Taskmaster The Podcast - The Black Company

Episode Date: October 9, 2022

*CONTENT WARNING* There are a few mentions of rape and sexual assault in this episode, one including a minor. Please be aware of this if it's upsetting to you. It's very generalized with no specific details, but is mentioned.Dark Fantasy Month begins with a dive into The Black Company by Glen Cook. A group of morally questionable mercenaries get hired by the epitome of evil, giving us a chance to talk about the relativity of evil, some dynamics of sex & gender, and why you shouldn't write fanfic about murderous overlords.patreon.com/swordsandsocialism Email: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodDarius: @Himbo_AnarchistKetho: @StupidPuma69 patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

🎵 Bro. Are you fucking real, man? Come on. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Sword, Sorcery, and Socialism, a podcast about the politics and themes hiding in our genre of fiction. As always, I'm Darius and with me is my co-host, Ketho. How's it going? Howdy. And this is the beginning of Spooky Month.

And for the beginning of Spooktober, we are doing dark fantasy this month. And as such, we started with a classic of the dark fantasy genre. We started with The Black Company by Glenn Cook. Yeah, Glenn Cook. This is a book that I would say a few years ago, therefore years ago, I'd never heard of, I'll be honest with you. I was introduced to it through the work of D&D content creator I followed in Matt Colville, who we've probably referenced on the show before. Matt Colville, in one of his D&D live plays, talked about the fact that the black company was a big influence on his world building.

building and he had mentioned that he really loved it growing up but that you know he was worried that these days it might be a little out of out of date i think might have been the phrase colville used i don't know if you remember uh not not specifically i i know that he had um he mentioned it specifically it wasn't even from the book that we read it was like a different thing about some downtime activity someone had done that accidentally released a bunch of like undead lich beings that were all trying to keep an even worse evil being asleep, which I assume to be something to do with the dominator. Yeah.

Which I assume, but then also if for those of you, if you want to look it up there from in 2019, Matt Colville ran a live play DVD called The Chain of Acheron. If you've read The Black Company, then you watch The Chain of Acheron, you're like, oh, okay, he just lifted the world building. This is just The Black Company. Which, I want to make clear, is cool and good you should do that yes he said in one of his campaign diaries steal the stuff you like from other works and just put it in your

own campaign it's dnd you can't be copyrighted it's fine one of one of my favorite quotes of his is um you know you're you're only yeah you're only as original as as the thing that you're stealing from is obscure. Yeah. So like if you base something off, you know, like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, everyone knows what you're ripping off. If you rip off, you know, a 1984 dark fantasy novel that by an author that's largely been passed up in time, people aren't gonna know what you're talking about until now now we know now we know and then everyone online was like this is just a black company yes even even as far as going with like the uh the annals of the black company going into like having yeah having the chain of akron have annals calling having like the captain and the lieutenant

who just go by those titles except they die almost instantly well just the captain the captain yeah the captain can die in like the first 10 minutes so that's not even a spoiler for the chain of akron it has a yeah hot open everybody hot open hottest of opens so he absolutely decimates that party in like like 30 seconds uh uh god so everyone should watch Matt Colville's YouTube videos. They're very good. If you want to, if honestly, if you're into D&D, or honestly, if you just want to be a writer, you should like listen to him talk about world building.

Yeah, he has plenty of good world building. World building stuff. And world building in a practical sense too, not just world building from like, ooh, what makes good lore? But it's like why world building is good for your actual like plot. how much of it you actually need to make your plot work you know not all this need to be robert jordan um or tolkien yeah or tolkien um so

but the black company by glenn cook released in 1984 i, to get off the bat, I was a little worried based on comments, you know, Colville had said, and I'd seen online, that I would read this and it would probably, that it might be like offensive in certain ways due to it being referred to as being somewhat like outdated, you know, with outdated language, that sort of thing. So I was worried that I was going to read this and there was going to be like, like i don't know a bunch of slurs or something like that there were a couple yeah um i guess does he actually drop the hard f at any point or is he just does he just um in the does he just call someone a poof because look okay he says he says uh faggotry he does say faggotry that's true so sorry but so does the but so does the original so does uh fallout 2 so yeah so there is one

there's there's there's one hard up and he does uh in in some banter between soldiers one of them refers to another one as a poof which while technically a slur i don't i'm not gonna get myself offended about that immediately after that uh it's like it's it it's very much i don't know um i feel like people would have had to experience this to understand it but like um it's not necessarily a good thing that that's just boys being boys. But from the perspective of the writer here who was in the military and who's writing a story about a military company, it is just really boys being boys. It literally is just,

it really just, just soldiers making fun of each other. And, but like not in like a serious way. It's just like, ah, these, these two characters,

it's goblin in one eye and they spend the entire book just like fucking with each other forever yeah so again not um not like condoning that sort of thing but no but it's also it comes from an understandable place for the author yeah and also i'm just saying that fundamentally it's not one that i'm going to get up in arms about so So again, I was worried that this book would be really sort of anachronistic or something like that and that reading it might be kind of rough. And I'm going to be honest with you guys, this book was way better than I thought it was going to be. Oh yeah. Like basically every level. level yeah even even down to like um honestly it it takes a little bit i think to get the aesthetic because there are his his writing moves very quickly and um like it never it doesn't linger a lot in scenes it tends to jump very quickly from scene to scene,

which means sometimes you don't have as much time as you'd like to like get a feel for the spot. And sometimes his descriptions, I mean, they're good. They're good descriptions, but they're really snappy and really quick. So in some instances you kind of like don't get a clear picture but if you'd like take a second to reread it and think about it the aesthetic is actually really cool and then you like i would look up um some people have done some crazy good fan art for this um especially for the 10 i don't even know if that's fan art that we keep seeing because some of it might actually be of the 10.

We'll talk about the 10 in a minute. We'll get to that. Yeah. But like some of the aesthetics for the 10 are really, really cool. Just from a dark fantasy perspective. Side note, Glenn Cook still alive.

I think he's still writing. The man has written like eight jillion books yeah uh he was he's only he's 78 so he's still alive gotta go champ anyway yeah he doesn't linger on scenes there's not a whole lot of like he's not wordy at all like oh no some of a lot of his sentences are borderline incomplete on yeah he's like this is it this is enough words my thought is done now i'm putting a period on it and we're moving on well it's it this is this this book is is it it's in i mean a lot of a lot of literary conversation talks about the like authors having an invented narrator that then narrates the narrator of the story and this is kind of what's happening here where it's more

obvious than most because the person who's talking it's in first person yeah and this it's what i think i think the word i would i was using for i was using was the frame narrative the frame narrative is that you are reading the annals written by the company doctor named Kroger. The company doctor and analyst. Yes, he's the company doctor, but also being one of the more lettered people in the company. It is his, like inside the story, his job is recording the actions of the company in as much detail as possible.

So future generations of the company can look back and see what the company did in the past. And he also occasionally brings out the old books to read them to other people. It's part of his job. Yeah, they read old stories to the current company. It's very much a sense of like keeping the tradition of the black company alive, keeping, you know, their like ethos alive. So they record everything. Remind them of what it means to be part of the black company. Yeah. Also, I mean, part of their whole mythos is that they are the last free company

of what I assume used to be many at one point in time, because they say that they are the last um and so you get this frame narrative that's pretty easy to understand where you are seeing everything from croaker's perspective and only through croaker's perspective um which even though person focused yeah first person limited um and it is. That obviously adds to the story, because there are things that he just doesn't know, because the other thing you have to understand about his narrator is that Croker is just a guy. He's just a dude. I feel like it's like he's not even one of the more like talented members of the group. The most talent he has is patching people

medicine like he's a good doctor from what you gather but that's about it he he has a slight flair for public speaking oh yeah about to say he's he can put on a small performance um when reading to the group um and he literally talks about like, he almost read himself to tears in that bit. Well, he says he lets it sort of get into him and other guys cry. Oh yeah. But so, but as compared to a lot of other epic fantasy,

because this does have shades of epic fantasy along with the darkness. Hold on. Hold on. Croaker's just a nerd. I got it. He's just, he's just some fucking nerd. He's just a nerd i got it he's just he's just some fucking nerd he's just a dweeb like especially compared to a lot of the other company like he's a soldier

like the rest of them but he does less fighting the rest of them because his main job is being a doctor like he can shoot a bow he can use a sword but he tries not to most of the time sometimes he gets a little carried away and he's like it's my turn on the front line it's for the duty of the company and the captain's like captain is like you dumbass you're the only one who knows how to heal anyone and then you know raven shows up and he constantly ends up getting into situations where he almost dies because he has to go with raven yeah so to finish off, the frame narrative is our main character, yes, his name is Croker. Where that comes from, no fucking idea.

