Who's more powerful, Hercules or Charlemagne?
Apr 03, 2021 1:41 am
Sorry, Buffy, martial arts are not a good tool against vampires.
Vampire's Dayrunner: the last book before Kit lets her dojo membership lapse.
Kit studied Kenpo karate because that’s one of the first styles of martial arts I studied. Her dojo wasn't much like the dojo I studied at. Kishimoto-sensei was based on one of my English conversation students in Japan, a cardiologist who liked to organize hiking trips. He didn't teach or study martial arts, but he had a great name.
Dojos are great places to have drama with other students (from a writer’s perspective; I’m not condoning drama in real life) but as the story went on, karate had less and less of an influence on Kit’s life. I realized that martial arts is not the best tool for fighting vampires (sorry, Buffy, but it’s true.) It looks good on television, but it just doesn't make sense from a practical standpoint. Any even moderately buff vampire is going to pummel a human into the ground.
In many classic stories, heroism is strongly gender coded: the good heroine proves her worth through working without complaint, the male hero wins by being bigger and tougher than the bad guys. But there's a third archetype: the trickster.
I love trickster stories (and not just because April 1 is my favorite holiday). I love it when the heroine wins not because she's bigger than the bad guy but through creativity and intelligence and by having friends and family she can count on. To answer the question in the subject line, Charlemagne. That’s because Hercules was just one guy and Charlemagne had an army. Charlemagne conquered Europe while Hercules proably retired to do the ancient Greek version of shilling protein powder on QVC when he wasn't busy murdering his wives.
It’s fun to watch heroines kick ass, but I loved Buffy because of her relationships with Willow and Xander and Oz and Spike, not because Sarah Michelle Geller is plausibly fierce. As fun as it is to watch people kick butt, it's even more fun when the Scoobies hatch a plan together and outwit the enemy.
Do you have a favorite trickster character?
Unknown enemies. Fatal hexes. Can this poltergeist-in-training uncover a killer?
If you haven't yet read Vampire's Dayrunner (book #3), it will give you some good grounding so that Vampire's Pawn (book #9) will hit harder.
Aru must choose: Use his powers to protect his family? Or give up his life to save millions of strangers? (Complete story free.)
Lizzie is not your average tourist on the idyllic Greek island of Corfu. Lizzie has a daunting task to undertake: to claim back her twin brother who was kidnapped twenty years earlier by an evil witch.
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