writing a story centered around your main antagonist is sort of difficult, because you risk “devillainifying” them. ![]() Start of Darkness is an unbelievably good book, and a more or less contained story. (If you haven’t read the Order of the Stick, well, here’s #1. ![]() If you haven’t already, please read Start of Darkness, the “villains” prequel of The Order of the Stick. So if I can make even one person think about how we treat people of other races (or religions, or creeds, or what have you) by using the analogy of Redcloak, then it will have been time well spent on my part.” Fantasy literature is ONLY worthwhile for what it can tell us about the real world everything else is petty escapism. If you are going to dismiss any themes or subtext present in any fantasy story as simply not applying to our world because that world has dragons and ours doesn’t, then you have largely missed the point of literature as a whole, and are likely rather poorer for it. ![]() “No fiction is meaningful if its lessons cannot be applied to the world that we, real actual humans, live in. ![]()
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