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Just something that has been bugging me, lately. Where did the idea of Methos the invincible, godlike ancient badass come from?
I mean, don't get me wrong, he's a survivor of the first water, and has been going strong for 5000 years, as a member of one of the most consistently badass species around. The man is badass, and sneaky as all get-out.
What he isn't, though, is an invincible superwarrior who can take on anyone he feels like in a straight fight. Well. Not from evidence, anyway. Which, given Methos, is always questionable, but still.
Looking at the actual fights Methos gets into, that we see. He fights Kirsten. After she's already tired and gotten her ass kicked by Duncan. He fights Steven Keane, who had Duncan worried, and beat him straight up, but he did that by calculating on Keane's psychology and using a very, very dirty trick. He fights Walker, and kills him handily, but again mostly through use of terrain, the fact that Walker thought he was a coward who didn't know what he was doing, and the fact that even immortals will be temporarily discommoded if you stick their sword in a live fusebox while they're still holding it.
Silas was probably his straightest kill in the series, and that was complicated by emotion and betrayal and confusion on all sides.
Methos doesn't usually win by straight skill or strength (though skill, at least, he almost certainly has), he wins by being psychologically the most ruthless player on the field, and by having built up a series of false expectations in the minds of everyone likely to face him as an opponent. Also, by doing things like feigning weakness, having back-up weapons, shooting people in the back, utilising Molotov cocktails, and sticking people's swords into electrical currents.
But when he was facing other people he thought had a decent chance of being as ruthless as he was, like, for example, Dark Quickening Duncan, or Kronos, he almost always arranges not to have to fight them directly. He played Kronos along until he could point him at Duncan. He ran the hell away from Dark!Duncan (again, complicated by the fact that he didn't actually want to kill Duncan that time, but that's part of the same point, really - unless Methos knows he's going to be the most ruthless person on the field, he finds a different field).
I mean, he's a sneaky-ass son of a bitch who is very, very good at killing people when they try to kill him, but there's nothing particular that makes him stand out, technically, among other immortals of the same flavour. He's a dirtier fighter than just about everyone, of course, and he has more layers of misdirection wrapped around him than, well, anyone, but in terms of swordsmanship he's not really shown to be top tier - he usually arranges to end fights before top tier swordsmanship becomes an issue.
He has held his own in a couple of show/training fights - the one against Duncan in Chivalry, the one against de Valicourt in Till Death - but he seems to regard them as completely different entities. Duncan beat him in Chivalry, and Methos didn't seem at all concerned, and both he and Robert were basically flynning in the latter. In actual fights, he doesn't usually trade long sequences of swordwork, he just keeps the other sword away from himself long enough to pull a dirty trick and get his opponent on the ground.
Function over form, essentially. Every time.
I mean, he's badass. But he's not badass in the sense of 'immortal demigod superwarrior', but in the sense of 'lying cheating bastard who will snipe you in the back if he thinks it would work better'.
I have the same problem with the Horsemen, actually. In that, myth and hystrionics aside, the Horsemen weren't actually all that impressive. I mean, they were boogeymen of the ancient world, but we're not talking the baddest of badasses, even historically speaking. In part, because they couldn't be, or history would probably have noticed (which Methos might have had something to do with, mind, but if we're talking them wiping out a settlement of thousands in one sitting, someone would have taken note).
Again, looking at what we see of them, how they functioned. Ignore Kronos' delusions of grandeur, for a minute, and Methos trying to knock Duncan back. Look at what we see them do.
They blitzed an isolated settlement on horseback, and slaughtered and/or enslaved anyone in range. This is strongly implied to have been their SOP, across centuries. And that ... That's not warlord tactics. That's not ruling tactics. That's basically glorified bandit tactics. Rinsed and repeated across centuries. That's all they were. A team of glorified immortal bandits who refused to die.
Go back to Methos again. What he yelled at Duncan, "I killed TEN thousand!". Fine. Even saying he meant that he, personally, had killed ten thousand people as a horseman. The horsemen rode for centuries. The figure I see most often (though I'm not sure it's actually verified?) is 1000 years. If you divide his bodycount out, that means he killed ... ten people a year? On average?
Say the average size of the settlements they hit was somewhere between 80 and a few hundred people. Divide that out by four of them, maybe allow for some of them being more bloodthirsty than others, and even taking only 500 years instead of 1000, that's still basically his yearly quota per settlement. Meaning that unless he was making numbers up off the top of his head, the Horsemen probably only hit a couple of settlements a year, spread out as they moved over two continents, which would fit what we saw in flashback. Which is apocalyptic for the settlement, and when it happens repeatedly over centuries by the same immortal band, you're going to build up a legend, but still. It's not really more than them being particularly successful bandits.
