Candy and spinach are two of our most important concepts here at Mythcreants. Candy is anything that makes a character look cool or otherwise glorifies them. Conversely, spinach is anything that humbles a character or takes them down a peg or two. The best characters have a balance: candy, so they’re fun to watch or read about, and spinach, so they stay relatable.
But spinach presents a real problem for a lot of storytellers. It’s not always fun to give our precious babies actual flaws or problems. And yet, these same storytellers also understand that spinach is necessary, which is how you end up with fake spinach. In these cases, storytellers claim that a character has problems, but these problems don’t hinder them in a meaningful way. Often, fake spinach is just poorly disguised candy, heaping even more glory on a hero while trying to make them relatable. Let’s examine what that looks like in the wild.
1. Xander Harris
At the beginning of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Xander is an unpopular nerd. He gets picked on for not being cool, and he doesn’t even have the comfort of being super smart like his friend Willow. This makes him super relatable, right? Well, there’s just one problem.
Okay, there are actually several problems, but we’re not talking about how creepy and sexist Xander can be. Instead, we’re focusing on the main reason his unpopular nerd persona doesn’t work: Xander is incredibly good looking. Actor Nicholas Brendon is not only classically handsome, but he’s also built like an Olympic athlete. The show tries to hide this by putting Xander in really loose clothes, but it’s still obvious.
This is a common problem in Hollywood, an industry infamous for only putting beautiful people in starring roles. It’s easy to find a cornucopia of supposedly plain heroines played by gorgeous actresses, but Xander proves it can happen with men too. Yay for equality?
Xander’s muscular build in particular sabotages his image as the bullied nerd. The first season has several sequences where other guys give him a hard time, but Xander looks like he could rip them in half like a phone book. Then suddenly the show emphasizes how hot Xander is when he joins the swim team for an episode, but afterward it’s back to being the unpopular nerd. This inconsistency makes his spinach even harder to take seriously. The audience is supposed to empathize with Xander’s school problems, but he looks like the perfect popular kid.
2. Nick Campbell
The novel Super Powereds: Year One is about a group of five misfits training to be superheroes. Three of them have really impressive powers, while the remaining two do not. These two are Alison and Nick, and their supposedly lackluster abilities are used to give them a lot of spinach.
This works fine for Alison, as her power is actually pretty weak. She can fly but not especially fast, and she doesn’t have anything to help her in a fight. Considering how many heroes get flight as a side effect of their main power, this is pretty disheartening. It sometimes even works a little too well, as it’s not entirely clear why Alison is even at this school, since she doesn’t seem to have the ability or desire to be a superhero.*
With Nick, this dynamic completely fails because his power is luck. If that sounds vague, it is. Nick’s power can cause just about anything to happen since nearly anything can be justified under the umbrella of “good luck.” Most immediately, we know he can use his power to rig games of chance and always hit his target with a gun.
That’s already really strong, since most supers in this setting aren’t bulletproof, but it doesn’t even begin to cover all the things he can do. With enough luck, Nick can simulate nearly any skill a human could have. Hacking? He just happens to find the password written on a sticky note. Survival? Good thing someone left a supply cache out here. Strategy? Luckily, he guessed exactly what the enemy would do.
Despite all that, the book tries to portray Nick as an underdog because his power isn’t flashy like laser eyes or teleportation. That might work for a reader who’s never seen a superhero story before, but for the rest of us, it’s obvious that Nick’s power is incredibly useful.
3. Katniss Everdeen
Welcome to Panem, home of the Hunger Games, a contest where 24 kids battle for survival. They have to find food and shelter in a massive arena and avoid a slew of deadly obstacles, all while trying to kill each other. Katniss is our protagonist, and she’s quite the underdog. Her only skills are stealth, tracking, foraging, navigation, hunting, and archery. Oh wait.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that Katniss possesses the ideal skill set for winning the Hunger Games, but the book can’t acknowledge that. If it did, there’d be no tension. Instead, the narration tries to make Katniss feel like an underdog by emphasizing how big and strong the other tributes are, with special emphasis on their skills in hand-to-hand combat.
Again, this falls apart once we think about how the games are structured. In a contest lasting days, survival is at least as important as combat. At the same time, in such a large arena, melee combat is a secondary skill at best. This just makes the reader wonder why the other tributes aren’t better trained in the most valuable skills.
