The Origins of Barric the Barbarian
When people hear the words barbarian and fantasy, they tend to imagine the same character.
Towering muscles.
A gigantic axe.
Very little conversation.
And, if we’re being honest, not an enormous amount of thinking.
I wondered what would happen if I kept the muscles…
…but changed almost everything else.
The First Thing I Knew About Barric
Before I knew what Barric looked like, I knew what he was doing.
He wasn’t fighting.
He was reading.
The image made me laugh.
A mountain of a man quietly absorbed in a book while everyone around him prepared for battle.
The axe could wait.
He hadn’t finished the chapter.
From that moment, Barric’s personality almost wrote itself.
Strength Doesn’t Have to Be Loud
Fantasy often equates strength with aggression.
I’ve never believed that.
The strongest people I’ve known have usually been the calmest.
They don’t need to prove themselves.
Barric became an exploration of that idea.
He could split a door in half if he needed to.
He would simply rather not interrupt his reading to do it.
The Spectacles
One of my favourite details about Barric is also one of the smallest.
His tiny spectacles.
They serve no practical purpose beyond helping him read, but they completely change how readers see him.
The contrast between enormous barbarian and delicate reading glasses tells you almost everything you need to know.
Sometimes character design is simply about finding one unexpected detail.
More Than Comic Relief
Barric certainly has humorous moments.
But I never wanted him to exist solely to make readers laugh.
He’s thoughtful.
Patient.
Reliable.
When the companions begin to lose perspective, he’s often the person quietly reminding everyone to think before acting.
Whether they listen is another matter entirely.
Why Readers Love Contradictions
Real people are contradictory.
Someone can be physically intimidating and wonderfully kind.
Someone else can be incredibly intelligent while making spectacularly poor decisions.
Those contradictions make characters memorable.
Barric isn’t interesting because he’s a barbarian.
He’s interesting because he’s a barbarian who enjoys books, values knowledge, and approaches problems with surprising patience.
Building the Companions
Every member of the party in Ashes and Embers was built around a similar philosophy.
Take a familiar fantasy archetype.
Find the expectation.
Turn it slightly sideways.
Not enough to parody the genre.
Just enough to surprise the reader.
Barric became the clearest example of that approach.
He’s exactly the sort of barbarian you’d expect…
…until he opens a book.
Final Thoughts
Readers often ask where characters come from.
The honest answer is that they usually begin with a single image.
For Barric, it was simple.
An enormous barbarian.
Tiny spectacles.
A well-thumbed book.
An axe leaning forgotten in the corner.
Everything else followed naturally.
Ashes & Embers is the first novel in the Voidshatter series, a humorous fantasy adventure set in the world of Axalar.
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