Some Passable Ghost

If you're uncomfortable with the human cost of war and don't want to glorify it... good news, you don't have to! A tournament arc gives you all the fun of competition and rivalry and struggle to improve, without the uncomfortable knowledge that your protagonist's subordinates are likely doing awful things offscreen.

Similarly, if you like getting into your antagonists' heads and humanizing them, but don't like writing the kind of monster that makes a good high fantasy antagonist- good news! In a tournament arc, the only thing that makes an antagonist an antagonist is that they want the same thing Blorbo wants and are fighting them to get it.

Struggle to come up with a plot? Tournament arc has defined beats. Struggle with making high stakes feel cool and not corny? Tournament arc. Want to write a big ensemble cast? Tournament arc.

The sword of Francis I (blade, c. 1480; hilt, c. 1510; completed c. 1515)

Musée de l'Armée, Paris, France

Ceremonial sword made for King Francis I of France around the time of his coronation. Captured as war booty at the Battle of Pavia in 1525, it later entered the Spanish royal collection before being returned to France under Napoleon I.

Type: Ceremonial sword

Overall length: 96 cm

Width: 14 cm

Origin: France (hilt);

Maker: P. A. Cataldo (blade)

Material: Iron, brass, vermeil, enamel, gold

Technique: Forging, engraving, gilding, enamelling

Decoration: Spherical red enamel pommel with acanthus scrolls; grip decorated with red and white enamel bands and surmounted by a salamander in flames, the emblem of Francis I; quillons ornamented with flame motifs

The system intrinsically abuses poor people.

Goneril and Regan, King Lear, Act I, Scene I

Artist: Edwin Austin Abbey (American, 1852–1911)

Date: 1902

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, United States

Description

me: yeah i know, they’re all primary colors, it’s perfect

When you go for an MLS (Master’s of Library Science, which is a thing, and which is usually required for “professional-level” library work [which is also a weird and contentious concept that I won’t go into here]), one of the things you study is the organization of information. This deals with how to determine what a book or other material is “about"—a concept we tongue-in-cheek call “aboutness"—and how to convey that to a potential user of the item and make it easy for them to find. Things like keywords and subject headings, do I put this book about how often wild birds attack aerial drones in with books about birds or with books about technology, if its a fictional novel do I put fantasy in it’s own section or mix it in with all of the other fiction, so on and so on.

OP is organizing books by how they would look for them. OP’s partner is thinking in terms of aboutness. This is a system that works for OP because it’s their personal library: they know basically what books they own and they only own books that are relevant to them, and if they know what the book looks like, that can be a quick way to find it.

In a library that assumes the public (or people who do not own that particular collection of books) are using the collection, that doesn’t work. Books are often re-issued in multiple covers, or re-bound in new covers when they get worn out, and if the user doesn’t know what the book looks like or is expecting a different cover, they’re lost. That’s why non-personal libraries used standardized cataloging systems like the Dewey Decimal System or Library of Congress System to organize a book by what it’s “about”, and then put books about the same or similar topics together, marked with labels and signage so a person unfamiliar with the book or collection can find their way to it.

Basically, OP’s system works for their own personal library, because it’s best suited to how the primary user—OP themselves—looks for books. OP’s librarian partner is coming from a background of thinking in terms of a public-facing collection, where aboutness is the key criteria and communicating it to a user unfamiliar with the collection is the priority.