Slicing into "Hero Kai."
To offer an understatement, there's a lot going on here.
To start, though, I want to take a broad swipe at theme. My impression is, as the introduction says, this is a SF story with fantasy underpinnings. (Or to get smart about the ending, its SF declaring war on fantasy.)
It is, like a good SF story, about the world being pinned into a change and forced to adapt. The Neighbors and the folks of Kai's land are weak because they are dependent on magic to solve their problems with a few chants and a whiff of spit. Even Kai.
But Kai's ultimate "heroism" is turning off the magic, the gods and the easy ways of the world into something more real and tough and agnostic.
And then he died horribly.
Thoughts?
To start, though, I want to take a broad swipe at theme. My impression is, as the introduction says, this is a SF story with fantasy underpinnings. (Or to get smart about the ending, its SF declaring war on fantasy.)
It is, like a good SF story, about the world being pinned into a change and forced to adapt. The Neighbors and the folks of Kai's land are weak because they are dependent on magic to solve their problems with a few chants and a whiff of spit. Even Kai.
But Kai's ultimate "heroism" is turning off the magic, the gods and the easy ways of the world into something more real and tough and agnostic.
And then he died horribly.
Thoughts?
posted by Nick Beadle at 11:42 PM
2 Comments:
So what exactly does Kai do that makes him a hero? Help his countrymen? Well, in that case almost everyone would be a hero which would mean the word would lose its meaning. Rid the world of magic? It seems first, anyone with determination and intelligence could have accomplished the same thing so I don't see how this action makes him special, and second, taking away magic was right to him but that doesn't necessarily mean it was actually a good thing from an objective point of view. So why is he Hero Kai?
Maybe he is in the sense that he did something brave and big and relatively selfless, not that he did anything particularly beneficial or praiseworthy.
He was a bit of sell-out, to say the least.
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