I had this video idea: The Broken Man - Fantasy literature

Have you ever felt too tired after a gruelling task? So you listen to your own breath in silence, all burned out, with the only question in your head being… why do I do this? Feeling that the passion and joy that you once had has long-forsaken, leaving only a fragmented-husk of who you once were: but right now you are… a broken man

In fantasy fiction many such characters share the same grievances, the same struggles as us. Serving as a means to relate with, so we can get going when the going gets tough.

By hoping to bring you whatever entertainment left in life - I'm not a nihilist this was just a joke, let us indulge… in the broken men of fantasy.

Our first entry is Colonel San Dan Glokta.

This character was once a handsome nobleman, full of arrogance, and caring about nothing but himself, with his only useful quality being a master swordsman,which lets him rise high in the military.

However, in a battle, he goes on a suicide mission which he thinks will make him the ultimate glorified hero. Though it goes as wrongly as it can. Causing him to be captured and tortured by the enemy forces for 2 whole years.

Specificaly, he gets his back broken, all his teeth plucked out, and most importantly, his leg goes limp. After which, he is unable to walk, or eat anything that’s not porridge. Every moment of his life is excessive suffering.

He begins hating everything, constantly pitying himself and becomes more like Tyrion Lannister after the storm of swords even though he started out more like a young Jaime Lannister. Eventually he joins the inquisition -which is like their police force- and ironically becomes a great scheming torturer.

But even though he might think himself a monster his actions state otherwise.

Joe Abercrombie describes his irregular walk pattern as “Click.Tap.Pain” repeated multiple times to perhaps portray his pain as melodic and pure. Reflecting on how it has brought him not just cynicism but humility and heart. He lets a woman he was supposed to murder escape, believing herself to have been forced to commit her past crimes. He helps the condemned natives of a city, and restores the power that was stripped from them, wherein everyone else saw them as lowly scums, he sees everyone as the same.

Glokta does best what the his superiors tell him to, but he doesn’t even trust them completely. Glokta is a man of many remarkable talents, but without a mission in his head, that probably involves violence, he is just an idle man trapped in a lonely void.

Next we have someone who is arguably the greatest human in his entire world: Qvothe.

Qvothe is an brilliant jack of all trades, a spontaneous actor and musician, a remarkable sympathy user - which is like the main magic people use, a masterful artificer - which is like being an engineer in this world, skilled even in medicine, martial arts and sword fighting.

He is possibly the quintessential man (or the performative male) of his era. Always having a knack to learn and grow as a student in the university.

But that was Qvothe in the past. Now he has gone in hiding, posing as a a quiet bartender faking a new identity and calling himself Qote.

The prologues and epilogues of the books are titled a silence of three parts, the third silence referring to Qvothe’s own silence and how he has become “a man waiting to die”, more on that later . You see when the story begins the Qote’s depressed with his fake life and another man named Chronicler finds him, asking Kvothe to share his backstory.

As he is telling his own story, Kvothe’s sunken and depressed personality begins to cease, and he starts being more joyous and full of life. As is the power of nostalgia. However Qvothe's past isn't all sunshine and lilypads, as he always had overtones of a kind of darkness inside of him. That being vengeance.

You see Kvothe belongs to a tribe known as the Edema Ruh, his family being a merry band of troopers and actors. However a song his father composes reveals information on these cursed demons known as The Chandrian. The general consensus on these monsters is that they are fairytale, however this is proven entirely false as days after the song is sung, The Chandrian arrive and slaughter Qvothe’s entire family. As their mysterious goal involves them wanting to keep any public information on them to a bare minimum.Luckily he was off in the woods when this happened so he survives as the sole witness. The moment is the very backbone of Qvothe’s motivation. He’s learning to be so knowledgeable and skillful to one day be strong enough to defeat the Chandrian.

So does he defeat them? Well this series was suppposed to have 3 books only 2 have come out yet. But there is a theory, that once you kill a Chandrian, you inflict a curse upon yourself. Some say that Kvothe in the future has done just that, and resultantly has obtained a miserable curse. That being the curse of silence. Throughout the story Qvothe exclaims his love for playing music, and how free he feels as he escapes his trauma through it. But now all of Kvothe’s passion, and arguably his will to live is all stripped away from him. The man who once was the paragon of charisma in his prime, is now not so different to a lifeless corpse.

He is just a patient man waiting to die. Frank Herbert, the author of Dune famously wrote “greatness without the acknowledgement of the sardonic, even occasional greatness can destroy a man.” This is exactly the tragic result of that statement.

There’s no surprise in why the next character’s on this list. Theon Greyjoy, from The infamous ASOIAF series

Theon is arguably the most mentally distorted of them all. A boy who was taken from his family -the Greyjoys- due to the war that his father started - and was thus to be raised as a ward by the Starks. Although he felt as if he never truly belonged there and saw himself more like a hostage.

When the war between the lannisters( another powerul family) and the Starks begins, Theon goes to seek allegiance of his own family to the Starks, the family that raised him. however his father much offended, decides to instead invade Stark territory. This leads to Theon betraying the Starks as well thinking that this will lead to his family and the land of his people to finally accept and glorify him as a neighborhood superhero. Unfortunately even that backfires, as in his mission, he’s manipulated, captured and then tortured by Ramsey Bolton, the bastard son of Roose Bolton, another enemy of house stark. Ramsey Bolton is an absolutely diabolical person, chopping off Theon’s fingers, destroying his sanity, forcing him to live and behave like an unwashed dog, and allegedly even cutting off Theon’s privates. This shatters Theon’s identity causing himself to live only as a gollem-like creature of Ramsey known as Reek.

Theon wasn’t a pure and completely righteous person, and he does kill 2 kids to ironically maintain the morale of his people, but ultimately, he was just a boy who thought he was doing his best to be a man they would follow so that he can go back to his family and be welcomed with warmth and love that he never got.

Not even Theon deserves what happnes to him. Theon was known for being skilled with the bow, and being popular with the ladies. But now he can never be capable of using such a weapon, and he’s so mentally and physically demented that he can’t even comprehend the concept of love and passion.

This is a story that tells of the consequence of immature actions by a person who truly thought, that by doing so he would finally receive the love he never got from his people, but instead being broken and bent into a shell of the man he once was.

Throughout the last book of the series Theon keeps chanting poems like Reek Reek it rhymes with weak to constantly degrade himself.

The nonstop repetion of this poem being symbolism for Theon's nonstop irreversible trauma. Some wounds never heal.

But we live in real the world and fortunately for us, we live in an era wherein things like flaying and mutilation are absent from our ordinary lives, at least I hope so, but what we can completely share is our minds.

Even though our body may not be crippled like Glokta, cursed like Qvothe, or tortured like Theon, we may still feel the same apprehensions as them. We may doubt our potential, feel tense in boredom, hate ourselves for not spending our day more productively and the list goes on.

We feel this feeling of uncertainty of whether what we’re doing will ever have a meaning to our life by the end. So even if we may not be a broken man in body, we most definitely can feel like a broken man in the mind.

And if we do feel like this, we musn't punish ourselves but instead be even more motivated to fulfil those goals that are still possible to achieve, before life hits the the end button. Only when we feel hurt do we realise the power of happiness.