 What would you say the biggest difference between fantasy for kids and fantasy for adults is? Your first instinct might be that it has to do with the maturity of the content, e.g. kids books won't have graphic violence or sex scenes, nor will they deal with mature themes like the struggle between noble ideals and harsh reality or the corrupting influence of religious authorities. But there are things aimed at adults that don't deal with any of that either, and as for violence, kid stuff deals with plenty of that too. Is someone getting stabbed any less violent just because you can't see any blood? Are monsters that disintegrate when killed much different than those that don't? Not really. I would argue that the primary difference between things aimed at kids and adults, especially fantasy, is the complexity of it and how much the hero is the center of the world. That goes for the storyline, the characters, the world, and the themes. The stories are usually straightforward tales of good versus evil where the heroes work to save the world as opposed to multi-faceted affairs with a bunch of different actors all vying for supremacy. Likewise, the main character is usually some sort of chosen one with super special powers and is the only one who can save everybody. None of this is bad per se, nor is it exclusive to things for younger audiences, but fantasy for adults, especially modern fantasy, tries to be more complicated. Our minds have absorbed more information, so it's harder to stimulate us and we need something different to do so. Other people matter to the fate of the world and the protagonist, and in some cases the world isn't even being saved. The conflict is much smaller. Ranger's Apprentice is a notable exception to this rule. A lot of people my age were infatuated by it in the late aughts and early tens. It's a tale all about a young boy named Will who desires to become a knight so he can go off and fight bad guys. He doesn't get to, but he still becomes a hero in his own way. Instead of a knight, he becomes a ranger who are essentially spies for the King of Arlen. He never becomes the greatest fighter on earth. He doesn't discover any amazing legendary powers that allow him to wreck armies. He never even saves the world. Will and the other heroes handle small-scale problems that are easier to understand and, ironically, easier to grasp the enormity of. The series starts with Will, a young boy in the kingdom of Arlen who was orphaned during a rebellion by a lord named Morgorath. Morgorath. That name is just trying to sound evil. He and the other orphans were made wards of their local lord, and now that they're turning 15, they're all being selected to become apprentices to craftmasters. Basically, they can learn to become carpenters or horse breeders or something. It's a nicer, imaginary version of medieval life since IRL they would have been on their own. Will wants to become a knight, obviously, because knights are cool. However, he's too small and so he gets rejected. He's heartbroken until a ranger named Halt agrees to take him on as his apprentice, and thus the story unfolds. At first, Will is nervous about the idea of becoming a ranger since average people know very little about them. Halt is just this old dude that hangs around on the periphery of the castle, and there are rumors that rangers can turn themselves invisible or perform other magical acts. We quickly learn that's not true. In fact, there's no magic in this series. None. There are a few points when the characters come across something that seems to defy the laws of physics, but there's always a mundane explanation for it. The rangers wear camouflaged cloaks and train in moving around without making noise or being seen, which is what makes people think that they can turn invisible. That's why Halt made Will an apprentice too. He set up a test to see if he could sneak into the Lord's tower without being caught, and Will pulled it off. Morgorath has an army of inhuman creatures called Wargulls, but they aren't controlled through magic. It's through an odd type of hypnosis, which only works because the Wargulls are stupid. There's a whole story arc later with Will investigating a wizard who lives in the forest and learning that all his feats are just illusions. And because there's no magic, there's also no chosen ones, or prophecies, or demigods, or anything else like that. None of the characters have special powers that set them apart as the one who will save the world. They have natural talents that they train with. Realism doesn't automatically make a story better, but it does help it stand out from the crowd of books about magical chosen ones who went to some sort of hidden school, which were totally not Harry Potter, I promise. Will slowly learns more about being a ranger. Basically, they act as spies for the King of Arlen, sniffing out threats to stability and occasionally eliminating them. So they train in things like stealth, archery, blending in with the civilian populations, tracking targets in the wilderness, and horseback riding. After a few months, Will gets pretty good at all of this. However, he doesn't become an expert on par with Holt after the first book. It takes many years of training to reach that point. And that's a small detail I really liked. Will is naturally very good at being sneaky while being very bad at fighting. It still takes him a lot of hard work to get to an expert level at one and a passable level at the other. Whenever combat arrives, he tends to just fire arrows at people. For kids