About to say they picked their names, but he didn't explain why he picked that. Yes, everyone in the company has a name that is either a physical description or a one-word name. So you could be One-Eye, and that name explains itself. Honestly, Goblin's name fits him just for the way he behaves he is a little he is a little fucking god and silent of course is the

character who has for some reason taken a vow of silence and nobody knows why um um it's actually really funny how they handle him at certain points i love him i think he's a great character because like just with the minute um like all of his character has to come from his actions and not from any like anything he says and um one of my favorite bits is after raven and croaker find those old documents that Whisper uncovered. And he's like, oh, should I tell somebody? And he's like, listen, I'll tell the one guy who's never going to tell nobody and ask what he has to say.

And it goes and and silence is one of their is one of their mages. So he like puts up a thing that makes it quiet outside of their space. He puts them in a little zone of silence. And he like yeah man i'll listen to what you gotta say i listen what you gotta say and he takes his advice well i think the thing about the thing about silent is that like i think a lot of people feel that way about him that he's smart and you can trust him as like a sounding board because he'll never narc on you. He can't. He can't. He's never going to. Well, actually, he could, which you learn later, but he won't.

Oh, yeah. So, but no, so you've got like silent. You also have like every character's monosyllabic is mononamed. Has a mononym. That's the word I was looking for. Except, I guess the lady still counts as a mononym.

I guess, because she's just... Sometimes you I guess the lady still counts as a mononym. I guess. Sometimes they just call her lady. The lady or lady. It's Elmo, the captain, goblin, whatever. That also carries through the rest of his world building. Every single city is just a single word. Every place name, except for the windy country is yeah it's it's like opal elm roses or uh lord's wist dye wine jane horse spit tanner like it's just yeah it's it's endless

yeah everything is like every place has a single name. Barbara. Barbara. So the basic outline of the plot is that the black company, when we meet them, are currently employed by the ruler of the town of Barrel. Barrel, as in the gem, not the item. But like they're losing control of the city, a bunch of shit's going down and they are essentially offered a contract with this character called soul catcher, who is one of the taken. The taken are these uber powerful wizards, mages that serve a character known as the lady who you are told off the bat

is evil like the lady and the northern empire and the taken are evil oh yeah croaker as soon as he hears her name he remembers because he's the only one that actually ever read history yeah i mean he that's his whole job so he knows who the lady is the lady is a resurrected super powerful evil empress yeah i mean well the thing is is is i think it's pretty explicitly stated that she's just a powerful sorcerer like she's just a really powerful wizard and otherwise she's just human. I mean, she's powerful enough that like the taken,

she doesn't like age or die. Oh yeah. I mean, it's like, it's the same thing, but the taken are the same way. The taken are, I think are just extremely powerful.

She was, she was a powerful wizard. She was a powerful wizard. And then she got more power simply by being associated with her former husband the dominator who also is just an extremely powerful wizard yeah this guy's this guy's character's name is just the dominator yeah you know what he does according to it's on the tin i don't think it comes up in this book, but according to my research, push my glasses up, schnarf, schnarf. According to my research, he obliterated his true name from everything. So he's just the Don of Fear.

Oh, yeah. That's just a side note. In this world, sort of like Earthsea and some other worlds, if you know somebody's true name, you have power over them. You can incapacitate their magic and shit if you have people's true names names which is another reason why the people in the company all have fake names especially their wizards especially the wizards um of whom they have like four and then they start with four then there's three because one of them died tom tom dies pretty early on um also all the wizards are like over a hundred years old specifically i, I think it's like goblin. They talk about the fact that he remembers this battle that happened like 85 years ago.

Oh, I think that was one eye. Was that one eye? Yeah. I was talking about like, uh, the Tarn torn. Yeah. The battle at Torn. So we're a little all over the place right now. Let's, let's focus, let's focus in here.

So they, they, they accept. The thing is they can't leave their current contract with the syndic a barrel because the black company doesn't break its contract it's the whole honor code thing and soul catcher is like yeah but if the syndic would happened to be dead you wouldn't have a contract anymore correct well and the captain's like the the first person to suggest that was croaker to be out you're right croaker, the first person to suggest that was Croker. Yeah, you're right. Croker is the first one to suggest it because the captain also knows that Croker, even early on, is established as being sort of the moral center of the company. Moral center, kind of a traditionalist compared to like the captain.

Yeah, the Croker is a traditionalist for what the company stands for. He's also kind of the moral center of the company. So the captain's like, look, I want to get the fuck out of here. Croker, is there a thing you would accept to let us get out of this contract? And Croker's like, I guess if the syndic was dead and soul catcher's like, I can arrange

that. I can maybe make that happen. We meet this evil monster called the Forvalaca, which is like a weird were-jaguar that's also a vampire. That's pretty cool. Which is a pretty cool concept. It's a were-jaguar that's a vampire that is essentially indestructible.

Like, this thing cannot be killed. For the most part. It'll come back later. Anyway, the syndic dies. They take this contract with Soulcatcher. Then over time, I'm going to condense the lore because you get it across the book. You learn that there's these powerful mages

called the Taken who serve the Ten and they serve the Lady. Now, the Taken are basically former opponents of the Dominator, because the Dominator's main thing, as it says in the name, was defeating powerful opponents and then essentially breaking them, killing them and resurrecting them as loyal servants. so these 10 taken who were reawakened from their underground tombs serve the lady now because just the lady came back not the dominator you find out later it's because the lady betrayed the dominator and left him locked under there because she hates him um she hates they all just hate each other like that's y'all hate each other the fundamental thing of all these people who are empowered they all just fucking hate each other which i think we can definitely get into among this like the sort of the psychology of the kind of people that would be seeking these positions of authority is that they all inherently distrust each other and so

they're all seeking to backstab each other all the time uh so you have the 10 who were taken. They all have really, uh, either descriptive or either names that are descriptive of what they do or names that are just cool. Cause they sound cool. Uh, I'm going to read them out to you guys just cause I enjoy these names. So you have the 10 who were taken, although it's just known as the taken because cook has to make everything one word. You have soul catcher, which has to make everything one word. You have soul catcher, which has been condensed to one word.

Um, limper howler, shape shifter, storm bringer, one word hang demand, technically two words. Good job. Cook,

um, bone nasher, night crawler, moon biter, and faceless man. So jinkies Jinkies so these are these powerful

shout out for my boy Bone Nasher Bone Nasher the Himbo King of the Taken the Himbo Cannibal King Himbo Cannibal King of the Taken who says like two words he says like two words immediately almost kills a four of a locker with his teeth and his bare hands.

And then, and then dies in a fight with storm green in a fight with storm bringer. Yeah. Um, that's all you get. He's there for like a page and a half. Yeah. You find out how yoked he is and that he dies.

So, um, uh, the taken, they are essentially the generals of the lady's army. The lady is fighting a rebellion. The lady is seeking to reestablish the empire her husband used to hold in the north. And they are fighting a war against rebels who are seeking to overthrow the lady.

It is given to you pretty much straight up. As the black company sign a contract to work for soul catcher and ergo work for the lady that the lady is evil and the rebels are probably good for fighting the lady. So you're sort of given off the bat that our protagonist and his homies are fighting for the bad guy like you just are they're fighting it they're they're fighting for the empire like yeah and it's like they realize that like they you're given this almost immediately as soon as they sign the contract and then soul catcher like hands out her

little pin her insignia to all of them and broker looks down and sees what the symbol is and he's like oh my god you're one of the taken shit he um like yeah he's like oh i don't know who the soul catcher is signs signs the contract sees the pin and goes, oh, fuck. I just literally signed a contract with the devil. Yeah, essentially. And I think an interesting thing to touch on here would be the way soul catcher is presented being, I mean, interesting as it is, and then can kind of get into some of the more, shall we say gender dynamics? Yeah. Well, do you want to get into that or do you just, yeah, let's just do that first. Cause again, I forget, I keep wanting to do plot recaps and I

forget that that's just not a efficient thing for us to be doing. Also, you just should have read the book in order to listen to these episodes i mean they're not going to make much sense if you haven't yeah and by the way everyone we are we are just covering the first book even though the black the chronicles of the black company is technically packaged together as a three book set oh it's the black company and then the shadow lingers and white rose. I just, yeah,

I just know that when I went to get this book from my library, the first thing that came up was chronicles of the black company, which forces all three books into one package. Yeah. So we only read the black company. So one of the, the taken that you interact with the most is the soul catcher now you will hear us refer to the soul catcher as she because that is that is a reveal you get at the very end of the story when the lady and croaker kill soul catcher well croaker kills soul catcher with an arrow and then by chopping her fucking head off.

