Conan the Warrior

Conan the Warrior

One thing I kept noticing was that Robert E. Howard went into very lengthy descriptions about the characters and the landscape he was introducing. Also, it seemed that he took every opportunity to make the characters as sexy as possible. When Conan laughs, he flexes his bicep for appeal. When he looks at Valeria, he pays particular attention to her large breasts and hips. You can just imagine how the scene would unfold in a movie—very little gets left to the imagination. The two main characters are beautiful beyond compare because they are the perfect man and woman (so it would seem) with no real flaws, except quickness to violence and occasional rash decision-making, both of which are still pretty attractive attributes. It seems that this short book was made the same way a sitcom would be made today—by which I mean it serves no real purpose but to entertain. No big ideas get thrown around, no morals are questions, and everything is pretty black and white. It’s just a book about two nearly superhuman characters messing around in a dangerous town and fighting off monsters and men alike with almost reckless abandon.

All in all, it certainly knows how to be entertaining. I completely understand the necessity for such literature. I also noticed that just about everything I’d consider cliché in today’s writing is a constant presence in Conan the Warrior: Women who move with the quickness of a cat and men who have bulging muscles just about everywhere. It’s one giant mixing pot of the things that gave birth to today’s genre literature.

Another thing I noticed was that Howard gives incredible details to little things like belts and clothes. He pays very close attention to how the clothes fall on the person wearing them—especially if the form underneath is still discernable through the clothes. This appears to be exactly the thing that many people would want to read about because such beautiful people simply don’t exist in real life and being able to get such an accurate description of what one looks like is just as good as seeing a celebrity or a 3d model of an incredibly attractive hero rendered on screen—and thousands of people pay to see that every day. Perhaps I'm over-simplifying it, but this is just how it seems to me.