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19991682 No.19991682 [Reply] [Original]

Anons... I am looking for a book or series where the hero is very Nietzschean and is incorruptible. I don't mind flaws but I am tired of the trope "nobility is actually just an illusion, nothing is better than anything else".

I have been reading some of the Witcher books but Geralt tries to stay out of stuff rather than do the noble thing. Does not have to be fantasy. Any suggestions?

>> No.19991723

Bump

>> No.19991729

The Bible
Mein Kampf
12 rules for life

>> No.19991731

>>19991682
What do you mean by nobility exactly?

>> No.19991758

>>19991731
Well I was thinking maybe a Beowulf like character. A man guided by faith and reliant on his own merits. They did a film adaptation of Beowulf that I hated where he was seduced by Grendels Mother and the rest of the film was a decadent slob. In the poem he is a continuous gigachad and unyielding in his search for glory.

I am just tired of the anti hero trope that has gone to the point where smirking nihilist are considered virtuous.

Sorry to talk film so much, but maybe Leonidas in 300, if you have seen it.

>> No.19991779

>>19991758
Red Rising

I will warn that the premise is dumb. Some neo-Roman classical empire spanning the solar system, with people genetically engineered into different color based classes, based on their place in society (Roman Golds on top, Obsidian Germanics as dangerous super soldiers, Red Celts as slaves).

Once you get over that it's fun though, and an interesting read. Gets better as the books go on. Liked them a good deal more than the Witcher books because the world, while too silly for hard sci-fi, was much more original, and it has great momentum.

The protagonist is essentially always a pretty good guy. He has weaknesses, is bad at politics, but it great at war.

Or if you want something slower and more complex, Kellhus in The Darkness That Comes Before is pure ubermensch in that he gives absolutely zero fucks about anyone else's morality but his own, although the natural consequences of this arguably make him a villian, or at best a walking natural disaster.

>> No.19991785

>>19991758
Hmm well classical heroes tend to be quite flawed. They do things much worse than what modern 'anti-heroes' can get away with. Rape, pederasty, etc.

>> No.19991790

>>19991779
That sounds wild but interesting for the former and absolute kino for the latter.

The latter actually reminds me of Conan the Barbarian. Maybe that is the hero I was trying to find as a reference although I have not read much Conan so I cannot tell you in confidence if he fits the bill.

>> No.19991806

Might want to search up for "Byronic hero". Not exactly the same, but close.

>> No.19991825
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19991825

>>19991682
Lohengrin
Siegfried
Parsifal

>Wagner was in conscious reaction against the sentimentality and lassitude of official art. Like Baudelaire (whose admiring letter to the composer after the Parisian performance of Tannhauser displays a self-conscious affinity) he saw that the ideal had fled from the world into the citadel of the imagination. Unlike Baudelaire, however, he believed that the ideal could be tempted back, so as to dwell among us (though at considerable public expense). He therefore tried to create a new musical public, one that would not merely see the point of the heroic ideal, but also adopt it. This attempt was already doomed when Wagner first conceived it, and his sacerdotal presumptions have never ceased to alienate those who feel threatened by his message. Hence modern producers, embarrassed by dramas that make a mockery of their way of life, decide in their turn to make a mockery of the dramas. Of course, even today, musicians and singers, responding as they must to the urgency and sincerity of the music, do their best to produce the sounds that Wagner intended. But the action is invariably caricatured, wrapped in inverted commas, and reduced to the dimensions of a television sitcom. Sarcasm and satire run riot on the stage, not because they have anything to prove or say in the shadow of this unsurpassably noble music, but because nobility has become intolerable. The producer strives to distract the audience from Wagner’s message, and to mock every heroic gesture, lest the point of the drama should finally come home. As Michael Tanner has argued, in his succinct and penetrating defence of the composer, modern productions attempt to ‘domesticate’ Wagner, to bring his dramas down from the exalted sphere in which the music places them, to the world of human trivia, usually in order to make a ‘political statement’ which, being both blatant and banal, succeeds only in cancelling the rich ambiguities of the drama. In contemporary Wagner productions we see exactly what the transition from modernism to the ‘post-modern’ world involves, namely, the final rejection of high culture as a redemptive force and the ruination of the sacred in its last imagined form.