Whoopsies. Whoopsies. And he finds out like two pages before he does it. Yeah. Cause he finds out. Yeah. So Croker doesn't know the gender of soul catcher until like, yeah,

two pages before he kills her because the lady says, calls her a bitch. Yeah. That's essentially the whole thing. And then says something like, I knew she had a plan for this. And Croker's like, she? But Soulcatcher's a super interesting character. Because the entire time you know her, she's wearing a face mask and completely clad in black leather as to be entirely ungenderable.

Yeah. Initially when, when Croker first meets, uh, soul catcher him. Yeah. He, well,

they call soul catcher him throughout 85% of the book. And, but like when they first meet, he's like, is this a child? this a boy yeah is this a man is this a woman he does he does say off the bat that the body is petite and like slim and small for such a powerful like general or warlord and so you get that warning you do get that right off the bat uh and every time it doesn't help that every time she's that every time she speaks, she speaks with a different voice.

Her thing is that. As she's speaking, her voice will change. Like. Tenor, timbre, pitch to anything. It could be a deep, resonating male voice, a high effeminate voice, undefinable ones in between. She covers the whole range. And because you never ever see what she looks like and the voice changes constantly,

you know, the patriarchy dictates that being a general, they refer to Soulcatcher as him throughout 90% of the book. Yeah, and they know that there are a couple women in the Taken, but they don't know who's who. So they're just like, we're just calling them all him. They don't know who's who. So they're just like, we're just call them all him. Yeah, they literally say that because all the taken look like shit or are completely covered up in bandages because they did spend a lot of time buried in the ground. And also being horrendously tortured and then resurrected back to life. Yeah. So I assume what happened to the hanged man?

Yes. So they all look like absolute shit. So but they literally say, since we don't know which ones are girls we just call them all him which we're gonna call that an l on the uh the on the inclusivity scale whoopsies i mean yeah hey listen if even like 10 years before this if even leguin wasn't getting that right yeah to be fair, Le Guin didn't get that right either. So, um, but soul catcher is super interesting because soul catcher is displayed specifically as being like, I want, I want to say non-gendered, but also just un-genderable like gender fluid because could masculine voice,

feminine voice, masculine behavior, feminine behavior. It's very, very up in the air the whole time. And honestly, I felt like it was kind of a letdown at the end to be like, oh, this is definitely a chick. Yeah. And it's like it turns out like primarily the reason that she covers up everything and hides everything is because she's. Identical. Essentially identical to the lady. Because they're like really sisters.

So she looks just like the lady. So she's covered up so people don't look at her and be like, ah, that's the lady's sister. It is just a little bit disappointing. We could have had an interesting

non-binary gender fluid evil wizard. Yeah, it would have been it would have been pretty interesting if he had like cut her helmet off, like just cut her head off and then never looked under the helmet. Yeah, but it's important, but for the story, he has to know that it's a lady's sister. Cause that's one of the turning points that actually eventually makes him decide to hate the lady. So yeah, because our boy, our sweet, sweet boy croaker,

despite being sort of the moral center, kind of for the black company. I mean, moral center is a loose term guys. They're a very morally questionable company. He is often though, the one that sort of steps in to be like, Hey guys, chill out whenever they're getting a little off the handle. Develops this weird fantasy about the lady before he ever meets her.

Like he literally starts writing fanfic about her. He's on AO3. He's writing fanfic about the lady and what the lady's life was like, what she's like now, what she looks like. The other guys in the company know and read it. They like, they like read his fanfic about the most evil person.

Any of them have ever heard of. And Croker gets like weirdly sexually excited about a lady. He's never met or seen. And who he knows is an evil empress. And because of this, she hears about it and takes an interest in him. So in every fulfilling the dream of every fanfic author and like and Twitter and Twitter reply guy, she hears that he's right, that he's obsessed with her and she's like huh i'm gonna check this guy out it's all and for a long time it's ambiguous as to why she's like entertaining his fantasies

and like humoring him you find out later it's because she kind of needs him for a couple things and also because she just wants her story written down which i thought was pretty interesting oh yeah yeah she brings him up at one point just to watch her do something that's actually one of the funniest moments in the book because they walk off and he's like what do i do with this horse because they like give him a horse so he can ride up there with them and then they leave him behind with the horse and he's like okay i don't know what do i do with this horse it just cuts to black yeah it just goes to the next scene um so she gets obsessed with him and he like then of course over the series of meeting with her and dealing with her eventually is like maybe she is because for a little while there he

kind of treads on the maybe she's not as bad as everyone says she is he never says that explicitly yeah and he but he but constantly berates himself where he's like i'm i really shouldn't be acting like a horny 15 year old and then like the next one he's like he's like i really need to let go of this weird uh sexual fixation um but he doesn't and then the only thing that he only does once he watch once he helps the lady murder her own sister. And she's like, good, I hated that bitch since we were 14. And he's like, that's real evil of you, evil empress. It is.

It is. It is a tiny bit jarring just because, you know, we know and he knows at this point that like the vast majority of everything that has happened all the people that have died all of these big rebel everything has just been an effort by the it's all like the machinations of the lady trying to bring all these people out of the open so she can get rid of all of them and essentially start over from a clean slate like the final battle involves the death of over a quarter of a million men because there's about a quarter million in the rebel army, let alone the 20,000 in the ladies army. Not to mention just the probably over a million people who have died in the war up to this point. by the lady in an effort to essentially bring every powerful person together to kill them all.

So she can stand uncontested on in her empire. And this whole time Croker's like, yeah, but I'm really horny about her until the, until she kills her sister. And he's like, ah, that's a bridge too far.

And you're like my guy. Yeah. Look, we've all made mistakes out of horniness okay we've all been there i don't know if we've made you know 250 million 250 000 people i've never watched a quarter of a million men die and kind of brushed it off but i'm also what can anyone say you know it's that it's that immortal it's it's that you know immortal poo tang yeah which i want to be clear though the lady herself never actually does anything overtly sexual oh no never

like never hmm this is you might as well call her asexual because she's just like, like the, the, the most she does is she'll like, like touch his arm with her, with her fingers, like just lightly touch him. And Croker gets weak, like a 15, again, like a 15 year old whose girlfriend like touches dick for the first time. Yeah.

It's literally, it's pretty much literally what he says where it's like, um, it's like the first, uh, any kind of sexual contact he's ever had, even though she's just touching his arm. Yeah. So it's it's this is entirely on our boy. He's down bad. He is. He is down bad because, well, I mean, he had a lady he pretty liked pretty well at the start of the book, but he had to leave her behind in Beryl. Yeah, and freaking like Elmo and One Eye were like, oh, you'll forget about her in like a week.

And he kind of did because a week after that, he was already straight. Maybe like a month after that, he was writing fantasies about the lady. So top tip to all you guys out there if you find yourself in the service of some sort of genocidal like maniac dictator maybe don't write a horny fanfic about yeah it's like don't don't write horny fanfic about uh a fascist dictator don't be horny for fascists. Don't. Don't be horny for fascists. Don't be horny for authoritarians, generally. So, don't be horny for them. Maybe stop using that fake picture

of young Stalin. That's exactly what I was thinking. That's not, number one, that's not him. Him. Number two, that's fucking weird. Stop it. Also, stop showing me pictures of castro i don't give a shit stop it um you all sound like croaker to me and then croaker spends a grand total of like 10 minutes around the lady and at the end of it he's like this bitch is evil well he meets her a couple times spends a little while like a few hours with her goes on like a journey with her to murder her sister and he's like i have been horny for the most evil the sorry the second most

evil person in all of existence yeah and that is a great leeway a great segue because even though we've been talking about sort of this general stuff i forgot the one other thing we had to touch on well we will go with this is the gender dynamic between the lady and the Dominator. Because these tie together. So you're segwaying into talking about probably. Sorry, I interrupted you. But the lesser of two. The lesser of two evils, right?

Yeah. But, you know, we got to discuss who the Dominator is really first and what is going on. So the Dominator is the original. Let's let's keep it the D&D terms, the BBEG. This is the big bad evil guy, is the Dominator. He was the original powerful wizard that learned how to turn people into Taken. To learn how to essentially kill them, break their souls, and bring them back under his service. The lady was, was slash is his wife.

Who is very, very powerful in her own right, but not as powerful as the Dominator. Back in the day, this special lady called the White Rose popped up and was basically immune to their magic. She led a rebellion. She beat them all and imprisoned them in the earth. Some of them got resurrected, but not the Dominator. At least you think not the Dominator. You later find out that they did try to resurrect the Dominator and the lady said, fuck that shit. Leave my husband in the ground. I want to be in charge.

