Would read a book about a 40-50 year old that has to leave his job to slay the dragon and save the world.
this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
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Not too far off. The main character is a venerable 51.
In 1930's Britain, the average lifespan of an Englishman was 60. Hobbits had an average lifespan of 100. So a 51 year old Bilbo was the same as a 30 year old Englishman.
Sounds like Rincewind and Cohen the Barbarian, all right.
Ah ha ha gotta reread those gems!
Have you tried Kings of the Wyld?
Its about an older band of adventures getting back together.
I can't be the only one that immediately thought of The Blues Brothers, right?
Yeah I think thats a good match up, if ever there was a film that caught the DnD party vibe without being a DnD film
"The Dirty Dozen" has entered the chat...
The original 'suicide squad' concept movie. 12 Allied prisoners, condemned to hanging or long term imprisonment are put under the command of a maverick officer. He has to train them and then lead them into enemy territory to attack and destroy a Nazi stronghold.
Seriously, you need to see this movie...
I do love Dirty Dozen, but Seven Samurai is the oft imitated, never beaten, in the desperate last stand for a hastily put together team film that has my number one pick.
I know it's heresy, but I'll got with "The Magnificent Seven" with McQueen, Coburn, and Bronson over Seven Samurai.
Which reminds me of anther comment I made in this thread.
'Yojimbo' stole its plot from a book called "Red Harvest." A middle-aged fat man who drinks too much gets hire to investigate corruption in a mining town. He decides that the only way to clean out the town is to blow it wide open.
Such a fun book.
Bilbo was 50
Exactly. Nothing wrong with a hero being at least middle-aged. Maybe they even have a spouse and kids they're leaving behind, or the kids are coming with them on the quest.
The classic hero arc is that the "to be hero" don't want to go, but is more or less forced, so that fits perfectly with a family!
Also, 40-50 year olds discovering magic would be a rare or never seen in a film/book.
You could swap the main character from how a realist hero saved a kingdom to a 55 year old bureaucrat and nothing in the story would change. The marriage to the princess would be creepy though.
And a few years later his nephew is saved by an 80yo geezer.
Not a book, but it's thematically similar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrX_u2no6OA
Ignore the Amazon Prime garbage. It was a Mondo Media production, which was the main reason I ended up watching it.
Reminds me of a line from Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe, and Everything.
He dropped into a kind of alert crouch that he had once seen somebody do on television, but it must have been someone with stronger knees.
Obviously she's never heard of Cohen the Barbarian and the Silver Hoard!
Read Dashiell Hammett's books.
The Thin Man's hero is pushing forty, and the Continental Op is 'neither young enough or old enough to think any woman finds [him] fascinating.'
Well well well, what a cosmic coincidence. I picked up “The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, and Selected Stories” by Dashiell Hammett from my local library. I only picked it up on a whim that short stories are suitable for story time before bed; I didn’t know anything of Hammett before.
So far I’ve only enjoyed The House in Turk Street. I’m impressed how he can make 30 pages pretty engaging. The characters aren’t too deep, even going so far as being stereotype characatures, but it allows for a more fast paced plot from being bogged down with backstory and motivation.
What I’m saying is, it’s creepily weird (in a good way) to hear his name drop on Lemmy and that his short & sweet, if also shallow, stories are so far helping me get back into reading after a college curriculum of textbooks and impenetrable classics (I love your ideas Kant, but God what a snooze).
Hammett should be known to every American school child.
When WW2 broke out he was one of the most famous authors in the country. As big as Stephen King is today. He was too old to fight, and would have been rejected for the Army because he'd been gassed in WW1.
He got into the Army, even though he had to have all his teeth pulled out.
Later he would be sent to prison for not naming names during the McCarthy Era.
Remember that you may think he is using stereotype characters, but he actually invented most of the tropes which everyone then copied later.
True story.
"The rag lay" meant stealing washing off a clothes line. It was the kind of crime a tramp would pull. In one of his stories he had the hero insult a woman by saying her mother had worked the rag lay. His editor objected to the line, because he thought it sounded obscene.
Hammett cut the line, but in his next story he used the term 'gunsel.' Since it sounded like 'gun' the editor approved it without a thought.
'Gunsel' was slang for a straight guy who traded sexual favors in prison.
That's not always true. In LoTR Frodo is 50 and Aragorn is 67.
Aragorn is functionally 25
They said 40, not fucking 70
Books maybe not, but it's become a film trope for sure. Taken, Wick, and Nobody comes to mind.
Oh, Taken put me off action movies for a good while. I don't even know if I ever bothered to watch it I was so irritated by the trailer.
Not just the movie, but Liam Neson?
It's like Military Aged Male only means something somewhere else.
hhhn it's been a while since i've last seen it but i don't think he did anything crazy in the first one, just being sneaky
Nothing like the Taken 3 scene of him jumping a fence from 19 different angles, each shown for less than 1 second to hide the fact that Liam Neeson absolutely cannot jump a fence to save his life? I think that was the craziest stunt on the entire trilogy. TIL, in cinematography it is called a “blender cut”. Because it looks like they just put all the clips on blender and stitched them at random.
Yah don't think anything was that bad. Not like Rambo or anything.
"R E D" with Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren as retired and extremely dangerous spies.
What there are tons of older hero's in films. Mission impossible fast and furious any Schwarzenegger movie I men's I could go in and on.
This is why Pluribus is refreshing (though I haven't finished it and also it's just ok otherwise)
Say one thing for Logen Ninefingers, say he is getting old.
Why Abercrombie's books haven't been adapted yet is beyond me.
They're too miserable for the mainstream. They'd also need to be pretty graphic to do the books any justice.
But think, Glotka would be pure Oscar bait for any actor!
Daniel Day-Lewis and Robert Downey Jr. would give anything to play a crippled torturer with a heart of gold!
I hate vertical videos, but at least it's funny.
One reason I loved Ace Attorney, it at least got a few steps away from the “high school hero” tropes of everything else made in Japan.
They eventually retread that issue with Apollo and Athena, but they were there for a bit…
They still felt the need to make the protagonist a fresh out of school lawyer. It wasn't that far off.
Lucky Wander Boy's protagonist is around 30.
Great Teacher Onizuka was around 30, too, iirc.