Tfw no one discusses the Elric series

Never read it because a friend borrowed them before me at the only place we could get it.
I'll read it if I stumble upon a PDF one day, sounds pretty cool. Read a lot about it tho.

There are some ePub files out there for the first few books.

I'll check it out, I've always wanted to run the Chaosium Elric! game.

>How does it compare to other sword and sorcery I have read? In particular, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.
Wouldn't know.
What i can say is that Elric is the reverse Conan through and through.
By the end of the first book, he willingly abdicates the throne of his (failing) empire to the his evil cousin.
They're an easy read and Sailor on the Seas of Fate shows that there's a whole other can of worms associated with his universe.

So Turin

Sailor On the Seas of Fate is by far the most adventurous of the Elric novels

Elric isn't an edgelord, Stormbringer is. Elric just wants to read books and not sacrifice 12 couples on their wedding day as a pagan blood sacrifice to the gods of chaos, or roam the streets at night jacking off and raping anything that moves because the fucking previous emperor died and "that's just how we do things here."

i mean, going by a very technical reading of the text, Elric was deposed as emperor and exiled because he wasn't edgy *enough* for the rest of the Melniboneans.

>Elric was deposed as emperor and exiled
That wasn't the case. He makes it clear that he abdicates the thrones willingly to Yrkoon to try and stop him from being such a douche by making him regent and went on to see what the Young Kingdoms had to offer to try to fix his very broken civilisation.
He understood that something had gone wrong but didn't know what. By the end, when Yrkoon usurps the throne he decides to say fuck it and raze his own city to the ground. They had their chance.

>Fafhrd and Mouser

No comparison. They're kind of opposites, really. F&M was so funny, I couldn't put it down. Elric was so tryhard, it was difficult to read sometimes. Horny mercs with a taste for wine vs. a hateful cold steel cutter who projected his self-loathing onto everything else. tl;dr:

No comparison.

Arioch!
Arioch!
Blood and souls for Arioch!

>Elric was so tryhard,
It was written in the 60s as a response to Conan and Tolkien. What else was it gonna be?

Elric comes up, more than any other incarnation of the eternal champion really. When we talk about alignment, sword and sorcery, osr, conan, dark elves, pulp, warhammer chaos stuff, fantasy books, intelligent/demon swords, ritual magic, psychedelic fantasy, etc.

>tfw agak gagak
>tfw i am all faces

How do I get into this series?

Gollancz has the entire series. Buy the first book and dive the fuck in. Ignore Fortress of the Pearl and read the Moonbean Roads afterwards.
Elric at the End of Time is optional material.

Moorocks entire bibliography has a continuity so if you read anything else by him(see Corum/Erekose/Hawkmoon/Jerry Cornelius) expect to have alot of easter eggs.

Fun fact, this image was used for the swedish ripoff of D&D/Runequest/Stormbringer/WHFP back in the 80s. People over here probably associate that picture with that game rather than with Elric.

CHAOS WORSHIPING SCUM
I'M GONNA MAKE SOME JUSTICE ON YOUR ASS.

X I O M B A R G
I
O
M
B
A
R
G

>Pale petitie slut

Nnfff

what? Yrkoon tricks him into pursuing human pirates who had attacked Imyryrr, knowing that the drugs Elric takes to not die are wearing off, then attacks him and drives Elric into the ocean where he drowns. then Yrkoon takes the throne.

right?

That's just the first act of the first book.
Elric is immediately rescued by Straasha and then this shit happens.

...

nah dude

Elric comes right back after that, kicks Yrkoons' ass then happens.

...

...

...

I wonder if i should do a storytime of the Elric saga some time on this board.
Did it on /co/ about a month ago and that ended in a resounding wet fart.

Last page i'm dumping. Good night folks.
So yes. Elric comes back. Shit gets weird after this.

To be fair, most tryhards and edgelords are wish fulfillment fantasy of power, whereas one of the salient points of the Elric saga is that no one, not even Elric wants to be Elric. Sure, he's got magical power for days and sword that can kill even gods, but he inevitably destroys everyone and everything that brings him happiness. The worst part being that, at any time, he could simply walk away, use his alchemical drugs, live as a normal person and leave the heroing to someone less prone to collateral damage. But he won't, because as much as he hates Stormbringer, he needs it, and will use any excuse to use it.

Elric of Melnibone is literature's most powerful heroine addict.

No idea why authors do this childish 'in response to' shit. Most of the time that isn't even the case and is instead their publicists being the ones trying to start shit as a ploy for a headline.

Happened with the Malazan seires too.

It's only childish when it's stuff like His Dark Materials, which is a Euphoric answer to the Chronicles of Narnia and Paradise Lost.

Like, I could maybe get behind an anti-Narnia that deconstructed Narnia by removing the escapist logic the series runs on, maybe addressing the fact that the series features kids being whisked away to a violent alternate dimension and fighting as child soldiers or something, but Pullman just said "Christianity is stupid and you're stupid for following it," and based an entire book series around it.

>heroine addict

Elric a shit.

A SHIT.

#rude

I think the HDM is fairly good, as someone who also read Narnia as a kid. It's much more about attacking the organisation of religion than religion itself to me, because it acknowledges a sense of spirituality inherent to man but doesn't attribute it to a particular god or religion. The spiritual experiences the characters in those books go through aren't explicable, it's not a "in this moment I am euphoric..." thing. You might as well disparage William James on the same argument.

Is that really the most anti-religion children's literature? What about something like Mortal Engines, which only ever acknowledges gods as debris from a lost world with no truth to them.

Really? I loved the 2nd hawkmoon series, but I always thought the first one was some of Moorcock's weakest work.

Just because you don't condemn spirituality in general doesn't mean you aren't a euphoric fedora. Hipster neo-pagans, the kind who would be devastated if they learned that the only Norse mythology we know today is heavily Christianized, come to mind.

I liked it, I wish there was a series where there was a protagonist that was basically the asshole sorcerer-type you find in Conan/Elric but none of that wangst/tragic back story shit, for instance a Pan-Tang sorcerer or Pelias from Conan.

Hated the ending of that.

God, this series was so fucking awful.

It started with promise, like inklings of good ideas, but everything slowly snowballed into an such a... it's hard to describe. It's like the entire series was designed to make fantasy suck.

Like, you're looking at the programme before a play starts, and you see all your favorite actors are going to appear on stage together.
All your favorite parts of fantasy.
And then, as the play progresses, you realize it's not them, none of them, but understudies.

And they're terrible.

They know all the lines, but the delivery is hollow, and they actually get worse as scenes become more demanding.
The plot drags its feet so they linger on stage for so long in each scene that you start to feel sick and angry just looking at them, and everything is even more horrible because you find out later that the all the primary actors were ready and willing, it's just that the director decided they didn't match his vision.

That's what reading that series felt like. Like you're sitting through an awful play, hoping to catch a glimpse of your favorite actor, hoping he'll appear in one of the final scenes, sitting through a slimy "unpleasantness" that's just a shade lighter than sickening, and then seeing that he too was replaced by a terrible understudy. The curtain drops, and you're left being frustrated with the knowledge that you could have left the show at any time.

Elric is awesome. Really got me into the whole "sword and sorcery" thing.

Not Veeky Forums related, but I most of my ES characters I rp as him. Fun times with deadric swords.

The setting is too edgy and elric is too angsty for my taste.

I've read the Amber series, and I hear there are a lot of parallels.