Because he's a piece of shit. Because he's a real piece of shit. And to her view view worse than her and also i think kind of by ascent of basically everyone else the dominator was a more evil person than the lady maybe just maybe just because the lady's hot i don't know yeah it's hard to tell so on the one hand you've got these two things going on there's this lesser evilism which we're going to talk a lot about but i want to finish off the discussion of gender because you learn eventually this book actually does have quite a bit of like politicking

and other stuff in it uh that there's like essentially a civil war going on between the taken where the female taken have been, uh, sort of turned against the lady by the dominator who is essentially talking to them from his tomb. And he's like convinced the female taken to try and overthrow the lady to release him. The male taken are fighting this because the male taken are loyal to the lady.

And that basically explains the gender politics of this book. Yeah, it's almost like, even in the name The Dominator, if that isn't like some, you know, Moloch Ball nonsense, it's almost like their control is borderline psychosexual. Yes. Where the male taken and to a lesser extent, someone like Croker. Are like, yeah, have this psychosexual attachment to the lady. They will not betray her. And I feel like it's probably the same way with the dominator

and the female take and the female taken um except except for soul catcher who tried to double cross everyone yeah she was like i'm gonna pretend to be on this one side and this one side which gives credence to my theory that soul catcherers actually like gender fluid or non-binary or something, because soul catcher was the only one who was able to avoid the dominators influence and the ladies influence. So. Ace, ace soul catcher. You can't make me horny either way. Shut the fuck up. She's like, get out of here. I cannot be dominated.

Not into that life. Yeah. But it is, again, like you said, this sort of weird sexual breakdown between who's in charge of what. And I think some of it also, I don't know, some of it also kind of plays into the weird. This is a pretty common trope from 70s and 80s pulp fantasy. The sort of like weird, like almost BDSM-y. A lot of people in leather. A lot of people in leather.

It makes me think of the drow, which has its own bucket of problems going on. Its own bucket of problems that WotC still has not i don't think adequately still not trying to address um um yeah like you're right a lot of the sort of pulpy stuff from the 70s and 80s had very sexual i don't even know if i want to call them undertones overtones um and it's you know, women in leather harnesses and whips. Yeah. And that's kind of the vibe that the name The Dominator gives me. And the effect that the lady has on people. Because the lady, to be fair, the lady is just described as being just hella hot.

That's, yeah, that's pretty much it. Hella hot. That's, yeah. That's pretty much it. Hella hot. And ice cold. Oh, yeah. Personality-wise. Personality-wise, completely, like, frigid. Well, except for when she specifically decides to turn it on to, like, make Croker do things.

specifically decides to turn it on to like make croaker do things um so you have this weird gender dynamic going on between like the taken and this is just mostly just amongst the bad guys you don't really see this among your sort of run-of-the-mill characters we see all the time besides croaker um i won't say though that like the gender politics of this book are great because you still have to you still be being a dark fantasy book and this being a soldiering company you still get references to what i want to call the uh the sort of there was a battle we took a city let's do a little bit of rape and pillage yeah now we never see and it's and it's almost explicitly stated not that we see it but it's almost explicitly stated that croaker himself does leaves that stuff out on purpose yes croaker

specifically does not put it in the annals if it happens because he finds it distasteful personally and and he writes it down and raven comments like hey you left some stuff out here like there's some bad shit going on and he's like listen i'm writing i'm writing stories my guy i'm writing what i see and what i think needs to be written down um even i will say we never see any of our like sort of characters that we're supposed to identify with do anything directly. Yeah. In fact, we see one of them. Stop. Stop it from that,

which we'll talk about in a little bit. Again, I think there's one time it's referenced that sort of might be happening after they take one of the towns and they're burning and looting and stuff. It's just sort of like, oh, you know, but they do kind of get,

he gives the sort of hand wave, you know, soldiers got to blow off some steam somehow, which again, bad, but I will say though, I don't know if that's a defense Glenn Cook is making, or if that is an excuse, the characters within the story are giving for their own bad behavior. Now you could argue whether that matters or not. And that's a worthwhile argument to have. Does it matter if the author's condoning it or his characters simply are, you know?

And again, I think part of this does come from the fact that he was in the military. Yep. So, I mean, fact that he was in the military yep so i mean part of it is almost him once again addressing simply reality as it stands he does know what soldiers on shore leave look like because he was in the navy so it's like is he condoning it or his character's he condoning it or his characters really condoning it? Or is he just expressing how he sees the world as it stands? And I lean towards that second thing, because now we're going to get into what is the main moral question of this story that I actually didn't expect going into a pulp novel about swords and guts and stuff is essentially is lesser evilism a thing?

And can someone actually be good? And I want to this would be some of our first quotes. Oh, first quotes of the day. Oh my goodness. One of the first times it gets brought up is explicitly by the lady herself. And a lot of this happens, bam, bam, bam, right at the end. And I think.

It is sort of backloaded. A lot of the moral questions are kind of back into the second half and particularly the last third of the book. Not to say the rest of the book isn't pretty good because the rest of the book is still pretty good but the um the moral meat happens at the end when because i think at the time um this is the most morally questioning period for croaker whose position we are looking at this from um the rest of what they're doing is just like it's kind of business as usual,

even if it's strange business. It's like they're still just doing what they're supposed to do. They're doing soldier shit. They're doing soldier stuff. Hold this point, take that fort, blah, blah, blah. Take that fort, trick a guy into being, you know, and trick an entire like city

into trying to hunt down a single dude but she says essentially she admits that she knows that the majority of the black company think that they're serving evil and she says to him evil is relative analyst you can't hang a sign on it you can't touch it or taste it or cut it with a sword evil depends on where you are standing pointing your uh indicting finger where you stand now because of your oath is opposite the dominator for you he is where your evil lies um she paced a moment perhaps anticipating a response i made none she had encapsulated my own philosophy so the black company, pretty much all of them admit to themselves that the lady is evil and that they work for her. Now, they're not they don't like it, but they don't like it enough to break their oath or their vow or their contract specifically. They're like, she kind of sucks.

But she does have it. we do have a contract so we gotta do it anyway we gotta do it anyways um it is kind of stated i think a little bit later that the only people who knew anything about the fact that the dominator was involved with any of this at all was to my knowledge just croaker in terms of the black company black company it's like other than that it was the croaker and the lady it was croaker and the lady and and the taken well even the taken might not have known for sure why they were doing it the taken new i think soul catcher knew yes so that's that's i think that's what he mentions those are the only three people who really knew that the dominator was involved in all this.

So the lady, what, what the black company is doing is they're fighting for the lady in this war against the rebels. The rebels are ostensibly fighting to overthrow the lady and free the North from her Imperium, which Croker admits that morally the rebels are in the right. Now he says that's actually pretty early on that he

believes that morally the rebels are correct in their overall goal but he then follows that up immediately by saying that their tactics and behavior are just as bad as the armies of the lady yeah he points out that they're hypocrites that they do the same sort of horrendous shit to their enemies that the evil people do and um he he still believes that they're more morally correct um in what they're attempting to do than what the lady is but um we find out a little bit later that essentially the leadership of the rebels are controlled by the dominator um they don't know they are but they are yeah um well some of them it says like are intentionally trying to release him i thought um maybe i think some of some of the high inner circle were yeah they were they were working to overthrow the lady so that they could gain power instead of her um whereas there were still huge swaths of just the regular foot soldiers who were fighting against the lady

because they thought she was evil and they wanted to free north i'd say 99 of the rebel force yeah um and a lot of them believed in you know this reincarnation of the white rose and um you know had a lot of hope that the lady could be defeated we never actually see the rebel forces directly doing a lot of the raping and pillaging, but we're told that they do. And so even at this, even at the most base level conflict, which is the lady versus the rebel, which in true Glenn Cook fashion, he just calls the rebel because you need to get everything down to like one

word. He doesn't even say the rebels. It just says the rebel. All of them are doing. And I think this is born of his experience of in the military and knowing how military conflicts often go, that even the side that may be morally correct in their war often participates in heinous shit during the war, raising villages, killing innocent civilians, doing rape and sexual assault, all sorts of terrible things that all basically all militaries throughout history have done. Yeah, pretty much without exception. Yeah. Sorry, everybody. Whatever your favorite military thing in history, it's they probably did this. They were they were definitely doing this, whichever military it is you you like.

The dynamics of violence lead to some really horrific shit. it is you like. The dynamics of violence lead to some really horrific shit. Yes. And that is one of the main points of this book is that the black company are working for, you know, the big evil lady. Like the rebels are doing the same sort of evil. However, as the lady points out, the Dominator is quote unquote more evil than she is. And as she says to Croker, you believe you're working for evil, but evil is simply relative to your position. they should understand that, that defeating the dominator,

AKA destroying the rebels is actually the more moral position to take. Um, yeah. I mean, it's, it's about like the rationalization necessary to be in a position like this. It's like people make these sorts of rationalizations all the time to justify what they see as inescapably bad things that they have to do

um and and it's like he even admits that that the lady is especially towards the end fundamentally one of the most evil people who ever has ever existed. And, um, yeah, I think he actually says she is either, if not the most, if she is not. Oh yeah.