>> No.19991847

>>19991785
This is true but classical hero's are also as glorious as they are flawed. Modern anti hero media tends to dispense with heroism altogether. It believes in nothing.

>> No.19991865

>>19991682
>>19991758
Dietrich von Bern?

>> No.19991866

>>19991825
Holy based Wagner. Cringe Talmudic theatre producers.

>> No.19991867

>>19991865
Whomst?

>> No.19991883
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19991883

>>19991867
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_von_Bern

>> No.19991936

>>19991682

>very Nietzschean
>incorruptible

Robert Heinlein tends to go in for this. Try Farnham's Freehold (early style) or Time Enough For Love (later style).

Ayn Rand is another obvious example. The Fountainhead & Atlas Shrugged are not very good novels as novels but they're certainly not worthless, as some people suggest.

If you just want incorruptibility you could try

Count Belisarius (Robert Graves)

which is an historical novel about a Roman General in about 500 AD when Rome was beginning to collapse. People complained that Graves made him too pure and noble, and Graves wrote a letter to the Times saying "it's a sad comment on the modern age that an accurate portrait of a good man is denounced as wildly unrealistic". The problem is Belisarius was a devout Christian who believed the Emperor should be obeyed without question, and his Emperor was Justinian, who was a wretched little weasel (so Graves says, anyway) who undercut and betrayed him every chance he got. So you might end up thinking he was a bit of a cuck rather than a Nietzschean.

If you want incorruptible hero plus happy ending, go for 19th-century adventure novels, like Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes, The Lost World, The White Company etc). These characters are pretty Nietzschean in that they have a fixed personal code and obey it with no qualms whatsoever. The problem is their code tends to be the code of the author, which means the code of Victorian society, so you might feel you're missing the distinctive Nietzschean flavour. (There are exceptions. Nemo in 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea is one.)

>> No.19991957

>>19991682
When I think of Nietzschean heroes I think of the characters in DH Lawrence, Andre Gide, etc.

>> No.19991960

>>19991957
oh and Yukio Mishima of course

>> No.19992255

>>19991936
>>19991957
>>19991960
>>19991883
Thanks fellas will check these out. Really appreciate it.

>> No.19992578
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19992578

The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison (1922 so pre-Tolkien)

Chad demon lords battle against dastardly witches (male) and their (((goblin))) advisor. At one point the main characters are described as "men like unto the Gods in beauty and in power"

It is written in archaic English, which may be a turn off. Here is a kino scene from chapter 2:

Now the King mocked Goldry, saying, "Rebellious hound, it is fit that I make demonstration unto thee, and unto these Foliots and Demons that witness our meeting, that I am thy King and Lord not by virtue only of this my crown of Witchland, which I thus put by for an hour, but even by the power of my body over thine and by my might and main. Be satisfied that I will not have done with thee until I have taken away thy life, and sent thy soul squealing bodiless into the unknown. And thy skull and thy marrow-bones will I have away to Carcë, to my palace, to be a token unto all the world that I have been the bane of an hundredth great champion by my wrastling, and thou not least among them that I have slain in that exercise. Thereafter, when I have eaten and drunken and made merry in my royal palace at Carcë, I will sail with my armies over the teeming deep to many-mountained Demonland. And it shall be my footstool, and these other Demons the slaves of me, yea, and the slaves of my slaves."

But the Lord Goldry Bluszco laughed lightly and said to the Red Foliot, "O Red Foliot, I am not come hither to contend with the King of Witchland in windy railing, but to match my strength against his, sinew against sinew."

Now they stood ready, and the Red Foliot made a sign with his hand, and the cymbals clashed for the first bout.

>> No.19992805

Would Conan the Barbarian be interesting for you, OP?

>> No.19992886

>>19992805
Possibly. After I posted I realised Conan might have been better than Geralt for comparison. I dunno anon. Would you recommend?

>> No.19992895

>>19992578
Very... Very kino. Will definitely read this. Thanks anon.