The Ghoul in the Attic asked Sebastien de Castell:

Hi, Sebastien! The Greatcoats tetralogy has often been discussed as part of the grimdark subgenre. Do you consider those books as grimdark and do you think there's something about "The Greatcoats" that makes it different from the classics (say, Abercrombie's First Law series)?

Sebastien de Castell I'm not much of an expert on fantasy sub-genres, but I suppose I'd say that my impression of Grimdark fiction is that it presents worlds that are inherently dark in nature (as opposed to worlds that are fundamentally good yet infected by some unnatural evil) and suggests that human qualities of kindness, decency, daring and self-sacrifice are inherently flawed approaches. With the Greatcoats, I wanted to propose that those qualities (in their aggregate form of "swashbuckling") still have fundamental value even when they seem to fail at a tactical level.

Put differently, most Grimdark fiction I've read presents a narrative in which trying to be decent is futile and, in a sense, an act of vanity because it's doomed to fail and thus bring no good to the world. The Greatcoats argues that decency and self-sacrifice are virtues not because they tend to be successful but because they tend to awaken those virtues in broader groups of people who've been beaten down into believing that their own senses of decency and self-sacrifice are irrelevant. Falcio's not successful because he's daring or valorous, but because his insistence on trying over and over again to live up to those qualities has the effect of making other people find them in themselves. Basically, he turns other people into swashbucklers.

That all sounds kind of pretentious, but then, swashbuckling has its roots in some wonderful pretensions.

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