who also feel like their particular skill set isn't valued, this was a reassuring idea. Maybe you aren't good at math, or you aren't athletic, or you're dyslexic, but you're very good at something more niche, like cooking, or making jokes, or overthinking books written for children and putting your thoughts on the internet. Things that aren't valued as much by society or traditional educational institutions. Seeing Will fail to attain the career everyone puts the most stock in, while still finding a position where he can be useful and be satisfied is similar, and probably cathartic for a lot of kids. Plus, this is one of the only things I've ever seen that acknowledges how strong you have to be to fire a longbow. For some reason, archers are always considered to be the weak, speedy characters, and that irks me. Here, Halt is strong enough to lift grown men over his head with little effort. It's a small detail that greatly amused me. After the opening, it's difficult to talk about the story here because the books are split into a few different arcs. At first, it seems like Morgorath will be the primary villain, then he dies in Book 2. Then Will is taken to another country as a slave and his friends go to rescue him. After they arrive, they find out that an army of barbarians is coming to conquer the world and they have to stop them. Then one of their friends gets kidnapped and they rescue him from an Arabian desert filled with subtle racial stereotypes. Then Will becomes a full ranger and stops a rebellious lord from trying to overthrow the king of Arlen, and so on. It's no secret that I'm not a fan of this type of episodic storytelling. It makes it difficult to build up long-running character arcs or have any proper climax, and you run the risk of trying to constantly one-up yourself by escalating every adventure. You start off by fighting bandits and before you know it, you're flying to the moon to kill an alien god, which is basically the plot of every JRPG from the 90s. Ranger's Apprentice avoids the worst of this, like I said, Will and Company never save the world. They save a few countries, but that's as close as it gets. Still, the climax of the series is a tad unsatisfying since it revolves around the fate of a country we've never heard of until just now. However, I'm not here to harp on the negatives. I'm here to celebrate for once, so let's talk about what is, in my opinion, the best part of the series. The battle for Scandia, or as it's called outside the US, the Oak Leaf Bearers, is the fourth book in the series. At the beginning, Will has escaped from slavery, but he's still stuck in Scandia, far from home. He comes across some foreign warriors before Holt finds him and they realize that Scandia is being invaded by people called the Temuji. The Temuji are a group of horse-based nomads who nearly conquered the Western world 20 years previously. They're loosely based on the Mongols and other Eurasian steppe peoples that existed over the centuries. The only reason they pulled back from their previous conquest was because their leader died back home and they needed to go back and pick a successor. Now they're returning to gain access to Scandia's ships, which they will then use to invade Arlen. Holt and Will manage to bring news to some friendly Scandians and help them prepare to beat back the invasion. The Scandian leader, called an Oberyarl, wants to simply gather up his men in attack, even if it doesn't work, at least he'll get to go to Valhalla. Holt talks him out of it though, since the Temuji have several advantages and it'll just result in Scandia being conquered. How are the Temuji so good at conquering? Are they just better warriors than everyone else? Are their cavalry archers just so amazing? Is it through sheer luck? Nope, it's through clever logistics and battlefield communication. The commanders have a series of colored flags that they use to communicate with their soldiers during the fighting, and at night they use colored lanterns instead. This allows them to maneuver much quicker than anyone they go up against. On top of that, pretty much their whole army is made up of cavalry, which means they move quickly, even when they have to carry supplies with them. And just like real steppe nomads, they're masters of the recurve bow, giving them an advantage over those who can only fight in melee combat. This is similar to how real nomadic empires worked, but different enough to be interesting. But I'm a nerd. Most kids wouldn't give a shit about that. They would care that, much like how Will and Holt gain all their victories through intelligence, hard work, and generations of men before them refining their craft to pass it down, the Temuji conquered their empire through cleverness, not brute force. It makes them more interesting villains since you have to outthink them. That's just one more way in which John Flanagan could have taken the easy way out, but didn't. Most stuff, especially stuff written for kids, would just have the heroes be better at magic or fighting. Here they have to gather information, formulate a plan, prepare themselves, train others, and be able to improvise when things go awry. As a kid, I found that far more engaging than simply having two sides crash into each other until the heroes win. Here's their plan to defeat the Temuji. First, Holt sends a detachment of Scandians to harass their supply lines. He specifically tells them not to get bogged down and instead just to slow down the trains. After a few attacks, the Temuji are forced to spend time every