Well, threes of fans, we’ve made it to September, and honestly, it doesn’t feel even a little bit like September here in Arizona. But it’s fine. I’m adjusting. Slowly.
Before I move on to today’s post, let me share with you the pre-order link for The Confession at Tacitio. Here’s the description:
You can pre-order directly on Amazon or go to Draft2Digital and find direct links to other major e-book platforms.
As for Soultainted, I’ll have a pre-order link ready for that one soon as well. I’ve finished the prose edit on it; I think it just needs a final proofing and some formatting, so the e-book should be very nearly done. I’ll keep y’all posted.
Okay, on to today’s topic in the Hero Ecosystem: The Thinkers and Counselors.
Side Character Energy
I know everyone these days really prefers to indulge in main character energy, but let’s linger for a moment on those all-important side characters.
I love a good side character. My current favorite in my own series is Brody Reid. When I went and married Connor off to Mairead, I really needed a rakish nobleman of questionable character to step in and say all the outrageous things a married nobleman with a great destiny couldn’t get away with anymore. And there was Brody, offering me a handful of dice and an inappropriate comment, and honestly, how could I say no?
But the side characters do a lot more than just provide comic relief. They’re the consciences and counselors, the advocates and advisors. They nudge, push, and pull the people with power into the decisions they need to make, and if they fail, they keep writing and talking until they get their point across or die.
Without the Thinkers and Counselors, movements, changes, revolutions wouldn’t have any shape–they’d just be isolated, chaotic events that fizzled and died before taking root.
There are really far too many Thinkers and Counselors in all of the movements I’m looking at to adequately name them all, so I’m just picking three archetypes–starting with a personal heroine of mine.
The Advocate: Abigail Adams
It would not be a huge stretch to say that this entire series was built around the idea of Abigail Adams as a key thinker in the Revolutionary War.
I know, I know–the obvious ones are Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the like.
But those guys–they had real power. My girl Abigail? She had the ear of her husband, an underrated tenacity, and a willingness to advocate for the causes she held dear, even at risk of personal cost.
Abigail Adams wasn’t just politically engaged; she actively argued with the men shaping the future of the country. She told her husband, John, that the ideals they promised to put in writing meant nothing if they excluded women and tolerated slavery. The Adamses never enslaved anyone, and when a free Black youth asked her to help him learn to read and write, she did so against the objections of a neighbor. She wrote that the young man was “a Freeman as much as any of the young Men and merely because his face is black, is he to be denied instruction? … I have not thought it any disgrace to my self to take him into my parlor and teach him both to read and write.”
Adams never held formal power, but she wrote prolifically and passionately in favor of her causes, likely contributing to the connective threads that eventually drove the later abolitionist and suffrage movements.
Fantasy analog: Eowyn from Lord of the Rings. Eowyn advocated for the right to be heard and counted as a shieldmaiden of Rohan, and when she was denied formal authority, she showed up anyway and fulfilled her destiny.
(That scene still gives me chills every time.)
The Thinker: Fukuzawa Yukichi
Fukuzawa Yukichi is a fascinating character. Born into a low-ranking samurai family in 1835, he seemed to exist in that odd semi-noble space between the highest and lowest. That’s a weird place to inhabit, I think; you don’t have much institutional power, but you aren’t expected to necessarily work for a living, either.
Whether because of his position or his insatiable curiosity and intellectual drive, Fukuzawa became a fierce critic of the feudal class system in Japan. He taught himself Dutch, and when he discovered he would need English to fully converse with the west, he taught himself that, too. He went on three Shogunate missions to Europe and America before the Meiji Restoration and developed a deep and comprehensive understanding of Enlightenment philosophy and values, which he translated into writings that argued for reforms in education, government, and societal structure.
Like so many visionary thinkers and reformers, Fukuzawa’s ideals were a step ahead of even his own practices. He argued for women’s rights, but educated his own daughters at home and married them off when they were in their teens. The man who wrote “Heaven never created a man above another nor a man below another” never entirely expanded that vision to the women around him.
But this is the tension Thinkers inhabit–the pull toward something better even as the tethers of the past stretch to not-quite-breaking.
Fantasy analog: Sazed from Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy. True, Sazed became a god in the end, but he had no idea that was going to happen along the way. He simply thought, wrote, compiled, researched, and counseled everyone else until his destiny swallowed him. He didn’t seek power; rather, he sought to coach everyone else and synthesize knowledge.
The Philosopher: Ibn Rushd
Ibn Rushd, known in the West as Averroes, was a 12th century Andalusian scholar who served as court physician to the Almohad Caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf I. He was a true polymath, proficient in essentially every discipline that existed at the time.
The truly remarkable thing about Ibn Rushd is that his works and thinking survived because his civilization fell.
Ibn Rushd was commissioned to write commentaries on Aristotle, and he eventually wrote over 100 books and treatises and was a court favorite of Caliph Abu Yaqub. But in 1195, Ibn Rushd’s works and ideas came under fire from more orthodox factions of the caliphate, and Ibn Rushd was subjected to a tribunal. His works were burned, his ideas condemned, and he himself was exiled.
Here’s the fascinating part. In 1085, the city of Toledo was recaptured by Alfonso VI in the long Reconquista efforts. The western hold on that city meant that when Ibn Rushd’s translations of Aristotle and other works of philosophy started to spread, they reached parties in the West who had lost access to the ancient Greek philosopher. Ibn Rushd’s translations restored and even expanded their knowledge.
Ibn Rushd’s ideas and legacy faded in the Muslim world, but his name and his works stayed relevant in the West–and laid the groundwork for the Enlightenment thought that led to the proliferation of liberal democracies.
Ibn Rushd’s life illustrates what it’s like to play the long game–to hold to your philosophies and ideas in the face of opposition, not knowing how they’ll play out in the future, but understanding that it’s the ideas that are the thing.
Fantasy analog: Loial the Ogier from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time. Loial sort of accidentally ended up as part of Rand’s band and fretted about being away from his people the whole time, but he couldn’t resist watching history unfold and contributing his insights to the philosophical traditions of centuries.
As much as I love a good on-the-page side character, all three of these figures illustrate how a full Hero Ecosystem can build on those background people who write, think, and advocate around the edges. They provide the infrastructure, the conscience, the framework, even the moral grounding for the heroes to stand on when they make that big assault–whether that’s charging a hill or writing a declaration.
And speaking of charging up hills… In two weeks, I’ll take a look at the Strategists and Architects.
See y’all then.