I've got it. I've got it right here. Yeah. Yeah. Read the quote, read the quote. It says, um,

I did not believe in evil as an active force only as a matter of viewpoint. Yet I had seen enough to make me question my philosophy. If the lady were not evil incarnate, then she was as close as made no difference. So philosophy. If the lady were not evil incarnate. Then she was as close. As made no difference. So Croker. And the lady. Croker at the beginning.

And the lady. Are relativist. Evil is not a thing. Like she said. You can't cut it. You can't touch it. Evil is. Not real. Evil is just the the thing that you're opposed to but then croaker sees enough that by the end of the story he's like maybe i was wrong maybe some things are

ontologically evil yeah he's like i think the lady might be ontologically evil. Despite me not believing in evil as a concept, I think I might actually believe in evil as a concept now. Just because of you. You crazy bitch. Because of the lady specifically. Which, fair. She's pretty fucked up. Well, Croker does a lot of his philosophizing

right at the very end yeah it all kind of compounds itself it all comes right together and he even kind of looks back at what the lady had done and asks himself if it's even worth it for whatever she had done um because like what did she really accomplished? You know, he's looking, it's like the destruction of the rebel. Um,

but, uh, they had become the instrument of her husband and even greater evil. It had been, he defeated here. If only he, she, and I knew that the greater wickedness had been forestalled.

Moreover, the rebel ideal had passed through a cleansing, tempering flame. And he's like a generation hence. And then he goes into kind of his like, like spiritual understanding of the world. That falls again into that relativism, a lack of objective good.

But it's like, I'm not religious. i cannot conceive of gods who would give a damn about humanity's frothy carryings on i mean logically beings of that order just wouldn't but maybe there is a force for greater good created by our unconscious minds conjoined that becomes an independent power greater than the sum of its parts maybe being a mind thing it is not time bound maybe you can see everywhere and everyone and move pawns so that what seems to be today's victory becomes a cornerstone of tomorrow's defeat um and he's looking at and he's like he's like the rebel ideal has passed through a a tempering flame here and he's like is this really a victory like what did you gain from this

from all this like raucous evil it's like all that's really going to happen is inevitably in the future something is going to come back and is going to end this one way or another the rebels that are left have essentially been through the gauntlet like any that still survive are going to be even more committed than they were before and in that same section is where he kind of has a vision of the of the white rose and and it he's kind of right where he's like if the actual white rose does exist and she shows up now. Or in a generation. Or in a generation. You're fucked.

It's like you have just sowed the seeds of your own destruction in a way. Now, I do also think it's partly prophetic and also partly, I think, Croker trying to rationalize what just happened. Yeah, it is. I mean, it's both. It's mostly the latter because he's like there's nothing in this book that would convince you that croaker has any supernatural powers

whatsoever um no it's like he's a dude he's just a guy he's a guy but now that he has he himself personally has significantly aided the lady in this endeavor by, you know, killing multiple taken. And the only hope he can personally have for to save his own moral, like conscience, moral conscience is to be like. Like there has to be a corrective force somewhere. Yeah, but because he's not religious and can't conceive of god he has this like maybe through our collective will there can be a for a corrective force for good in the world that works on its own time which even given the sort of like disturbing backdrop of coming up to that conclusion i don't think is a bad conclusion to come to. I don't know.

It's that's it's kind of a positive thing to think of the idea of it might be wishful thinking, but to believe in like the collective will of or at least like the power of people fundamentally working together to overcome something, which is even even in the worst defeat, there can be the seeds of eventual victory. where he's kind of both saying that the victory will sow the seeds of defeat. And it's kind of, he's saying that, but it's almost inverted. Like, you know he wants the opposite to happen. You know he wants... No, the victory of the lady is sowing the seeds of her eventual defeat, which he is hoping for. Yeah, that's what I mean.

It's like, it like it's like it makes it seem like oh this victory could become our defeat but in reality i mean what he's really saying is that he wants the lady to lose yeah he wants his side to lose now that he knows the lady as fully as just about anyone else who's not that probably more than anyone that's not taken. And yeah. And specifically he wants, um, he wants the new white, he wants the new white rose to arise. Yeah.

It's like, um, I saw plainly what the rebel wanted to destroy that part of the movement, which was true white rose, not puppet to the monster who created this woman and now wanted her destroyed so it could bring its own breed of terror back to the world and it's like you know that he is like i i i understand and agree that the rebels should cut her freaking head off he he on the one hand agrees that they needed to stop the rebel army that would have freed the dominator.

But on the other hand, he also wants the rebels to win because the lady also needs to die. And so he's stuck in this place where he's like, I may have helped the lady win this time, but hopefully in the future she won't. Yeah. I mean, he's basically saying, I hope I get my comeuppance at some point that's yeah it's kind of it's kind of sad he's like damn i sure hope

someone beats our asses eventually but you can apply this concept now to the real world. And I think today you can apply it pretty easily. There's a lot of conflicts going on right now, and you can find a lot of takes about the value of supporting one side or another. I have seen just within the past couple of days, a significant amount of debate among, you know, the more,

the, the, the online anarchist community about the value of anarchists siding and fighting with the Ukrainian military against the Russian invasion. I've seen arguments arguments both for and against participation or at least coordination with the ukrainian military now i'm not saying that the russian state is as evil as or sorry that the ukrainian state is as evil as the lady however they have done a lot of atrocious shit right yeah yeah the kind of

like literally using the cover of war to destroy collective bargaining yeah to eradicate labor unions and eradicate labor unions pretty bad also essentially banning all left-wing parties well i mean not all left-wing parties. To be fair, the Communist Party that they banned was just a Russian puppet party. Oh, that's true. Yeah, I forgot about that bit. Again, the rebel was actually a puppet of the dominator. But this argument of the lesser of evils, as someone facing, you know, death, genocide, what have you, morally, how does your conscious handle essentially siding with one oppressor in fighting someone else that's seen as a more evil and more oppressive force?

evil and more oppressive force. Yeah, how much value is there in it if potentially the outcome is only marginally better? And I know that there are lots of people who would argue, argue essentially to make Croker's decision to side with the Ukrainian state against the Russians, or the Russian state, I should say, and then hope that the fight can be taken to the Ukrainian state afterwards.

That's a whole different fight and a whole different conflict that you can't actually be guaranteed will happen within your lifetime. that you can't actually be guaranteed will happen within your lifetime. However, not helping the Ukrainian state, not helping the lady, almost guarantees your destruction at the hands of the Dominator. So what do you do? Do you simply not pick a side? Do you run?

Oh my God, why is this always in dark fantasy? witcher yeah the witcher does that too the lesser evilism thing is present there as well yeah um you know and i'm i have my own personal opinions about what i believe the moral choice to be but the question is out there and I have seen people argue both sides. Is this, is this the, is this like walking away from Omalas? But like walking away from a shitty place because potentially it could get even shittier.

Actually, I wouldn't really compare it to Omalas. It's just that. Is Omalas being invaded? Yeah. actually i wouldn't really compare it to omelas i know it's just the loss being is almost being invaded yeah the decision to not make a decision is more what i'm getting at here it's like no decision do you do it or do you not make the choice at all yeah exactly or does do you do you say that morally your choice is to not side with either one. You know, that's again, there are arguments either way. I know what I would do or what I would argue is the correct choice. But I, I also feel like

this is a touchy enough issue that, uh, you know, actually, if you want to know what I think about it, you can just look at my Twitter account. Um, but this was not, uh, an argument I expected going into this book. I thought this was just going to be some like pulpy, you know, there's a company of guys that slaughter enemies and occasionally do bad things. And suddenly I'm having an existential crisis about the morality of whether you should be supporting the Ukrainian state at this time. You know what I mean?

Like it was a lot more than i expected going into it uh meatier media than i expected yeah a lot meatier than i expected hey um it's just a it just goes to show that there could be a lot of politics hidden in even the most you know pulpy, supposedly nonpolitical books. Yeah, even though I doubt Glenn Cook would argue his book is nonpolitical, but you will see more people argue that fantasy is more nonpolitical than sci-fi or something. Yeah, well, I think the space that Black Company comes from is a, I'll call it, The space that the black company comes from is a, I'll call it not necessarily politically ignorant, but a space of intentional political pretend neutralism. Where not even necessarily the authors, just the audience. I mean, that's kind of large.

Is that not essentially what we talked about last week? Yeah, with Moorcock. With Moorcock, where he said the audience liked to pretend it was apolitical when it never actually is. Yeah, because his argument could essentially boil down to the, you know, if there's one Nazi at a table of. At a table of nine other people, there's Nazis Nazi at a table of – at a table of – With nine other people. Nine other people. There's ten Nazis at the table. But with books.