For comparative purposes, Vlad Tepes reportedly had over 20,000 people executed by impalement in one sitting, in 1462 (according to his enemy, yes, but estimates on the numbers he had executed over his reign still come to around 40,000 on the conservative end). As in, Tepes killed twice Methos' centuries-long bodycount inside of a year, just by execution and not including battle casualties and the slaughtered inhabitants of sacked cities. Genghis Khan, as the administrative head of an army, wiped an entire empire quite literally off the map inside three years, in the 13th century. Even in HL, Darius in all likelihood had as big of a bodycount, considering he apparently headed an army that aimed to do an Attila on it and steamroll Europe until he hit the sea.
Methos said what he said to shock Duncan. And Duncan is Duncan. The thought of one innocent life taken is enough to draw his wrath, and the guilt of having used his abilities in one battlefield encounter (Culloden) was enough to send him into full heroic bluescreen of death. What Duncan was in no mood to account for at the time was that the lump number Methos presented to him actually represented centuries' worth of violence, not a single sitting. If you weigh out Duncan's bodycount, just in the Game alone, and in four hundred years, he's killed nearly 200 people. One at a time. Not counting his various battlefield experiences over the centuries. So.
Historically speaking, the Horsemen were not badasses. They built their legend the same way Jack the Ripper built a century-long legend with a bodycount of five. The power is in the myth itself, not the men behind it. They were an unkillable foursome who brought death and destruction for centuries. They didn't need to make much practical difference (and horrible as it sounds, a couple of settlements a year, particularly ranged across two continents and continuously on the move, probably didn't make that much overall difference to the powers of the time) to become the boogeymen of legend.
And in practice ... Silas was basically a berserker, but he was in it for the fight. Aside from his being immortal, there were probably hundreds and thousands like him over the centuries. Caspian was pretty obviously a serial killer by inclination, he just had the time and back-up to indulge himself more than most. Kronos had grander ambitions, yes, but he also had full-on delusions of grandeur ('I AM THE END OF TIME', whilst in the middle of getting his ass kicked), and without Methos to do the planning for him seemed to actually be reasonably ineffectual (yes, he made the chemical weapon, yes, he planned to use it, but Methos was able to sideline that handily by playing to the man's nostalgia and ego).
They were monsters. Do not get me wrong. But considering the time and place they were operating in, the sheer length of time they were operating for, and their tactics as we see them, they were no more monstrous than many historical figures of their era, and considerably less impressive than some 100% human monsters in history. They were not demigods (well, possibly if we're taking 'demigod' in the Greek sense, as in god-touched, usually-bloodthirsty, often-insane wandering murderers, then yes, they were absolutely demigods. But then, so were half the immortals we met. Comes with the territory).
*rubs nose* What I mean is, the myth of Death does not actually make Methos a god, or an unbeatable immortal badass. The whole point of Methos, from the first moment he's introduced, is that the myths he's built up around him have little to nothing to do with the man underneath them. Aside from the fact that he has spent 5000 years consistently not dying (which, granted, is pretty impressive just on its own), there is nothing more superhuman about him than any other immortal.
He's just a man who is very, very good at staying alive, by any means necessary, up to and including running the hell away from fights and hiding out for centuries on end. Also lying to everyone in range, building layers of falsehood around himself so that no-one knows what's what with him, and making sure than he is always underestimated in at least one key aspect by everyone he meets.
He was also, at various times, a violently ruthless monster among other violently ruthless monsters. That still doesn't make him impressive. It just means that when Methos decides to side with the victors, he really doesn't bother with limits.
I love Methos. I actually do adore him. But I love him because he's a sneaky-ass son of a bitch who's survived as long as he has by being the dirtiest, most ruthless fighter going, not because I think he's the best of the best. The point is that he's not invincible, he's just really, really good at making sure that he never has to be.
I'm in love with the Trickster archetype. The man who quietly arranges for all his opponents to mistakenly kill each other before they ever get to him will get more admiration from me than the man who beats all his opponents in a straight fight (for a near-perfect illustration of this, understand that I favour Artemus Gordon over James West, in Wild Wild West). It's pretty much why Methos was my favourite. (I am, incidentally, aware that this does not necessarily say the best things about me).
