Book-Game Challenge for February 2019

To briefly recap, I chose to play and read this month:

Game	Book
Conan Exiles	The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian by Robert E. Howard

As a reminder, I am not doing straight up reviews of either the book or the game; you can find plenty of those easily online. Instead, my wrap-up posts are focused on how the two forms of media portrayed the same ideas and how they meshed for me personally as a consumer who enjoyed them concurrently.

He stood, the one atom of life amidst the colossal monuments of desolation and decay. Not even a vulture hung like a black dot in the vast blue vault of the sky that the sun glazed over with its heat. On every hand rose the grim relics of another, forgotten age: huge broken pillars, thrusting up their jagged pinnacles into the sky; long wavering lines of crumbling walls; fallen cyclopean blocks of stone; shattered images, whose horrific features the corroding winds and dust-storms had half erased. - Black Colossus

Now just as a quick overview of both products for any reader who is not aware of their basic premise, courtesy of Wikipedia:

The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian is the first of a three-volume set collecting the Conan stories by author Robert E. Howard; the set is noted for presenting the original, unedited versions of Howard’s Conan tales.

Conan Exiles is a survival video game developed and published by Funcom. The game is set in the world of Conan the Barbarian, with the custom playable character being rescued by Conan, beginning their journey.

Ah, Conan the Barbarian. The ultimate Gary Stu. How you’ve turned my head round and round this month with surprises both appealing and unfortunate.

As you’re probably aware, Conan the Barbarian has been a fixture in popular culture for decades, having been portrayed by the likes of a 1980s Arnold Schwarzenegger on the big screen and just recently brought into the Avengers fold with Marvel comics. There’s games and books, toys and Halloween costumes available for anyone enamored with the world’s favorite loincloth-clad swordsman.

But what you might not know is his real origin: he was brought into existence by a man named Robert E. Howard, a 20-something regular Joe living in rural Texas in the 1930s, whose means of livelihood depended on selling fantastical short stories to the popular pulp fiction magazines of the time, notably one named Weird Tales. Howard is considered the father of the sword-and-sorcery genre, and while Conan was not his first heroic fantasy creation (Kull the Conqueror of Atlantis takes that title) he is by far the flagship hero. Howard’s works are solely short stories meant for periodical publication; many ghost writers have since expanded on Conan’s world and story over the following generations which attests to the character’s wider appeal.

The world of Conan is brutal and bloody; this is not a setting for pacifists or utopians. While Conan himself seems to have his own rogue’s code of honour, I knew going into this that I’d be addressing other issues along the way: violence, sex, slavery, misogyny and racism. Though it’s not within my scope here to write a treatise on social equality, I would be doing a disservice to both works if I ignored those undercurrents as it is all so very ingrained in the setting.

I climbed out of the abyss of naked barbarism to the throne and in that climb I spilt my blood as freely as I spilt that of others. If either of us has the right to rule men, by Crom, it is I! - The Scarlet Citadel

I’m going to start off by saying that I am neither a serial reader of mass market/genre fiction or a regular player of survival video games. So topically this month looks like it would have been a failure on both accounts, but by virtue of having a rich setting and talented world architects did I manage to remain enthused about my time in it.

And talk about vastly different beginnings to both! When I opened the book, to my very pleasant surprise it started off with a five stanza poem entitled Cimmeria; an ode to Conan’s homeland. As a bit of a poetry nut I was quite happy by this, and the writing at the beginning of the first short story in the book started off quite dramatically and unexpectedly eloquent. It was truly a ‘wow!’ moment, as I guess I had been prepared to be tied down reading campy yarns this month. For all its later faults, I truly believe that Howard could have been quite a fine writer had circumstances been different - the man had an excellent grasp of vocabulary (dated now) and you could tell that he had probably been a longtime reader of other classics like Shakespeare. His short stories are vivid and energetic, and forcefully so. I suspect that had Howard made Conan a passion project ala Tolkien instead of a simple meal-ticket, his works could have been very different.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the beginning of the game was completely unimpressive, and I imagine that’s where a lot of players tend to wander off for more exciting worlds. You start off watching a mini CGI movie showing Conan rescuing someone tied to a cross, handing the victim an axe, and both of them fighting off monstrous beasts in a heroically savage melee. Conan then just walks off, leaving you to fend for yourself now freed. “Yeah! Right on! Ready to take on this world!,” you think, excited by the bloody victory. After you create your own character avatar, you then are summarily plopped down in an empty wasteland of a desert completely naked with nothing to your name and no direction for what you do now. Maybe you pick up a few rocks or branches, or discover that you can take fibers from the sparse patches of grass. If you tinker around, you figure out that you can now latch a rock to a branch with those grass fibers and have yourself a crude hammer. What happened to that cool axe Conan gave you?!