Katniss’s only real spinach is that her main combat skill requires a bow, and she doesn’t start out with one. That’s good, but it’s still clear to any reader that Katniss is an easy favorite to win. And once you see that there’s a bow in the starting equipment, it’s obviously only a matter of time until she gets her hands on it, even if you didn’t get one of the covers that show her nocking an arrow.
4. Harry Potter
In this series of witchcraft and wizardry, the Boy Who Lived is a classic blank protagonist. That makes it extra important that he get enough candy for wish fulfillment and enough spinach so the reader can identify with him. This makes fake spinach doubly attractive, since it seems to be able to do both at the same time.
Enter parseltongue, Harry’s ability to talk to snakes. On the one hand, that’s really cool, and it helps Harry out on several occasions. Obvious candy. On the other hand, it’s also supposed to be spinach because it shows how Harry is more like Voldemort than he thought. Except it doesn’t, actually. There’s nothing inherently bad about parseltongue, and Old Voldy having it is completely coincidental to his being a Dark Lord.
Harry’s trend of fake spinach continues with his school work. On the one hand, he’s constantly struggling, both in class and with homework. This is super relatable, as most of us have struggled academically at some point. But at the same time, the books also make a point that Harry is really smart and always does well on his final tests. He even does better than Hermione on Defense Against the Dark Arts, the most glorified class in the series.
Even the brightest kids have trouble in school sometimes, so this could have worked once or twice, but the books employ it constantly. Pretty soon, it becomes unbelievable that Harry can be having that much trouble in school while also acing all of his tests. Rather than making Harry more relatable, the fake spinach just makes him frustrating.
5. Harry Dresden
As the protagonist of a noir detective series, Harry Dresden* has a lot of candy by default. He’s cool and confident, he knows all the seediest back alleys, and he’s always got a sarcastic quip for the villains. On top of that, he’s a wizard, for even more candy. How is the story supposed to give this guy any spinach?
One way would be to make Dresden bad at evocation, the most combat-oriented magic, and that’s exactly what the early books do. This is a brilliant move, as it means that Dresden is great at getting into trouble, but not so great at getting out of it. He’s in over his head, face to face with powerful monsters that he can’t defeat through brute force.
Except we quickly learn that when the books say he’s “bad” at evocation, what they really mean is that he’s “too good” at it. His evocation spells are always really powerful, which means he can’t do fine detail work very well. This might be a problem if the Dresden Files featured a lot of delicate carving competitions, but it doesn’t. It’s a book series about blasting monsters directly in their ugly faces, something Dresden is actually great at.
Despite this obvious contradiction, Dresden insists for several books that evocation isn’t his strong suit. Sometimes, we even meet other wizards who supposedly have more fine control, but it doesn’t seem to give them any advantage in a fight. Eventually, the books give up this charade and just admit that Dresden is a fantastically powerful battle mage, but it takes a surprisingly long time.
As I was compiling this list, I noticed that the vast majority of my examples came from books rather than TV shows or movies. I suspect this is because in a book, the author can use narration to convince readers of something that isn’t true. We might believe Dresden is bad at evocation because that’s what we were told. In a visual medium, it would be immediately obvious how powerful he is. While it might be tempting to try this in your own story, I don’t recommend it. Readers will always see through your trick eventually, and it won’t make you look good.
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Great article!
I finished the last of Mike Carey’s Felix Castor books fairly recently. One thing I really like about that series is that Castor has such a good balance.
You might start the first book expecting Castor to be this over-candied cool urban fantasy wizard in a trench coat, but first of all, magic in this universe is really limited. It can only be used to control ghosts and demons; it cannot directly affect other humans or things native to our world. So Castor can already be, say, threatened with a gun or simply kicked and beaten by someone strong, and unable to immediately do anything about it. Even when it comes to ghosts and demons, Castor is a good mage, but not the best. The books say so AND consistently show it. There are entities simply above his power level.
Finally, he’s actually shot down by other characters now and again when he quips something sarcastic. He doesn’t walk away from every single little verbal dual with a win. (And it also happens on occasion that he verbally shoots down someone else, and then immediately thinks to himself that “that was a bit mean and unnecessary”.)
Yep, that sounds like the right balance to go for. Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll add it to my list, which admittedly is already way too long.
Very informative article, thanks Oren!
I recently finally got around to finish the Johannes Cabal series (five novels and a couple of short stories, but I’d become distracted during “The Fall of the House Cabal”, the last novel).
