The Curse of discussing Sword & Sorcery on the Internet

Godwin famously discovered that as the length of a discussion on the internet increases, the probability that someone will compare another person to Hitler approaches 1.

Here’s Yora’s Law: “As the length of a discussion somehow related to Sword & Sorcery increases, the probability that it will turn into a debate on the proper definition Sword & Sorcery approaches 1.”

If for some inconceivable reason, it takes more than 10 posts to reach that point, that’s already amazingly impressive.

3 thoughts on “The Curse of discussing Sword & Sorcery on the Internet”

  1. The problem is Elric and Conan are both considered Sword & Sorcery and the books are very, very different. We really need new terms like Weird Sword & Sorcery to divide out the Weird Tales stuff from Elric. Or High Magic Sword & Sorcer versus Low Magic Sword & Sorcery or something.

  2. That’s because Elric was Moorecock’s conscious attempt to turn the S&S paradigm on it head.

    1. I wouldn’t say that Elric is an anti-S&S series, though. More a push to take many of the key features of Conan stories and expand them beyond just Conan-clones.
      And it was only after that that a discussion began on creating a name for this new genre. A single series and its knock-offs is not a genre yet.

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