High Effortposting about my Favourite Fantasy Book Series
A lot of pixels have been spilled on the inherent comedic potential of a character being in the wrong genre. More often than not, this is spent on stuff like that one post about how Sherlock would thrive in an isekai setting or how Columbo would crush the death note mystery. That kind of thing. But in terms of characters quite clearly in the wrong genre, and the interesting stories that can arise from this, I have a bit of an oddball pick.
Deltora Quest is a children's fantasy series which any australian worth their salt has hopefully read. The story is about a young boy and his travelling companions assembling a mystical artefact to defeat the dark lord. The issue being that the dark lord is an insanely powerful sorcerer who has lived for centuries, conquered the entire land so slowly nobody realised it had happened until too late, and rules with an army of monsters and grunts that do his dark bidding. In the end, he is of course defeated by the fully assembled Belt of Deltora and the powerful warding magic it represents, but it takes some time for his influence to fully leave the land.
How was it that such a powerful overlord was defeated? Was it because he failed to account for the indomitable human spirit? His inability (mostly) to make shapeshifters that didn't have a glaringly obvious tell? The fact that evil shall fall and good shall triumph as a base rule of most fantasy?
Well, sure. But I think it's mainly because he's not actually a sorcerer, but a mad scientist in entirely the wrong genre.
Let's start with the basics. Magic in this series can generally be classified into two categories: quirky little oddities that are largely bound to a single place or family, and Real Shit. There are springs of water which can let you see dreams, honey that gives you superspeed if you're a horse, and the actual literal hulk living out his days as a travelling salesman. Baubles, in short. There are also the ancient gems of Deltora, powerful talismans that can ward off all evil, and the sacred city of Tora, home to endless magic and miracles. These two categories are fairly set: the former can appear anywhere but needs cleverness to exploit, and the latter require very specific circumstances to actually work but are basically unstoppable. Magic is either widely applicable but weak, or rare and impossible to use without specific pre-requisites but incredibly strong.
The Shadow Lord, in no particular order, displays the following magical capabilities:
The construction of extremely painful projectile weapons from frog venom and careful construction.
The large scale creation of obedient armies of near-identical almost humans, show explicitly to be grown in "vats".
The ability to speak over long distances and record sounds and sights using a magic mirror.
The creation of vast machinery that billows out smoke and poisons the land.
Accelerated "evolution" and "mutation" (sic) of base creatures by exposure to a strange type of glowing rock.
As a last resort, in the final book of the final series, an actual literal self-replicating matter eating grey goo that can only be stopped by the heat of pure dragonfire.
I'm not certain that he's a sorcerer as well, but it's definitely possible. There are actual no-shit knowledge based sorcerers in this setting, magic is something that can be learned if you are very old and very lucky. It might help explain some of his stranger abilities, such as existing in a non-corporeal form. But what he's capable of obviously goes beyond that. My hunch is that there is a difference between the magic he has learned and the technology he wields, in that one could probably be replicated by even normal people given time and resources, but it's a difference nobody in the setting (maybe not even him) is aware of.
As for his motivations, he doesn't attack Deltora out of some ancient grudge. He is aggressively pragmatic about it. He wants the place for its vast natural resources, and its favorable ports that shall allow him to send vast legions of warships. He's the estranged disfavored son of a noble family, if the deep lore is to be believed, and that's some prime mad scientist material if I ever heard it. He has a history of encountering beautiful magical things, such as dragons and the singing sisters, and creating false versions of them when he couldn't bend the original to his will. I'm not arguing just based on word association with scifi bullshit here. There's themes to this. Whenever given the opportunity, he behaves like a mad scientist would.
And as for how he ultimately gets defeated? Magic. Again and again, it's magic. He can't breach Tora, so he besieges it and cuts it off from the rest of the country with subtle manipulations. He can't destroy the belt, so he scatters the pieces of it. When he is defeated for the first time, it's with a magic belt. When he's briefly taken out a second time, it's with a magical flute. While my memories of his third appearance are hazy, you can bet it was magic that stopped him then as well. He doesn't understand magic beyond a surface level, beyond his own tricks, he can't truly replicate it, and he can't stand against it.
The Shadow Lord is a villain in the wrong genre. And this is his greatest strength just as it is his greatest weakness. This is why you'll never win, Shadow Lord. None of that nonsense about good triumphing over evil: the entire setting is just an outside context solution to your outside context problem. But if it's any consolation, I'm sure that somewhere out there, there's a foul sorcerer trapped in an old world university with a stitched up corpse and a lightning rod wondering how the hell he got there as well.
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