I like how Johannes is a very unsympathetic hero (if a necromancer of some little infamy can be called a ‘hero’ at all). Johannes is pretty much antisocial and more than just a bit homocidal at the beginning of the first novel (to his excuse, he’s been without a soul for about ten years) and a person who has no qualms about killing (and years earlier had no qualms about locking his only brother into a crypt with a vampire). He’s changing over the course of the stories and gets more human once he gets his soul back and with it his conscience. Still, he stay a pretty cold-blooded and antisocial person on the whole. The nice thing is that Cabal’s strength are played against a world in which a lot of people want to see him dead for a variety of reasons (authorities mostly for his necromancy, hence he starts out the second novel in a cell, awaiting execution).
Cabal isn’t a strong fighter, albeit good enough with both a gun and a foil (he has the good old blade stick at his disposal), so once the enemy is prepared to fight and he can’t use a gun for quick killing, he’s usually in a weaker position.
He can do magic, but not much of it, so it’s not as if he can call down destruction on his enemies (unless, in rare cases, when he’s teamed up with Madame Zarenyia, a freelancing succubine devil). He’s a good planner, but not all that good at improvising (unless the situation is so desperate that his instinct takes over). On the other hand, he’s not in the habit of panicking and usually keeps a cool head (see ‘cold-blooded’) and he’s not averse to ending lives, which often gives him more options
With the stories often throwing him into situations where he has to improvise, which mostly means ‘running, hiding, planning, returning,’ he never comes off as overpowered, yet it’s clear that as soon as he can take a breather and think things through, he can overcome obstacles with a minimum of endangering himself (although ‘minimum’ is a very relative expression here). It’ ‘taking a breather’ which often proves a challenge while he’s being chased by ghouls, has half the secret police after him, or is in an unreal mirror reality where London has been reduced to a nightmare-scape. Or while he’s looking for a long-dead Chinese sorcerer in the abandoned parliament of hell with a succubine, spider-esque demon who enjoys flirting and the word ‘poik’ for some reason.
That does sound really interesting. I’d be concerned about the likability of a character like Cabal, but some stories can make that work, so I’ll keep an eye out for this the next time I have a gap in my reading list.
The author keeps the reader close to Cabal’s mind, so that you know what he’s thinking and why he’s doing that. His reason for becoming a necromancer in the first place (which is unveiled at the end of the first novel) also makes him a little more human. And, as said, he becomes more human over time. The guy from “The Fall of the House Cabal” isn’t the same as “Johannes Cabal: The Necromancer”. He’ll never be the most soft-hearted of people, but he’s certainly different from the guy who walks into hell to speak to Satan at the beginning of the first book.
My personal favourite is the short story “A Long Spoon,” so if you have a little spare time at some point, you could check that one out – it doesn’t need any information from the novels to work.
1) You know, for all the crap given about Andrew Garfield playing Peter Parker in the Amazing Spider-Man movies, I did like that he at least seemed socially awkward (I even head canon that his version is on the autism spectrum). Which would make his unpopular kid status a little more plausible. Xander doesn’t seem to have that.
2) Domino in Deadpool 2 is proof that luck is an OP power. At least that movie was a comedy.
3) To be fair, it’s mentioned that the Careers hoard the supplies they find so they don’t have to hunt or gather food and can focus on what they do best; killing other tributes. So Katniss’s hunting only puts her at a slight advantage over other non-career tributes.
4) The only time I can think of when Harry’s lack of academic success came up to hinder him was when he didn’t score high enough in Potions to take the advanced class, which is required to become an Auror. But that is quickly negated with a new professor.
5) The lack of finesse was supposed to be that Dresden has a tendency to set the building on fire (hence why Butcher named him after the town in Germany), thus getting himself into more trouble. It doesn’t happen enough to hinder him, though. Same with his money problems.
The entertainment industry isn’t going to start casting average or even below average looking actors anytime soon for a variety of reasons. This means that the only way to portray an unpopular nerd is to give them social and personality traits that alienate people like ranting to long about their particular hobbies. I suppose it could happen in real life but physically attractive people tend to get tutorials in social skills because people like being around them. So even if they don’t have a latent social sense, chances of them being completely clueless socially is not going to happen.
My wife was reading over my shoulder, so I explained candy and spinach to her just now. She loves it!
