If you consume instructional material on the craft of storytelling, one of the most common bits of advice is that your protagonist must change in some way over the course of the story. They have to learn something, become better, have a realization that their old way of doing things simply isn’t going to help them solve the problem they are struggling with.

According to screenwriting coaches, you’ll have a hard time selling a script with a main character that doesn’t grow or develop through the arc of the story. That’s why iconic characters like Batman or Captain America often get origin story films. The character ends up being who they are in the sequels. In the origin story, they have an arc where they go from being whatever they were to their final heroic selves. There is a real resistance in Hollywood to any character that doesn’t change over the course of the film.

There are certain literary genres where the most celebrated protagonists don’t change.

The sword & sorcery story is one of them.

Episodic stories

Sword & Sorcery emerged from the pulp magazines of the 1920’s and 1930’s. The stories are episodic. They are episodes that you can read in any order and still enjoy. The stories don’t vary much in structure or convention. The hero who faces similar (though different) challenges that are resolved in much the same way from tale to tale.

The episodic nature of the stories was brought about by the way they were sold. Each story had to be a self contained story or fit into a few issues as a short serial. Otherwise, the reader wouldn’t pick it up off the newsstand and the publisher wouldn’t make a sale. If you had to find and read ten previous issues to know what was going on, you might not give it a try.

As each magazine was trying to deliver an exciting action story to young men who loved those tales of adventure and bravado; the editors wanted characters that largely produced the same kind of story from issue to issue. In order to have stories that hit that action adventure nerve with their readers, the editors needed stories about a certain type of character. Typically, the heros were masculine men of action who were out doing exciting things and living a life of adventure.

In pulp stories, the protagonist’s is causing their own problems.

Pulp detectives get beat up for poking their noses into a gangster’s business because they are detectives who take cases from rich widows whose husbands have been murdered. If the detective wasn’t snooping around trying to reveal secrets that dangerous people wanted to stay secret, they wouldn’t get into trouble.

Conan causes his own problems. He sneaks into a tower or temple to steal the treasure. He goes pirating. He takes on jobs as a mercenary. He knows that someone is going to stand against him in all of these situations and doesn’t care. He’ll overcome them with his prowess.

Let’s compare this to high/epic fantasy. In much of the epic fantasy, the central problem of the story isn’t caused by the main character. It’s a dark lord, a god, an empire, a wizard causing problems that the protagonist is called to fight. Bilbo doesn’t go looking for adventure, Gandalf shows up and thrusts one into his face. His Tookish side impulsively responds to the offer and he runs after the dwarves without a hankie in his pocket. If Gandalf never shows up, Bilbo stays at home enjoying tea and biscuits.

The epic fantasy hero is responding to the call to be a hero.

The sword & sorcery hero is seeking fortune, glory and adventure for their own sake.

We don’t want them to change.

Conan is content with his life of adventure and sees no need to change. What’s more, we don’t want Conan to change. We like him just the way he is, thank you.

If Conan decided that his barbaric ways were no longer serving his interests and he needed to be more civilized, we’d probably pitch that story in the bin. If he decided to become a sheep farmer and the only time he fought was when sheep thieves showed up in his pasture, nobody would read those stories.

There’s never a moment where Conan thinks that he’d be better off being more civilized. He is always a barbarian,

It is the fact that he doesn’t change that we keep checking in with him and reading his stories.

Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser are about taking action. They don’t have any interest in becoming like their sorcerous patrons Ningauble of the Seven Eyes and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face. They have their swords, wits, and luck. That’s all they ever need.

The appeal of the sword & sorcery story is that we know we are getting an adventure story where a character we like faces a challenging, nearly undefeatable foe. We aren’t sure how they are going to get out of the scrape their in but we keep reading because the hero, being a person of action will figure it out and it is exciting to see how they do it.