Yeah, with authors and their audience. Where he was like, if there's freaking one Nazi writing fantasy and everybody loves it, well, I guess everybody who's reading it is a freaking Nazi. he's reading is a freaking nazi um yeah but i mean that idea that this genre this sort of 70s and 80s pulp fantasy uh tries to portray itself as being non-political i agree with morecock is a potentially ignorant way to portray the media because i've just shown this is inherently very political yeah and i think honestly well i guess i say political but it's more if you want to be accurate it's more moral is what it is it's more about your morality than it is your i don't know what more people would consider your quote unquote politics well yeah but i think fundamentally that falls under the the umbrella purview of what we're what we mean when we say

that something is like political sure that it has a world view that it is arguing um or trying to dissect whether or not that person is intentionally doing it. I think, and I think Moorcock got at this last time, but portraying it as any other way can almost be seen as insidiousness, like insidious sneakiness on the part of the people who are writing the more egregiously fashy stuff. To go, oh no, this isn't political at all.

I'm a centrist. And what I'd say is that i don't think this book hides from it i think a decent chunk of the book is just schlocky good fun not necessarily good fun fun is kind of a strong well-written story i've been i i was i liked i would 100 recommend people read this book but say enjoy enjoyable that's a better word than fun because it's bleak it's not it's not fun it's bleak but it's a good book the story is it's a it's a good book that a vast majority of it is just like solid generally just enjoyable pulp fantasy um with interesting and sometimes um meatier philosophy than you'd think and i and i don't necessarily think of it as being particularly bent towards any political persuasion really like i don't i don't think these ideas that are being presented are ones that are unique to any specific worldview these are very

general yeah again it's more of a your moral justification for things and essentially what you can personally handle. Yeah. And I think more so than for the choices you make, I think more so than a lot of fantasy it or moral tales. I don't think it's ever actually telling you an answer. No. Which is something that i think

is really important if you don't want your book to become starship troopers yeah you know if you don't want your book to be a i feel like if you if you want to avoid the possibility of your book being called not necessarily just political but being called fascistic or reactionary a good way to do that is to never actually like is to not present something as being correct just simply pose the question and explore it without divining a specific answer yeah because i don't think that this book says that any of these people are right. I don't think it doesn't say that any of these people are correct. Croker kind of lays out his argument. And but it does not.

But the book doesn't prove him right. No. And the book shows you at least tangentially enough other people's views that it's not it's not all, it's also not saying the croakers view is the only view because you have a couple other people that I wanted to mention here that sort of provide slight counterpoints to croaker. You have, I think sort of the two people who I,

I picked them because they're shown as being friends, but I don't think they actually have the same view of things who are the captain and Raven. being friends but i don't think they actually have the same view of things who are the captain and raven the captain is what i would call sort of like almost like obstructionally what i call like pragmatic yeah hyper pragmatist hyper pragmatist he is going to do whatever is necessary to keep the company functioning and to keep the company winning and alive. I mean, that function makes him a pretty good leader. I'm gonna be honest. He's good at keeping the people of his under his command alive and.

Employed, I guess, like as a unit. guess like as a unit but he then as a rule at least from our perspective does not engage in any of the moral questions now he's and a lot of the people in the black company are in this position at least from croaker's point of view um are morally desensitized to the point of just turning it off. Yeah. A lot of them either joined the company because they were already bad people running from the law or because they have now been with the company so long that they are completely morally desensitized that they could serve just about anybody. And they're literally just,

I don't know. I'm being paid to do it. I'm going to do it. Not my problem. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's,

it's this kind of hyper like intentional moral ignorance where they're like, listen, I know this could be bad or whatever, but I, I not going to think about it. I can't, I don't have the headspace to think about it. They very much have the like, they go and do something.

Now, we only ever see them serving, you know, two masters, the syndic of Beryl and the lady. And in both instances, they're fighting rebels. In both instances, they're fighting rebel forces trying to overthrow the existing power structure. Yeah. Although the Beryl ones are like disgruntled soldiers. It's like a police officer overthrowing people. Well, it's more like the Roman urban cohorts, which he does call them cohorts, being upset with the emperor and trying to install a new emperor because the urban cohorts are upset. upset with the emperor and tried to install a new emperor because the urban cohorts are upset.

But he definitely portrays most of the members of the black company, like say, I mean, the captain is the pinnacle example, but also like Elmo. Most of the people in hard leadership positions. They're, they, if they engage in these moral questions, do it entirely internally. Uh, because when it comes to actually doing the job, they're like, look, I'm just doing what I'm told. The captain is saying, we took a contract. We get an order. We do it. That's it. No more questions. And then the people below him follow his lead. If the captain says, Elmo, I need you to go do a thing. Elmo says, all right.

That's it. It's this very, like, we, if they give me the impression of like, if they participated in something truly horrendous, they'd have like, you know, a night or so at camp where everyone's kind of quiet and withdrawn. And then like a couple of days later, they just kind of do that. Like that.

Oh, I was fucked up. Huh? Anyway, let's never talk about that again. You know what I mean? You know, like,

like the weird version of like, if you're like out in public and you like just fucking trip over your own feet and fall, you just kind of jump up and look around and you're like, do you want to see that? No. Shit. Oh fuck.

All right. I'm just gonna, just gonna keep walking. I'm pretend that didn't happen at all. That's how the company generally handles anything really atrocious that they do. And that is the, the captain is the pinnacle of that.

That's why he's willing to like personally murder the syndic to get them out of a contract because getting out of the contract is the best thing for the survival of the company. And that's all he cares about. Yep. The flip side of that, which I said is weird because they're also shown as being like actual friends. Yeah, like surprising friends, like really quick. Surprisingly good friends really quick.

And I can feel a theory formulating in my head as to why. Is a guy named Raven. Raven, they pick him up in Opal, I think. Yeah. And within the first, like, ten minutes of you, like, reading him in, he literally strangles his wife to death. Yes. But he's also shown as morally not being necessarily wrong to do so.

Kind of. Yeah. Because you hear the- It's like a revenge thing. So you find out throughout the course of the story that eventually he used to be like an aristocrat of some kind uh and but the city he's from has a whole lot of backstabbing and backbiting political like established rich families yeah and it was and it was overarchingly technically controlled as territory of the limper. Cause it's part of the empire.

And so what happened was the limper and a bunch of aristocrats that were close to him, including a coordinated essentially with Raven's wife to betray Raven and kill him. So his wife could get with some other guy or take his land or do some other shit. But Raven didn't actually die. And in like the opening scene

when he's trying to join the company, his ex is, I guess, technically still wife and her like new homies roll in and he kills one of them and then just straight up strangles his wife to death in front of everyone in like a in like a crowded restaurant yeah they're in like they're at like some fancy soiree and and he just strangles her to death kills two people immediately strangles her to death and then he turns around he's like i want to be in the company and they're like um finish up your business and we'll meet you later and then they leave without him on purpose

because they try to avoid him the only person who says he should join is croaker and the captain everyone else is like nah this dude's fucking crazy this dude is insane we just watched him murder his wife in cold blood in like broad daylight and the wife literally pleads and is like don't he's like she's like please don't and he's like and so this guy pretty rough start for Raven. The only thing you learn about him is that he's incredibly withdrawn. Um, he's willing to choke his F white, his ex wife to death.

And he's really good at killing people. Yeah. Like, like really good with a knife. He's a, he's a brooder hiding in the corner, a flash and with a knife. He's a he's a brooder hiding in the corner, flashing a big knife. He is the too edgy for you rogue from every D&D party you've imagined.

Exactly what he is. He is he even like half the time he kills somebody, it's through like sneaking up and stabbing him. Yes, he's just a big dagger wielding rogue. He's like a knife throwing dagger using my backstory is too tragic to talk about i won't tell you even if you ask me under force too edgy for you rogue yeah that is who he is until assassin rogue yeah until the the company gets to a village and some of the limpers forces are there and they realize the limpers forces have been extra, extra evil. We're talking like murdered children, lots of of the raping and the pillaging.

Yeah, I must say. And worse to said much. Yeah, much worse age group. Yeah, we're talking. That, that you know we should probably put a trigger warning i i'm going to put one at the beginning of the episode we'll probably have to do that for a couple weeks yeah i'm going to put one at the beginning of the episode but again specifically here if you want to skip forward a couple minutes like it is you know a very you know sexual assault trigger warning for this

type thing like it's either said or directly implied they're like sexually assaulting children well they're they're literally aren't they assaulting uh aren't they in the middle of sexually assaulting darling yes yeah so these soldiers are Let's leave it at sexually assaulting a girl who is nine, nine. While her grandfather is forced to like watch. And they're like stabbing him too, for fun sometimes. And then,

and, and Raven is the only one that immediately like no prompting, no, nothing just kills them. He just shoots them. Yeah. So Croker and Elmo, I think an Elmo maybe,

and Raven and maybe another guy like roll up to see what the hell's going on. They see this and are grossed out by it, but nobody does anything immediately except Raven who looks up and just starts dropping guys with knives. Just no hesitation. No hesitation whatsoever. He like kills a guy. He kills another guy.