Yes, it spreads! Soon all the world will be naught but candy and spinach!
For a good example of a character that has an interesting take on spinach, I recommend Aaronovitch’s River of London series. Peter grant, the main character, has some major problems: One, is he’s just learning magic, being taught by a person who hasn’t had an apprentice in over fifty years, and has started late in life. Add to the fact that overuse of magic literally causes brain damage. This isn’t just a “mention it and it goes away” thing, it actually kills someone later in the series.
The unique problem Peter faces though is that he’s a cop. Specifically, part of the Metropolitan Police Service; as a result, he has to deal with the bureaucracy that’s designed for dealing with conventional crime. As a result, he can’t just go haring off firing fireballs at a suspect- he has to clear things with his superiors for things like interrogations or entering a crime scene, has his inquiries on the crime database tracked, and has to do a lot of paperwork.
It’s good because not only does this force Peter to deal with superiors, it makes him part of an organization, and there’s a lot one can do dramatically when one may be highly special, but still a low-ranking cog in the machine.
Sounds interesting.
The Laundry Files by Charles Stross might be similar.
I like your idea of spinach vs candy so I’ll carry it one step further. Sometimes the spinach makes you better. The spinach you chose for Katniss for instance is that she has not had the training of the more popularized contestants, because she has been too busy struggling to survive. I argue and I believe the theme of the book concurs that, real life struggle is better training than gym time. What I’m saying is I’m not sure that was supposed to be a big “flaw,” but more of characteristic. I see Katniss’s flaws as being emotionally closed off and unwilling to form bonds. I love how that flaw makes her vulnerable, but also allows her to “win.” I find a book much more enjoyable if a character embraces or addresses their flaws, depending on whether the flaw is changeable or not, and grows from it. Flaws should not always be static, imo.
One of the most rewarding parts of Harry Potter is seeing Harry grow through addressing his flaws. Parlsetongue is more a clue to how the books will end than candy coated spinach. Harry’s academic struggle is endearing. Who hasn’t struggled and worried only to do fine on a test because we struggled and worried. And sometimes he just flat out bombed them. Even the time he did well in potions just not well enough for Snape. Yes he was lucky that Slughorn came a long, but we (those of us who had to wait for the book to come out) spent a whole year thinking Harry wouldn’t be able to pursue his dream.
You’re right about serving of spinach you identified for Xander and Dresden. I always thought maybe Xander wasn’t popular because he wasn’t willing to be mean to Willow the way the Cordelia seemed to require Buffy to be in order to be popular. I bought Xander as a nerd, but I was 16 when I watched the show the first time and my critical thinking was not vast or deep. And I think Jim Butcher just decided it would be more fun if Harry was a badass. I think he’s right. And I applaud Jim for continuing to up the stakes with the real spinach he keeps serving Harry, like physical trauma and soul endangering job opportunities.
Spinach is meant to make you stronger, not just get caught in your teeth.
1. Being conventionally attractive doesn’t make you immune from bullying. I was always a pretty athletic kid, but people still bullied me because I was socially awkward and had “nerdy” interests. Also, being fit doesn’t make you good in a fight, especially against multiple people. Not to mention, violence isn’t a good solution even if you win.
The inclusion of Harry Dresden on the list is kind of stretching things to make it fit. The idea that his difficulty handling evocation magic is supposed to be his spinach is a dubious claim, since the actual claim he makes is that his weakness is control. Which is also about efficiency, in that all he do is sling overkill blasts that exhaust him rapidly, rather than a the right about of power for the job. This is also not the first IP in which the author of this article has refused to acknowledge the author’s portrayal of a balance between raw power and efficiency of control, suggesting that Oren maybe has a bit of a power fixation. In both The Dresden Files and The Wheel of Time, the magic of the characters is set up like a gas tank, with a finite limit to the quantity of power any individual can weild within a given time period, making it obvious that there are advantages to being able to ration your allotment efficiently and be able to accomplish things with finese and skill instead of trying to brute force every objective, and in both cases, he has dismissed one side of the argument by insisting that having the bigger gas tank is the only important metric.