His luck will run out someday. That's the point of the Game, too. The fun is in watching him stave the inevitable off one second, one dirty trick, at a time.
What he isn't, though, is an invincible superwarrior who can take on anyone he feels like in a straight fight. Well. Not from evidence, anyway. Which, given Methos, is always questionable, but still.
Looking at the actual fights Methos gets into, that we see. He fights Kirsten. After she's already tired and gotten her ass kicked by Duncan. He fights Steven Keane, who had Duncan worried, and beat him straight up, but he did that by calculating on Keane's psychology and using a very, very dirty trick. He fights Walker, and kills him handily, but again mostly through use of terrain, the fact that Walker thought he was a coward who didn't know what he was doing, and the fact that even immortals will be temporarily discommoded if you stick their sword in a live fusebox while they're still holding it.
Silas was probably his straightest kill in the series, and that was complicated by emotion and betrayal and confusion on all sides.
Methos doesn't usually win by straight skill or strength (though skill, at least, he almost certainly has), he wins by being psychologically the most ruthless player on the field, and by having built up a series of false expectations in the minds of everyone likely to face him as an opponent. Also, by doing things like feigning weakness, having back-up weapons, shooting people in the back, utilising Molotov cocktails, and sticking people's swords into electrical currents.
But when he was facing other people he thought had a decent chance of being as ruthless as he was, like, for example, Dark Quickening Duncan, or Kronos, he almost always arranges not to have to fight them directly. He played Kronos along until he could point him at Duncan. He ran the hell away from Dark!Duncan (again, complicated by the fact that he didn't actually want to kill Duncan that time, but that's part of the same point, really - unless Methos knows he's going to be the most ruthless person on the field, he finds a different field).
I mean, he's a sneaky-ass son of a bitch who is very, very good at killing people when they try to kill him, but there's nothing particular that makes him stand out, technically, among other immortals of the same flavour. He's a dirtier fighter than just about everyone, of course, and he has more layers of misdirection wrapped around him than, well, anyone, but in terms of swordsmanship he's not really shown to be top tier - he usually arranges to end fights before top tier swordsmanship becomes an issue.
He has held his own in a couple of show/training fights - the one against Duncan in Chivalry, the one against de Valicourt in Till Death - but he seems to regard them as completely different entities. Duncan beat him in Chivalry, and Methos didn't seem at all concerned, and both he and Robert were basically flynning in the latter. In actual fights, he doesn't usually trade long sequences of swordwork, he just keeps the other sword away from himself long enough to pull a dirty trick and get his opponent on the ground.
Function over form, essentially. Every time.
I mean, he's badass. But he's not badass in the sense of 'immortal demigod superwarrior', but in the sense of 'lying cheating bastard who will snipe you in the back if he thinks it would work better'.
I have the same problem with the Horsemen, actually. In that, myth and hystrionics aside, the Horsemen weren't actually all that impressive. I mean, they were boogeymen of the ancient world, but we're not talking the baddest of badasses, even historically speaking. In part, because they couldn't be, or history would probably have noticed (which Methos might have had something to do with, mind, but if we're talking them wiping out a settlement of thousands in one sitting, someone would have taken note).
Again, looking at what we see of them, how they functioned. Ignore Kronos' delusions of grandeur, for a minute, and Methos trying to knock Duncan back. Look at what we see them do.
They blitzed an isolated settlement on horseback, and slaughtered and/or enslaved anyone in range. This is strongly implied to have been their SOP, across centuries. And that ... That's not warlord tactics. That's not ruling tactics. That's basically glorified bandit tactics. Rinsed and repeated across centuries. That's all they were. A team of glorified immortal bandits who refused to die.
Go back to Methos again. What he yelled at Duncan, "I killed TEN thousand!". Fine. Even saying he meant that he, personally, had killed ten thousand people as a horseman. The horsemen rode for centuries. The figure I see most often (though I'm not sure it's actually verified?) is 1000 years. If you divide his bodycount out, that means he killed ... ten people a year? On average?
Say the average size of the settlements they hit was somewhere between 80 and a few hundred people. Divide that out by four of them, maybe allow for some of them being more bloodthirsty than others, and even taking only 500 years instead of 1000, that's still basically his yearly quota per settlement. Meaning that unless he was making numbers up off the top of his head, the Horsemen probably only hit a couple of settlements a year, spread out as they moved over two continents, which would fit what we saw in flashback. Which is apocalyptic for the settlement, and when it happens repeatedly over centuries by the same immortal band, you're going to build up a legend, but still. It's not really more than them being particularly successful bandits.