He tells the old man to grab the girl and get over behind him. His comrades are then forced to also take up arms because he's part of their company and they started the fight. So they got to defend him. And the captain like yells at yells at him he's like why the fuck did you start a fight the captain is mad at him because those the troops that they're fighting with are ostensibly on their side they all serve the lady and the captain is like why the fuck did you get into a fight and raven's like i did it and i do it again yeah he just says he's like it's like i did i would i do i would do it again he's like i'll do it again right now i don't regret it at all

and that's the first time you actually see any character take a hard moral stance on something and ostensibly correct moral stance on yeah the it is correct like he stops yeah it's like it's sexual assault it's it's the first like actual redeemable moment for any character in the book and it's the guy who in the previous chapter strangled his wife to death hey he's the worst and the best then throughout the rest of the chaotic neutral not chaotic evil i'd actually call him waffle oh well yeah he has a code he has a code he's lawful neutral, not lawful evil. Yeah. So throughout the rest of the book, he essentially becomes the fucking, the protector of this girl who's named Darling. It is also important to note,

Darling is mute. And deaf. Darling is mute and deaf. Just, I'll let that sit there for a second so you can remember what the fuck was happening in the previous chapter before we learned this.

But, Darling is mute and deaf, but Raven learns sign language so he can talk to her. Yeah, it's like their own developed sign language. They develop a sign language. I think her grandfather

also spoke it too, I think, before he got killed. So, I think her grandfather also spoke it too, I think, before he got killed. So Raven learns sign language. And over time, Croker also picks up some of the sign language. And Silent knows the sign language. Which is interesting, because then Silent will talk to Darling. Yeah, but no one else.

And only Darling. Only, but no one else. And only Darling. Only Darling. No one else. So Silent, who could speak if he felt like it, and who knows sign language and could use it to the other adults that know sign language, still does not. I don't think he even uses sign language with Croker or Raven. Oh, no. It is just. He will speak to Darling and darling only in sign language uh but i do

want to point out that for an 80s pulp novel with a bunch of other horrible shit happening there's never the sign language it's never posed as something weird or worthy of being mocked yeah i was about to say almost the entire like senior command considers adopting it because it would be better as battlefield uh communication communication than their old outdated hand signals yeah so some of the senior command actually pick up sign language because it makes it easier to communicate in battle. And I it sounds simple, but I think it's also really important that for that 80s schlock novel, you meet a child who's mute and deaf, who can communicate only through sign language. And this company of of murderers just go. Damn, I guess that's kind of useful, huh? of murderers just go, damn,

I guess that's kind of useful, huh? Also, just in case anyone was wondering if these two threads connected, she's the reincarnated white rose. It is. Yeah. Basically not directly told to you, but heavily implied that Croker believes and Raven believes and silent.

And the captain probably also, well, the captain might not know, but silent Raven and Croker all believe that Darling is the true reincarnation of the White Rose who will one day overthrow the White Rose. Because there was a sleep spell cast on a large group of soldiers that she happened to be in the middle of. Everyone else fell asleep, and she was completely immune. And she ran around waking everyone else up so they could continue fighting and the reason raven deserts the company at the after the battle leaving everyone to assume he and darling were killed

is because he knows that she's a reincarnated white rose and needs to get her the fuck away from the lady before the lady figures it out yeah because the lady would absolutely murder her 100 murder her and then there's a little tension because when croaker and silent go try to confront raven about it he thinks that they're there on the lady's behalf to stop him and they're like no dude we we agree with you you're right we're just telling you exactly what the stakes are so you get the fuck out of here also here's a pile of money yeah like here's your share from that cart get the hell out of here here's your share of the cash you should go further than you think you need to the limper's actually alive still yeah and you two have a history so you should probably fuck off

but i wanted to we're talking about ra Raven because through you see throughout this also in other instances, soldiers are like, we should do some shit. And Raven will be like, if you do it, I'll fucking kill you. Oh yeah.

Yeah. He's like, fuck the rest. Like, don't you dare. He is the only one in the company that has the power to stop aside from the captain, the only one in the company who has the power to stop other people in the company from misbehaving and he doesn't do it through command authority like the

captain does he does it because they're all fucking scared of him even croaker's pretty scared of him croaker i have never seen this man make a an expression before croaker yeah croaker's terrified of it and even the fucking sorcerers who cheat constantly will not cheat at cards when Raven is playing because they're too scared of him. They are legitimately too scared of Raven to cheat and they cheat all the time. So that's pretty much all they do

when they're playing cards is cheat. Cheat, yeah. So these are sort of your two counterpoints for what I want to call sort of practicality to morality within the Black Company or the Captain and Raven. Raven clearly believes in something. And I think that when you look in retrospect, you realize they were hinting to it the whole time. when you look in retrospect, you realize they were hinting to it the whole time early on when they get to the North, they talk about these like rebel,

like shitty rebel prophecies about the reborn right, right Rose. And Raven always kind of does this. Like they're like, Raven, you know all about this rebel bullshit. Right. And he's like,

what? Oh yeah. I'm aware. Yeah. And, and even, even Croker later on is like like raven says like i don't know why i like believe in all these things and and croaker's like listen you've been around them your entire

life i'd be surprised if you didn't yeah and so you learned that raven has but raven has been sympathetic to the i think been roughly sympathetic to the rebel cause the whole time. Oh, yeah. And actually believes in the reincarnation of the White Rose and has the whole time. I think he was mostly joining the Black Company to get close to people like the Limper. Yeah, he was using the Black Company as a way to exact revenge against the lady and her agents. Mike.

Whoops. Which, you know, but he is the only moral character in the entire book. Obviously. I mean, darling probably is, but we don't know what darling thinks really.

She's a child. But yeah, but also wanted to point out, so Raven and the captain are like best friends. Now this would seem to be a bit of a contradiction considering one of them is sort of the moral one and one of them is the pragmatist. I think it's because the captain is actually acutely aware of the moral position he has put himself in as captain of the black company. I think the captain has enough self-awareness to realize that he has

intentionally set aside his morality. Oh yeah. He's a smart guy. He's smart enough to know what he has done. Whereas some of the lower down soldiers, I just get that way through like osmosis and basically, you know, repeated trauma. I think the captain is acutely aware of his choices and what they mean.

And he has just found himself in a position where he has decided that he will not take morality into account, but I think he still has it. And that's why he likes Raven because I assume that he and Raven probably talk and discuss that sort of thing. And he likes having Raven around because Raven has these morals that he, the captain cannot allow himself to have. You think the two of them get up to high minded philosophical debates? Well, maybe.

And I think it also might just be a part of the captain knows Raven is a moral person. And so he just likes having him around because then Raven can say things that the captain can't say like Raven can go, no, we're not fucking doing that. And the captain can beg. Yeah.

Raven's right. That's probably a bad idea. And it doesn't have to seem like the captain is the one like making a moral call as opposed to a pragmatic call. And I think that's why the captain it's sort of like the, he get Raven gets to be his like murderous Jiminy cricket. Um, now Raven still does a lot of killing.

Let's say, yeah, he does probably more killing than, than almost everyone else in the book. Yeah. He does more killing than than almost everyone else in the book. Yeah, he does more killing than anyone that's not the Taken. Yeah. And he's also the moral center of the book. He does some killing of the Taken, almost.

I mean, yeah, almost. He helps hunt down the limper. Yeah. The only non-magical person who kills a taken is croaker that's true he kills the soul catcher just straight up murders her he shoots her with a magic arrow and then cuts her fucking head off shoots her with multiple magical arrows yeah like two or three yeah he's like unloading his entire quiver and then runs he unloads he unloads the clip into her and then cuts her head off. Is so again,

it's the only one that actually only like mortal that actually kills taken, which is interesting. Mr. Doctor man. So I think that's enough about sort of the moral character of this book because we can, I mean, we can talk about it back and forth, but it was surprisingly morally in-depth than I expected a pulp novel to be.

I just want to do a touch on a few final points about sort of the story, the construction of the story itself that we didn't talk about at the beginning. Number one, the world is really well constructed. Now, just with, while not being nearly as in depth as some other authors we could mention, the world has all the depth that needs for you to believe it personally. Yeah. I think, I think effectively this has, I don't know, this doesn't feel any, you probably, you can feel free to disagree. This doesn't feel any less in depth than like the Witcher. Oh no. Um, it's a, it's a very, obviously it gets even more deep because he continues writing books on it.