But I have to say that overall, the theme of fighting your way across the world to greatness is probably the most Conan thing to do, as in the original stories you are constantly reminded that our hero pretty much wanders all over the place in nothing but his loincloth, sandals and sword and through sheer physical prowess and force of personality manages to go on to lead armies, become a king, defeat gods, and leave the most desirable women of the world swooning. The violence is gorey and wanton, like the man himself.

Conan is absolutely a male power fantasy in both literary and digital form. To paraphrase my female gaming friend who played along with me: when a male in Conan’s world wears a loincloth, it displays his brawn and might, a warning to all who might seek to challenge him. When a female wears a loincloth though, she is merely sexy and something to be conquered.

Now to touch upon the underbelly of things here. Slavery is a fact of life in the Hyborian Age and Conan himself possesses slaves at various points in the original writings by Howard, though they never describe him as mistreating them. In the game, you can literally take a club and a rope and beat other AI human beings into submission - indeed, that’s the only way you can craft certain special armors and weapons, by enslaving master craftsmen to your will. There was an ick factor for my friend and I when we started capturing slaves in the game, particularly at the beginning when all the human AIs you face are nearby darker skinned desert dwellers.

And here is the crux of my problem with the original short stories by Howard. There is no mask for the author’s personal racism and because Howard wrote all his stories solely for publication to make a living, he wrote what 1920s-30s pulp fiction readers wanted to read. He frequently describes the most attractive women as being white (literally using the word), and the most foul of villains as black. At points he described a black male as having ‘thick blubbery lips’ and described a woman in Xuthal of the Dark as having ‘yellow flesh.’ Indeed, the entire story of Valley of Lost Women was one huge snowball of open disgust for black tribesmen, to the point where I set the book down and stayed away from it for a few days.

Thankfully I saw very little of that within the game (aside from the ability to select who you choose to enslave - all races are available for that) but then the game itself is quite light on story. As a player you really have to dig deep to piece together lore, as the main focus is on surviving the barbaric world and conquering the land.

What the books and game do best though is weave tales of heroic fantasy - Conan is in his element while fighting against demonic beasts with impossible odds, and making your way through a dark, half-sunken dungeon carrying a flickering torch in the game is pretty thrilling. Your adrenaline pulses along with the hero’s as creatively outlandish foes rise from the depths of hell. That is the shining moment in all of this: the slash of steel, the poisonous fang, the spurting blood and grunts of pain. All vividly described and portrayed.

This was no longer battle, but butchery, frantic, bloody, impelled by an hysteria of fury and hate, in which culminated the sufferings of battle, massacre, torture, and fear-ridden, thirst-maddened, hunger-haunted flight. - Iron Shadows in the Moon

The most important question: was this worthwhile?

Yes. The book was more time consuming to read than I had expected it to be, mostly because I was going back and forth analyzing all the more questionable themes swirling beneath the otherwise unexpectedly enjoyable writing. At times I literally had to set the book down because it was just too much - and for good or ill, that type of reading always stays with me long after the cover has been closed.

The game is one meant for long-term play and I imagine that it’d be an amazing experience to play with quite a few people on a multiplayer server rather than just duo with one friend as I did, but the atmosphere and sense of exploration and discovery were my favorite parts while in the digitized lands of Hyboria. I do feel that the developers largely captured the feel of Conan the Barbarian.

All fled, all done, so lift me on the pyre;
The feast is over and the lamps expire. - Howard’s suicide note