day just getting themselves into formation and moving slowly to avoid ambushes. This has three effects. One, it negates their speed advantage. Two, it makes their leaders realize that the Scandians are smarter than they thought, so they're more cautious going forward. And three, it buys the heroes time to prepare. Then, Will trains a large group of Scandian slaves to be archers. He doesn't have time to make them into individual marksmen, he just trains them to aim at large masses of enemies and fire as a unit. This doesn't completely negate the Temuji's range advantage, but it means they can't just wait at a distance and pepper the Scandians until they break. Because the Scandians don't have archers, for some reason. That's kind of dumb. Even if they looked down on it and see it as unmanly, they'd have to have a few, that's what the classical age Greeks did. They were called Toxatai, and mostly made up of lower class citizens. Finally, the heroes lured the Temuji into attacking them at a well fortified position. This is self-explanatory, it's easier to kill someone when they're unable to effectively utilize their superior numbers and you can hide behind a wall. What follows is a fun battle. Will and his archers inflict heavy casualties on the Temuji from their hiding spot, the Scandians clash with the Temuji at melee range, there's some back and forth, all the stuff you want from a battle. Will and the archers wind up being cornered and have to beat off an attack from the cavalry, they manage it, barely, but with heavy casualties. The Temuji eventually retreat. Is it because the heroes assassinate their leader? Maybe because they smash the army so badly that they have no choice? Nope. The Temuji leader realizes that they could win if they kept pushing, but they would take such heavy casualties that they'd be unable to continue to Arlen, so he cuts his losses and heads home. It's a subtle change from just about every other fantasy series. In those, the evil army is destroyed beyond all repair because obviously the good guys would never have to abide by technological and geopolitical realities of the world they inhabit. Sometimes war isn't about winning so much as it's about not losing. After that, the heroes forge a treaty between Arlen and Scandia that'll prevent Scandians from raiding them, then they go home. Will has offered the chance to join the royal scouts, a corps in the king's army that trains archers, but he refuses so that he can continue his ranger training. While the later books were all solid, they never reached this level again. It's neat that we get to see Will grow up, become a full ranger, and explore more of the world. Most series aimed at kids wouldn't do that. But while they still have plenty of smart plans and scheming villains, they never reach the same heights. Frankly, if this had been the end of the series, I'd have been more than satisfied. It has all the makings of a great climax. And since I can't end this without complaining a bit more, let's discuss the world building for a minute. Rather than just being a hidden part of our world, Ranger's Apprentice takes place in a wholly original fantasy realm. That's neat. It sets itself apart from all the hidden magical world settings that I was reading at the time. That said, the world building is lazy. Every country is an obvious parallel to a real world one. The heroes are from an island nation called Arlen where everybody is obviously English. They share the island with a northern country called Picta from the Picts, and Celtica from the Celts. There's also a nearby island called Hibernia, and that's literally just the Roman name for Ireland. Then there's Nihonja, clearly just Japan. Tootlunt? Could that maybe be Germany? Scandia is just an amalgam of all Scandinavian countries, and so on. Basing a fictional culture on a real one is very common, however those usually try to change things up at least a little. Here, Scandia is still run by Yarls and Ober-Yarls. They still raid and viking long ships. They still go to Valhalla when they die, and they still live in the cold mountainous north. There's zero creativity here, and that goes for every other culture too. And rant. To put it in brief, the Rangers' apprentice is smarter and subtler than even a lot of adult fantasy. Real geopolitical issues get mixed in with simple characters and stories. This doesn't talk down to kids. At the same time, there's nothing here that kids would have trouble following, or that would be inappropriate for them. To a lot of young readers, this was their first foray into something resembling epic or heroic fantasy. Most kid stuff involves someone from our world discovering a magical underground, or going to another world to become the chosen one. Here, Will is just a smart kid who becomes a smart adult and helps to save the day a couple of times. To some that might be a criticism. To me, it's a unique, fun way to showcase adventures. How the hell is this kid series more original than most adult epic fantasy? Huge shout out to everybody who watched this far. I'm not sure who would want to listen to my thoughts for this long, but especially big shout out to all of my ten dollar nut patrons, which include Oppo Savilainen, Olivia Rayan, Brother Santotis, Buffy Valentine, Karolina Clay, Dan Anceliovic, Echo, Joel, Carcat Kitsune, Liza Rudikova, Lord Tiebreaker, Madison Lewis Bennett, Marilyn Roxy, Michael Weingartner, microphone, peep-the-toed, sad-martigan, tobacco-crow, tombini, and va-victus. 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