So it gets more and more just throughout like through time and effort. But I'm talking from this book specifically, like you get a feel for the different like regions, you get a feel for like the history and the sort of character of the world in which they live. And I wanted specifically to call out how much I like the magic system. Oh yeah. And by the magic system,

I mean the lack thereof, but say the magic, cause there is no system. Let's say the magic just happens. So there are wizards, like we said, and there are like sort of wizards range in power level from, I can do just magnitude from,

I can do a little bit of nonsense to I am the dominator. And so the company has at the beginning for, and then after barrel three wizards, goblin silent and one eye, and they can do all sorts of magic. And it's never really described exactly what the limits or capabilities of their magic are. Just that they have to wiggle their hands to do it. And sometimes they have to say words.

So in D&D, there are no material components, but there are often verbal. There are also semantic and physical components to their spellcasting. What are the limits of the spellcasting? What can they and can't they do? I don't know. Lots of cool shit. Shrug. It's soft, soft magic system.

This is the most definitionally soft magic system I think we might have read so far. And I love it yeah at the end of the day it doesn't really fuck with anything no i actually think the world this story would be worse if you he took the time there i bet i bet you there you can assume with like a soft magic system like this that there is like a magic system. It's just like, so few characters know what that is, that it's just not important. Yeah. We're also,

so we're seeing it from Croker's perspective who obviously doesn't know, you know, it can't magic person. Yeah. And you know, it can be taught because goblin in one eye and silent, like it's mentioned like them learning from another guy, right.

Or some of them like the brothers uh learned from a different wizard right so it's clearly a thing you can learn but it's also a thing you can just be like gifted i think or your power can be increased through like gift because while the taken were all powerful wizards in their own right they become more powerful through the process of being taken by the dominator slash the lady their power is increased how does that work doesn't don't know nobody knows don't worry about it it's not important and again i i think the story benefits from that i don't and the more of these stories i read the more i learned that i i actually like soft magic systems better i don't i don't want you to tell me the like you know 17 rules of how to make a stone fly through the air. I don't, I don't care.

I like sort of the wonder and the whimsy of it being that this guy can do shape change. Why is, why does only he shape change and nobody else? That's what he likes to. Yeah. He just likes doing it. And you're like,

Oh, okay. Neat. That you're like, oh, okay, neat. That's like all of the Taken sort of have their own flavor of the kind of magic they like to do. And it to me comes across more like a D&D specialization. Like, ah, I just went into weather magic. That's my deal is weather magic or whatever the Soul catcher's deal is i'm not exactly sure i think i think the soul catcher she does like that weird black void thing

yeah and i think she like absorbs people you're right because yeah she and then those extra voices you're hearing are supposed to be the souls of the people she's consumed. Oh, yeah, you're right. You're right. All the people. That's why she can like have arguments with herself because it's sort of the incorporated souls and personalities of the people she's taken. She can also read minds. Kind of. Maybe it's like it's maybe it's more like like deep insight, like a really, really high insight skill.

Yeah, it's either she croaker says she's either so insightful that she can sort of intuit what you're thinking or she's actually reading your mind one of the two and they never explain well whether it's one because because croaker doesn't know he doesn't know so how could they possibly explain that um you know the howler just sort of screams a lot and flies through the air and does like poison magic and some other stuff yeah if if you guys if anybody gets on the wiki they've got a bunch of art from one guy has done a lot of art um and his name is mikey patch and a lot of his art is fucking sick. Is really sick.

Like, it's really good. Raven looks great. Sorry, I'm just like looking through this stuff. Oh, Raven looks exactly how I expect Raven to look. Exactly what you expected to look. But the 10 who were taken

have very specific aesthetics. I really love the design he did for the howler. Oh, it's basically like a mummy with an open mouth and sort of like a shawl. Yeah, it's it's. The limper is actually kind of terrifying in his art instead of.

As he's supposed to be. Yeah, I know it's like, but in the book, it's like you're kind of like almost don't just because he's called the limper. And I don't know, it's like you're kind of like almost don't just because he's called the limper and i don't know it's a little weird shape shifters freaking huge bearded man um but hanged man is really really gross uh yeah because as he's described he's got his neck is crook cranked to the side and his neck sort of bulges where his body was hanging, you know, from a noose. Yeah.

And I, so yeah, a lot of, um, there's a lot of art out there. Except for the ones that were never really described like moon biter. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever that means.

Yeah. The ones we never actually encountered or faceless or moon biter and faceless man. Yeah. Uh, bone Nasher sort of reminds me of. What's that like Batman villain? That's like a crocodile. Oh, yeah.

You know, I'm talking about. Yeah, he's in this. It wasn't even like the Suicide Squad or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. It's literally just croc. I think it's croc. Killer croc.

Killer croc. He kind of reminds me of killer croc. He kind of reminds me of killer croc. He does look a lot like killer croc. But no. You know, now we're kind of rambling. I just wanted to say this book made me really appreciate the soft magic system. I like that the wizards just do stuff and magic happens. The taken just get to do things and magic happens.

The lady does whatever it is, the hell it is, the ladies do. And I love it. I love it. I it is. The hell it is. The ladies do the, the, I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. As part of the reason that I'm never going to read a Brandon Sanderson book on this podcast,

because I don't need to read a science textbook about how magic works. You better stop that nonsense. My guy, I don't want to read the storm at archives. We don't have to read the storm at archives. We can read Mistborn. I don't really want to read. I don't really want to read Mistborn. Yeah, we got to do one we got to do one i don't really want it i don't care that is he has to describe that you can do magic

by bouncing off the mineral or of a pebble over there to force yourself and absolutely sometimes you gotta you gotta dive into stuff you don't don, my guy. Yeah, I said the last time I read a book I really didn't like, the audio book was like six hours long. Every Brandon Sanderson book is going to take- Yeah, it's going to be like 15 at least. Yeah, like 15 hours of my life that I'll never get back again. I just don't care, man. Anyway,

more soft magic systems, more, more. How does the magic happen? I don't know. I don't care. You know why? Cause like Croker,

I'm dumb. There are, I don't know why the magic works that way. Definitely. I don't know where they, what they are, but I know there are definitely tabletop role-playing games where the magic, could just be like i do this does that work and the dm is like yeah i'm sure there are is that just fate do that fate probably does that it's probably fate

it seems like something fate would do let's say fate just has attributes you can just do whatever you want soft magic do you know that doesn't work as well yeah so lessons to take away from this book uh can you make the moral choice about lesser evilism don't be horny for evil dictators don't uh just don't do it despite how hot mikey patch drew the lady. Yeah, he did. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe don't way too hard. Maybe don't be Croker. But maybe Croker's got a point. Or he could be Raven, the one good person in the entire book. Be the listen.

This is the one time we'll ever tell you this. Be the brooding rogue with the edgy backstory. But don't be the murder hobo rogue with the backstory. Be the oddly noble rogue with the edgy backstory. Edgy backstory rogue with a code. Yeah, yeah.

Be the one with the code who joins the Zhentarim because it's like he needs to make the money. But then if they try and like do something stupid, he'll just start killing them. I'll finish with a quote about the lady

from the back cover of The Black Company, which is, Some feel the lady, newly arisen from centuries in thrall, stands between humankind and evil. Some feel she is the evil. Yeah. I think both are true. Sometimes

two evil forces fight each other. And you know who loses? Everybody. I was about to say, everybody else. The psychosexual urges of Croker. That's who. Alright, everyone, I hope you enjoyed this breakdown the black company is i mean it's dark and pulpy but it's not honestly as dark as i thought it

would be yeah no i mean it's it's dark in the like well we weren't really expecting people like a spooky fantasy we were thinking dark and lots of people more morally dark morally gray not even morally gray this is mostly morally like dark gray this is this is morally almost black maybe gray it's gray because because Raven's in it. Yeah, it's gray because Raven is there. All right. I think our next episode will be, I believe, on Berserk. Which, if you want to read a story about another morally questionable mercenary company,

guess what? Hey! Berserk is up next. From the Black Company to the Band of the Hawk. Here we go. After that will be Coraline and a bonus episode about Blade. I promise everyone that there are no mercenary companies in Coraline. No, that is true.

That'll honestly be a nice light reprieve after the hell gonna end the hell we are gonna go through this next week oh god i'm gonna spend the entire next week reading berserk so it's okay my roommate's gonna like beat the shit out of me if i don't pray for me fans all right everyone uh thanks for listening you should check

us out on social media subscribe to us on patreon to listen to our episode about Blade and everything everywhere all at once and other stuff. You know, do the podcast shit. Rate us on i-whatevers. They call iTunes now. I don't fucking know.

I don't use Apple products. Do it. And that's it. We'll see you next week. Goodbye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. That's it.

We'll see you next week. Goodbye. Bye-bye. Bro. Are you fucking real, man? Come on.