The claim is also disingenuous, even if you accept that presentation of Harry Dresden’s evocation power. First, it’s not ONLY evocation. Harry characterizes his magic across the board as a case of a lot of natural power, without the control or finese or the effectiveness that comes with decades of practice that experienced wizards have. Even Harry’s own pupil can show him up with her superior natural dexterity at casting some sorts of spells, forcing him to rely on her to perform those feats, which frequently undermines his authority as her teacher and encourages her to get cocky and blow him off or challenge him. Secondly, “evocation magic” is just one aspect of Harry’s story. A significant issue is Harry dealing with temptation and the morality of his magic and the potential for abuse and harm, and the dangers of becoming arrogant. The first serious antagonist he encounters in the first book of the series is a Warden (a wizard cop) who is seeking to execute him for violating a probation against using forbidden powers. Harry has to accomplish his objectives of solving a crime and eventually confronting the perpetrator while under the scrutiny of a hostile evaluator who is presented as absolutely able to execute him, with Harry’s abilities nowhere near sufficient to defend himself from the Warden. In that circumstance, Oren’s dismissal of Harry’s raw magical strength being spinach is absurd, since overkill could have fatal consequences for him. There are other aspects of being a wizard beside how much raw power one has. Wizards cannot use electronic technology and cannot even be near it safely, and even mechanical devices are prone to malfunctions and disruptions. Furthermore, it is explicitly shown that the stronger the wizard, the greater this effect. As the series progresses, we meet a number of very weak or limited magic practitioners, who either don’t have much power available to use or can only do one or two tricks. These people can use technology freely, but Harry can’t even carry a cellphone. The magnetic strips on credit cards stop working after he carries them on his person for a while. A modern vehicle with too many electronic features breaks down when he drives it for an hour or so. He and other wizards of his level of power dare not fly on airlines, due to the certain havoc their powers wreak on the planes’ electronics. Another issue is that wizards are no stronger, faster or possessed of superior five senses or injury resistance than any other human being, but almost any adversary in the supernatural world has one or more of those qualities in abundance. The major advantage a wizard brings to the table is knowledge, which is critical to properly using magic, and due to their technology problems, wizards lack many research and study tools people take for granted. Furthermore, because it’s a modern setting, people simply don’t believe Harry when he warns about magical dangers, or tries to obtain knowledge that will help him understand a supernatural threat, so he cannot question them properly or convince them to cooperate with his efforts. By contrast, many supernatural threats and hostile entities do not share the weaknesses of wizards with regard to technology, so vampires, shapeshifting monsters, faeries and ancient demons can and do make use of the internet, telecommunications and electronic sensors. And all four of those enemies are physically more dangerous than Harry’s human meat sack.
Harry Dresden is a character who is almost infamous among well-informed fans for the amount of spinach to candy he has to cope with. Cherry-picking a single aspect of his candy to twist into a claim of false spinach, when in fact, Harry’s magical strength is not actually intended to BE spinach in the first place, is disingenuous at best, and really much closer to dishonest, if we are being frank. The Dresden Files itself is an excellent illustration of an author’s improvement and growth as a writer, so slagging on the series on a site claiming to be a resource for writers is very poor form.
I very much agree with Cannoli on this.
Also I always took Dresden’s loneliness and general distrust of other people (especially wizards) towards him as his main spinach.
The whole issue withe the evocation was not presented as all that important.
Bless you for putting this into words. The overkill aspect to his powers really is a hindrance in a lot of scenarios, and his lack of finesse bites him in the butt constantly. It’s almost Fake Candy, the powers are so cool-sounding but have so many practical reasons they wouldn’t be ideal.
Secondly, are you the same Cannoli who used to be a regular in the Cinnamonbunzuh comments section? You were one of the most astute people I’ve met in the entire Animorphs fandom, no mean feat, and I had a little jolt of happiness seeing the name.
(In related terms, Tobias wouldn’t be Fake Spinach, would he be? Probably closer to Fake Candy. Like, everything about him sounds cool as hell until he finds a way to make it depressing, from the living situation to the dad reveal. )
Yes, that was me. Thank you for the compliment. I am actually afraid I was a bit overbearing and opinionated on those boards sometimes, so it’s nice to hear someone liked it.
I would absolutely call it more Fake Candy than Fake Spinach. I think, though, that Tobias had both. The Candy was that his hard life as a hawk made him mentally tougher in some ways and more competent than some of his teammates in some ways, but it’s clear that he had very little going for him in terms of quality of life or prospects for the future. Even his relationship with Rachel seems like Candy, with the picked-on outsider getting to be with the hot girl, until her death shows exactly how little he has aside from that, and how uninvested he is in his own existence as a person.
