Simon_Jester wrote:They usually do it by making the wizards the protagonists (many examples, Harry Potter being perhaps the most famous one that is both recent, well received, and artistically decent), or by giving the hero an excess of manly determination (Conan the Barbarian).
The point being that there's a genre convention whereby superpowers must confer a significant advantage, without any corresponding disadvantage to offset it: the wizard's magic blasts give him firepower equivalent to a guy with a pistol, but for some reason you won't see him going down to a random guy with a pistol.
That would be pretty silly, yeah.
Stuart's entire story is built around the subversion of that convention, by creating supermen who are actually kind of dumb and easily beaten by a savvy opponent with better engineering and organizational skills. Hence the screaming from the anti-fans; they can feel their genre convention being violated and it hurts, but they don't quite understand what the problem is*, and that makes them angry.
Well, I can clearly articulate what the problem is; defeating the villains is simply a matter of getting to them,
but the story isn't about that process. It tries to be about everything else that happens while that goes on.
The only tension we get is from "what ineffectual, outmoded quackery are the poor, stupid widdle demons/angels going to pull on us next? Oh wow, that one might inconvenience us for a few months. (It will have next to no effect on our warmaking efforts whatsoever.)"
