10/29/25: (re)writing kolvis

I'm in the process of reworking my fantasy novel Meat City into a final draft.

The Fool is zero. Which means nothing but also unlimited possibility. Zero can become one. So the Fool can become anything, which implies that foolishness is a path to anything.

My initial conception of Kolvis the Swordless Swordsman was as "Kolvis the Unscrupulous." He was a fantasy character who fancied himself a hero but was so stupid he was capable of incredible evil. The thrust of Meat City was, initially, to be a satirical sword & sorcery quest about a man who thought of himself as a noble swordsman but at every turn was horrible, selfish, insanely violent. Then I started writing and almost immediately my perception of Kolvis shifted. Pretty quickly I renamed him in the subtitle from Kolvis the Unscrupulous to Kolvis the Swordless Swordsman and, crucially, I stopped seeing him as an ironic marionette that I could puppeteer through a satire and became someone I was actually rooting for.

While Meat City was still a story about Kolvis acting reprehensibly while believing himself to be a romantic figure, I started to see other facets, other colours emerging. Kolvis wasn't purely someone whose stupidity and selfishness led him to be cruel; he also had a kind of accidental courage. His inability to process the real implications of what was happening, abetted by his terminal self-absorbed delusion, gave him an ability to leap bravely into danger and, more interesting to me, made him indomitable, able to face horrors that would break a more circumspect person. I had initially based his characterization on impressions I had made of other fantasy heroes, particularly M. John Harrison's tegeus-Cromis ("who fancied himself more of a poet than a swordsman" and silently composes undoubtedly terrible poems in his head that we are never privvy to). As I wrote, Kolvis started to take on his own dimensions, and to become someone much more interesting to me. There was a limit to what could be done with first-draft Kolvis. How many stories can you tell about a piece of shit who doesn't know he's a piece of shit? One, probably. Then the joke gets repetitive. As I wrote that first draft, my understanding of Kolvis grew, and this new, deeper understanding was helped by the youtuber Izzy N. Griffin's explanation of the archetypical Fool of the tarot and his focus on how the Fool can become the Sage.

So Foolishness can lead to wisdom. Or the tyranny of the Fool King. Or unending foolishness. Or anything.

Now my idea of Kolvis has clarified a little and I see him better. He's still a mystery to me for sure, but I have a clearer idea of how he moves. He's still a piece of shit for sure, but I have more sympathy for him and I've seen how the qualities that make him capable of doing bad things also make him capable - just as accidentally - of doing good things. Before he was a farcical guy who would blunder through situations making everything worse. What excites me about him now is not just that he's a blundering ironic anti-hero but that his stupidity and selfishness can lead to any number of things: incredible cruelty and callousness, even atrocities, yes; also: bravery, wisdom, an ability to absorb and process trauma, nobility, (he's always thought of himself as noble, but in my earlier draft it was about the ironic contrast between his self-image as noble and his buffoonish actions, now he can be genuinely noble if only by accident) and who knows what else.

Meat City is about Kolvis's idiocy and delusional self-image manifesting in reprehensible actions (hopefully to comedic effect) but I hope that this deeper understanding of him leads, in this new draft, to a greater humanity in him. He's no longer a cypher for comedic purposes but a more complex character I hope. I find him fundamentally sympathetic. I think he's a capital-H Hero and I have plans for more stories that show different ways his particular idiocy can impact the world, good and bad. He is, almost, an innocent, and I think that's much more fun for me to write than just an ironic joke of a character. I feel like he is quite legible through Christian ethics.

I hope you are doing well.