Style & Acknowledgements

If you're reading this, I have to hope you enjoyed The Exile of Morgan Red-Maw! I wanted to start by talking about the style it's written in.

I spent a long time worrying over whether it would be easier for people to connect with it if I wrote in a modern prose style, just using the medieval source as inspiration for the characters, themes and events; or possibly to alternate between the two, either when the transformation or action scenes begin, or to differentiate between past and present events. In the end, I decided to just give the saga-style a go, and it turned out to be so enjoyable to write that I abandoned any thought of doing it another way. I think the past and present scenes still feel a little different, though, since the stuff that happens before Morgan's rebellion is heavily referencing two Ulster cycle stories (Mac Da Tho's Pig and The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu, the first of which frankly deserves more credit than I do for some of the big moments here), while the sections in the present are more or less the shape of episodes 1 and 2 of a Showa-era Kamen Rider show.

For those interested enough to know the significance of this, the style mostly being emulated is that of later Irish saga-material, from the late medieval and early modern period (these are not hard divisions--this was a late phase in a continuous tradition stretching without major interruption back to our very earliest sources). I find that easiest to work with, because the descriptions particularly of duels are much longer and more elaborate in a way I find captivating. This spectrum of "older means less detailed" generally runs across the tradition; If I was writing in a style more imitating the earliest Old Irish stories, the big fights would mostly read like "they fought, and X killed Y". I did try and pare down somewhat for the story of Za Salou's calf, which as our translator notes at the end, seems to be an older work inserted into a later one.

Finally, whether you're a fan of medieval heroic tales, classic tokusatsu, or space exploration, I think there's some details woven in there you will recognise, and I hope they found their mark.

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With all that said, this project could never have been begun without a lot of help and encouragement. Thank you to:

- Zack and Sara, for proofreading this thing and assuring me it rocks

- Sara (again) and Pen, for letting me make them read the Ulster cycle, and listening to my constant ramblings about it

- Jules, for receiving the vision, often at length, and remaining a stalwart hype woman

- Thaliarchus, not just for what he's thanked for on the main page, but also for putting up with all sorts of questions about presenting something like this

- Dr Emmet Taylor, for their tireless efforts to make medieval Irish literature more accessible and comprehensible to the public, without which I might never have had the chance to become enamoured with the misadventures of Cú Chulainn and company to begin with. They also kindly answered several questions that had me stopped in my tracks during the writing process

- My girlfriend, who goes by SuperChickenDX online, for being the light of my life; and also for leaving the comfort of a warm blanky to come look at the screen and reassure me the background colour I've chosen looks fine

- Miyauchi Hiroshi, for playing all his characters like that

- And you, for reading