Backstage: Amaldis (Patreon)

Backstage for Amaldis.

I do not remember why, in college, I suddenly got so incredibly butthurt about the genre of sword and sorcery in which noble barbarians always defeat evil wizards with their mighty thews (seriously, does this genre even actually exist or was I going off reviewers' complaints about Conan?), but I did. Because, between a very very competent and skilled barbarian swordsman, and a very very competent and skilled wizard, it should not be a contest. The wizard should always win. It's like putting a samurai who's spent his life studying the blade, wielding a katana, against an experienced US Armed Forces drone operator with a bomb-armed drone. Having mad magical skills implies the ability to kill at a distance, and that is one thing the mighty-thewed barbarian cannot do; he has to be able to at least see his target.

So I wrote this, where the barbarian can do this bullshit because his plot armor is an actual magical object that grants him good luck, and where the "evil" wizard is "evil" because she's a democratic anti-monarchist in a society where every other ruling leader is a king, so naturally every ruler around her wants her dead as too many of their peasants are voting with their feet to go live under the democratic rule of her city/state. 

It's not my best story ever, but I had a worse opinion of it in memory than I did when I opened it up to see if I could revise it for the 52 Project and found that, actually, it wasn't too bad.