Chivalry: Might is Right… Not Quite What You Think
I love writing knights because they had such a unapologetically simple way of looking at the world (first blog entry in this series here).
The knightly world view was internally consistent, but must have been infuriating to anybody with a logical turn of mind. In Swords Versus Tanks, I had fun imagining just such a conversation:
Ranulph swept his arm around the cell to indicate the corpses. “God has just shown you His will.”
“Knights!” The red-haired girl gestured at the carnage. “You think that was a trial by combat.” Her eyes narrowed. “You wear a somewhat soiled arming jacket, so it was defeat in battle which brought you to this dungeon. Was that also God’s will, Sir Ranulph?”
“I suppose that God wanted me here to save you,” said Ranulph, with a vague, familiar, feeling that he was going to regret arguing with her.
In fact — if Kaeuper’s Chivalry and Violence is to be believed — real knights tended to take things further with an utterly glorious piece of reasoning:
Knight: “God granted me victory, therefore I am more pious than the dead guy.”
Priest: “But you still need to do penance!”
Knight: “Penance, Sir Priest? Pah! Wearing armor in the field is mortification enough.”
Partly this was lazy thinking at work.
Saturday, July 25, was an odd day. At 4 in the afternoon I was meeting my girlfriend and some other friends to watch Princess Jellyfish, a live-action adaptation of a manga that had already been adapted into an anime series. But because I had to queue for it with members of the media, I’d actually be waiting in a different line than the people I’d be seeing the movie with. So I decided I’d go to the Fantasia screening room first, and watch another film: Mamoru Oshii’s Nowhere Girl.