For comparative purposes, Vlad Tepes reportedly had over 20,000 people executed by impalement in one sitting, in 1462 (according to his enemy, yes, but estimates on the numbers he had executed over his reign still come to around 40,000 on the conservative end). As in, Tepes killed twice Methos' centuries-long bodycount inside of a year, just by execution and not including battle casualties and the slaughtered inhabitants of sacked cities. Genghis Khan, as the administrative head of an army, wiped an entire empire quite literally off the map inside three years, in the 13th century. Even in HL, Darius in all likelihood had as big of a bodycount, considering he apparently headed an army that aimed to do an Attila on it and steamroll Europe until he hit the sea.
Methos said what he said to shock Duncan. And Duncan is Duncan. The thought of one innocent life taken is enough to draw his wrath, and the guilt of having used his abilities in one battlefield encounter (Culloden) was enough to send him into full heroic bluescreen of death. What Duncan was in no mood to account for at the time was that the lump number Methos presented to him actually represented centuries' worth of violence, not a single sitting. If you weigh out Duncan's bodycount, just in the Game alone, and in four hundred years, he's killed nearly 200 people. One at a time. Not counting his various battlefield experiences over the centuries. So.
Historically speaking, the Horsemen were not badasses. They built their legend the same way Jack the Ripper built a century-long legend with a bodycount of five. The power is in the myth itself, not the men behind it. They were an unkillable foursome who brought death and destruction for centuries. They didn't need to make much practical difference (and horrible as it sounds, a couple of settlements a year, particularly ranged across two continents and continuously on the move, probably didn't make that much overall difference to the powers of the time) to become the boogeymen of legend.
And in practice ... Silas was basically a berserker, but he was in it for the fight. Aside from his being immortal, there were probably hundreds and thousands like him over the centuries. Caspian was pretty obviously a serial killer by inclination, he just had the time and back-up to indulge himself more than most. Kronos had grander ambitions, yes, but he also had full-on delusions of grandeur ('I AM THE END OF TIME', whilst in the middle of getting his ass kicked), and without Methos to do the planning for him seemed to actually be reasonably ineffectual (yes, he made the chemical weapon, yes, he planned to use it, but Methos was able to sideline that handily by playing to the man's nostalgia and ego).
They were monsters. Do not get me wrong. But considering the time and place they were operating in, the sheer length of time they were operating for, and their tactics as we see them, they were no more monstrous than many historical figures of their era, and considerably less impressive than some 100% human monsters in history. They were not demigods (well, possibly if we're taking 'demigod' in the Greek sense, as in god-touched, usually-bloodthirsty, often-insane wandering murderers, then yes, they were absolutely demigods. But then, so were half the immortals we met. Comes with the territory).
*rubs nose* What I mean is, the myth of Death does not actually make Methos a god, or an unbeatable immortal badass. The whole point of Methos, from the first moment he's introduced, is that the myths he's built up around him have little to nothing to do with the man underneath them. Aside from the fact that he has spent 5000 years consistently not dying (which, granted, is pretty impressive just on its own), there is nothing more superhuman about him than any other immortal.
He's just a man who is very, very good at staying alive, by any means necessary, up to and including running the hell away from fights and hiding out for centuries on end. Also lying to everyone in range, building layers of falsehood around himself so that no-one knows what's what with him, and making sure than he is always underestimated in at least one key aspect by everyone he meets.
He was also, at various times, a violently ruthless monster among other violently ruthless monsters. That still doesn't make him impressive. It just means that when Methos decides to side with the victors, he really doesn't bother with limits.
I love Methos. I actually do adore him. But I love him because he's a sneaky-ass son of a bitch who's survived as long as he has by being the dirtiest, most ruthless fighter going, not because I think he's the best of the best. The point is that he's not invincible, he's just really, really good at making sure that he never has to be.
I'm in love with the Trickster archetype. The man who quietly arranges for all his opponents to mistakenly kill each other before they ever get to him will get more admiration from me than the man who beats all his opponents in a straight fight (for a near-perfect illustration of this, understand that I favour Artemus Gordon over James West, in Wild Wild West). It's pretty much why Methos was my favourite. (I am, incidentally, aware that this does not necessarily say the best things about me).
His luck will run out someday. That's the point of the Game, too. The fun is in watching him stave the inevitable off one second, one dirty trick, at a time.
Tags:
- highlander,
- meta,
- methos,
- musing,
- rant