I love the idea that literally anyone with a strong enough will can overcome anything. This idea is pushed outside of the realms of reality all the time in fiction and most famously through the trope of a knight slaying a dragon. The specific appeal of being a knight, even in modern day, has stuck around and it has absolutely nothing to do with nobility, wealth, or even duty. It’s all about power. This idea exploded as an online meme about fantasy roleplaying when, in 2022, a trailer for The Elder Scrolls Online expansion, High Isle, broke containment of it’s target audience and went viral on social media: In this trailer are three heroes representing the broad playstyles of fantasy roleplay: A big beefy barbarian, an elegant elven mage and an agile thief. The villain, that knight, absolutely kicks the crap out of them and he is the reason this whole thing went viral. Everyone, in unison, identified with wanting to be a normal guy in a suit of normal armour, with a normal sword, just going to town on this larger-than-life skilled opponents armed with nothing special of their own, except that indominable will. Later, in the year 2023, with the release of the Dungeons and Dragons game Baldur’s Gate 3, this whole thing resurfaced again. Widespread discussion about the insane wizards and monsters players would have to fight began circulating, and players were already discussing what they would play as when the game finally released. The popular meme at the time was the following: Gender: Male Class: Fighter Weapon: Longsword And, to be fair, it would transpire that playing a human fighter in Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the easiest ways to play because they get a lot of health and do absolutely absurd damage. As I got deeper into thinking about other instances of the appeal of being this normal guy in an absurdly hostile world, I thought of the Warhammer setting. In both 40K and Warhammer Fantasy, humanity is represented as the Empire. The Empire have super soldiers and all of that, but the majority of combatants in their ranks are just dudes with guns who go out and fight beings that can warp reality, perform psychological warfare, and alter the laws of physics. There’s many factions in both Warhammer settings that have far more creative uses of their genres and more diverse types of soldiers, all with their own lore and backstories, but players always identify with the Empire. However different the settings may be, both versions of the Empire have one thing in common: They both take the ‘knight slaying a dragon’ trope to the most absurd limit, characterising it as a guy with a howitzer that fires nukes against a demon that can wipe out a planet if it makes contact… And, of course because of the trope, the guy with the big howitzer is somehow going to win. I think Burt Gummer might be the closest thing to this ‘knight slaying the dragon’ trope in modern fiction because he is an ordinary person with ordinary weapons fighting a threat that he has no business overcoming, but he manages it anyway. Yes, because he has a lot of guns, but also because he has that indominable will to survive and, more importantly, to win. Burt Gummer is a character, portrayed by Michael Gross, in the Tremors franchise. Tremors is a cult-classic film, with many sequels, about mutating monsters that learn from each time you kill one, forcing you to change your approach next time. What makes Burt stand out is that he is like a knight, only he has a gun instead of a longsword. His approach is to blow them up with bullets and explosives and it always seems to work. I do have to say I am a big fan of this trope. I think it is why people like to gravitate towards superheroes like Batman or Captain America who are somewhat extradentary because of what they achieve but, at their core, are just guys who punch really hard and have their wits about them. Even someone like Tony Stark, who can fight the strongest Marvel can throw at him, is just a dude in a suit of armour like that knight versus the dragon. It’s easy to say that everyone likes an underdog story and, while I agree that’s why it works on a narrative level, I think there is more to it. There must be something etched into our brains evolutionary that makes this sort of thing more appealing than it has any right to be. I think we all know it isn’t the reality: A knight who isn’t outsmarting a dragon is definetly being beaten by it in a fight. Burt Gummer who isn’t planning ahead isn’t outlasting every graboid in the movie. Batman without his detective work is not winning against Killer Croc. All these stories have layers to them that explain how or why an ordinary person could defeat these threats, but it is the fact they simply can, and not necessarily how, that is the part of the trope people find appealing. And who doesn’t want to triumph over something?