Fighting is Really Good Exercise. Therefore, it Can Get Tiring.

I've always loved violence. I know that's an awful thing to say, but I only say it because it's the awful reality. There must be something hereditary about it; it's a vestige of the days when humans were wild, when fighting was closer to necessary. Luckily, there are healthy ways to indulge that craving. One of them is this business I wish to break into.

When I was much younger, I longed for non-stop action; entire episodes of the Ninja Turtles where they did nothing but fight. Ah, to be naive again.

Nowadays, I'm much more appreciative of quick-and-brutal. Something more realistic; violence with perceived meaning. I like a lot of arguing and/or political conflict leading up to a literal battle. Evenly-matched slugfests can be great in small doses, but much more often than you'd expect, a completely one-sided fight can be much more satisfying.

Bounce for me, springman.

I just read an old novel in the Warhammer universe by the name of The Daemon's Curse. It did not work well as a story. It was 'Action Porn' (not a term I'm fond of) in book form, 400+ pages of it. The main character, Malus Darkblade, is a dark elf, a complete dick, and on a quest to become the biggest dick possible. It's the thin adhesive that ties fight after fight against enemy after enemy together, each one trying to give the impression of resistance and near-death experience. Yet after each, I found myself less able to believe that anything could be a real threat to Malus, and that no level of injury he sustained would ever really mean anything.

If I want the protagonist to mow through enemy after enemy, I'll play a video game. There's countless titles where I can do exactly that. I get to behold awesome fighting capability and, better yet, I get to claim some semblance of responsibility for it. To some extent, I'M the guy kicking so much ass! Implausible power and the ability to undo non-lethal wounds through some silly magical mechanic are much more entertaining when I'm the one who possesses such things. If it's some Dark Elf who is incredibly mean to the people he's aligned with, I'm gonna need more than constant exposure to his butchery to keep me entertained.

Heisenberg was a much more interesting evil protagonist. He'd lose in any fair fight, but that only made it better when he won. Breaking Bad had some of the most graphic, brutal, depraved scenes of violence, but because the show spent most of its time weaving its complex story, developing its characters, and tightening its tension, some of those brutal moments are unbelievably cathartic and/or satisfying.

Everything in this show should be considered an example of what NOT to do. Ever.

The video games that resemble The Daemon's Curse and shows like Breaking Bad weren't available when the book was written. But reading it now helped drive a point home: there's no place for this kind of novel format anymore because other mediums do it better. There's (obviously) still  a place for battle in fiction, but that place is much fewer and further between than it was even twenty years ago. To have any prayer of maintaining an audience, we need a whole lot of remarkable content that justifies a little bit of violence, not a whole lot of violence tied together by some flimsy justification.