Other examples of false spinach:
Michael Stackpole’s character Corran Horn in a considerable number of Star Wars pastiches, primarily the “X-Wing” series and “I, Jedi”. Horn is very close to a Mary Sue, especially as Stackpole often writes him getting the better of the characters from the Star Wars films or even other Star Wars writers’ books. But in an effort to give him flaws, Stackpole gives him “different” Force powers, that are initially presented as weaker, since he cannot perform certain feats we see Jedi and Sith do all the time in the movies. However, Stackpole makes him excellent at other things, like lightsaber fighting, and gives him other powers, like absorbing and channeling energy. Horn can stand in the middle of an explosion and absorb its power and walk away unharmed. His inability to use telekinesis doesn’t really seem much like spinach in that context.
A similar character is Androl in “The Wheel of Time.” Introduced as a background character who can use the One Power, that series’ version of magic, by the original author, Robert Jordan, he gets a larger role in the series when Jordan died and Brandon Sanderson took over. In an effort to add his own element to the series, Sanderson “took over” Androl, gave him a backstory and fleshed out his personality. He shows clear favoritism to his creation by making the backstory cool, making Androl smart and experienced in historical events that impress other characters, but no readers heard about them (because Sanderson made them up to buff Androl). Androl is suddenly revealed to be the one man keeping things running when his leaders are busy with the main plot of the series, and he ends up upstaging the established character who was intended to be the hero of their side plot. To balance all this characterization and backstory candy, Sanderson attempted to make Androl’s spinach be a lack of strength with the One Power. But he also gave Androl an advanced skill at making portals from one place to another, an ability called Traveling in the series. He can supposedly make portals far larger than characters with much greater strength and much more power available to their actions, despite that being a complete violation of how the magic system works. People with a specialized talent can do things more easily or more swiftly, but they cannot violate absolutely ratios of raw power to effect. The one character who would seem to be a precedent in being able to use an ability beyond the limits of her strength, specifically says she has honed her ability with decades, possibly centuries of practice. Androl has been using magic for mere months. And he is so adept and creative with the application of his portals, that he might as well not have any weakness in the amount of Power he can weild at all. His portals are more deadly weapons than the lightning bolts and fireballs everyone else fights with.
Personally I feel the Parseltongue example in Harry Potter is kind of missing the point, because while it’s true that parseltongue is a cool and useful power, it absolutely does present problems for Harry. Namely, he is socially ostracized by his peers after they hear him speak it and is suspected of being the one who is turning students to stone because of the power’s connection to dark wizards. This connection to the Dark Arts could potentially get Harry thrown out of school, and considering it’s a story centered around school and friendships, this is a pretty serious ramification for Harry, and I don’t think the power counts as “fake spinach”.
Can we talk about fake spinach in worldbuilding? By this I mean stories which depict a negative aspect of the setting in a backdoor glorifying way. This is particularly prevalent in historical and historical-inspired fantasy. For example, Mad Men contains surface level messaging about the health risks of smoking, but always shows cool, sexy, glamorous people smoking. Or “dystopias” that use the degradation of women to up the grittiness factor, but also eroticize it. You can tell when an author is paying lip service to a message but secretly reveling in the opportunity to be “bad.”
Good point! Yeah, that sucks.
I felt this so hard with Iain M Banks’ Culture novels, when he introduces an alien culture called “the Affront”. He’s like, oh, they’re so bad! That’s why the Culture calls them “the Affront”!
The powerful men abuse, torture and castrate their poor servants, and they rape women all the time. They have even genetically engineered women to find any sex painful, so they HAVE to be raped because they’ll never agree to it otherwise. Also in their culture they hand out medals to the most successful rapists, and they love to torture animals too just for the fun of it… and… and…
And then the human male protag, who’s portrayed in a positive light, is supposed to be extra open-minded for hanging out with these aliens and enjoying their culture. Instead of condemning it. Like a, uh, “less tolerant” person would…
Even if this human male hadn’t been described as so tolerant and great, it’s clear throughout the passages describing the Affront that Banks just LOOOOVES the fantasy of being a powerful man who can rape and torture to his heart’s content.
We actually have a post about that! When Dark and Gritty Is Just Exploitation
You might be interested in When Dark and Gritty is Just Exploitation, but I agree it would be interesting to revisit the subject with a comparison it to spinach/candy and fake character flaws.