Historically, haven’t most Great Men been terrible, chauvinist shitheads? Their Greatness lies in vigorously applying their shitheadedness to socially approved Great Matters, like building monuments or fighting wars, rather than, like, crime and genocide.
Or the cliche: “Most great men are bad men.”
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
They’re monsters, but they stood for something; the tragedy is that turned their passions away from what was good and proper and chose to be dickwads. Meanwhile, thousands of people stood aside and did nothing.
Vegeta’s a terrible father–and more generally, a terrible man–but again, he stands for something. He might not be a genocidal maniac after a certain point towards the end of the Frieza saga, and then he becomes a terrible father, but think about what he wasn’t doing. With Frieza out of the picture, Vegeta could have taken over the galaxy and reign in Frieza’s place. Vegeta goes as far as saying this much. But he doesn’t do it. Why? Because instead of seeking to become a petty tyrant, Vegeta is obsessed with Goku turning into a Super Saiyan. He can’t ignore the challenge, and he can’t ignore the idea that there is some wonderful enlightenment at the end of that road. Each time he lets Some Dude reach their final form or what the fuck ever, he’s doing it because he craves adversity. We can appreciate his dedication to The Challenge, his constant training-through-hell, while saying he could channel that energy into something productive.
Dragon Ball Z even ends with Vegeta’s bravado coming down and using humility to save the day. It’s he who comes up with the plan for all the Earthlings to give their energy to the Spirit Bomb. Vegeta, a total hardass, has to fess up to the fact that he simply isn’t good enough and he needs the help of people who were previously beneath his contempt. He doesn’t just arbitrarily hit Good Guy status. He’s forced to confront his biggest character flaw and was able to beat that thing.
Appealing to real life history to excuse the characteristics of fictional characters isn’t a convincing thought exercise to me
This gets into the topic of critiquing characters as flawed creations (as we are all flawed beings) and critiquing characters as projections of the author’s belief systems, but I also think that we have enough info on Buronson and the culture he comes from to form an idea about his own views about the nobility of his “tragic” characters. Just as HnK presents a dystopic physical and political landscape it also suggests a utopia, and there is no reason to not believe that Buronson’s concept of the latter is one wherein any compulsions of women beyond motherhood are reprimanded, perhaps mildly at first, but then in ways paralleling and going beyond Rei’s assault of Mamiya
Critics and criticism are important, Toll
This is just a variant of “wow if u dislike (x) so much how about u do better” which is the hugest intellectual dead-end in the universe
It’s the opposite of a dead-end. It’s easier to critique than it is to create, and we miss out on creators when critiquing is “good enough” to look respectable among your peers. Critics dream of becoming great men, but great men are always creators.
In terms of Fist of the North Star, there exists magic karate, but most people sit on the sidelines regardless.
Critique is a form of creation, like any other art form. At its best, it is its own literature.
I think the only people who deny this are shitty pulp writers who are mad at reviewers.
Most people also seem to have a family, whether that’s through blood or not. I think the thought of abandoning all that to train for years in some remote region (if you can even find a trainer to begin with) without any contact with your loved ones would probably seem less appealing than trying to survive as best you can in your village.
I’m not talking about characters so much as the definition of great. I don’t actually disagree with you about a single thing in this thread except that greatness does (as opposed to should) entail any sort of goodness or decency. I think the sorts of people whom society has deemed great back me up, and that what Toll’s talking about is a pretty common outlook, of which HnK’s is just a magnification.
So really I’m quibbling over literally one word while agreeing with you wholly and shitposting in your good architecture thread. 
not sure if how generic so much of this looks is down to HnK being a singular defining influence on single plane beat em up games or if I’m just kinda jaded on this sort of game but I’m seeing a lot of similarities to Trojan and Gladiator and Rygar and Astyanax but game doesn’t look as enjoyable as any of those
All of him??
Got done with the whole Raoh arc a while ago, guess I’ll keep going
Manga location vs. videogame location
You can even see Agni and Rudra guarding the gateway
MFAs with a writing focus actually tend to be the most hostile towards critics (calling them lazy parasites and way too negative, etc), many genre writers began as critics.
How anyone can decide upon writing as their craft and not understand criticism as an intertextual conversation is beyond me. lol academia? Toll’s assertion about criticism as separate from creation is especially baffling because it suggests that the critic’s subject arose ex nihilo – but the reality is that everything is a response to something else. Often times the most interesting works are vitally dependent upon explicit forebear material.
All art is “parasitic” – or, rather, usually (and ideally) “symbiotic.”
Entirely a sidebar, but there was an interesting assertion in a Brian Stableford bibliography of fantasy I read recently, that literary fantasy is parasitic on commodified fantasy, this isn’t meant as a negative (Stableford writing literary fantasy when he writes fantasy, after all) but as a plain fact that commodified fantasy is needed to cultivate an audience that understands the signifiers that are manipulated in literary fantasy, the genre cannot sustain itself purely on groundbreaking works.
