Two fantasy questions just for discussion - bad guys and s&s

[flannelberry]

Hi all

I have been pondering going back to fantasy (my first writing love) after a couple of years away. Well, more than pondering, I took out a 10 yo manuscript this week and began fixing it (embarrassing at best, I must say). As I've been working on it and returning to the genre I wondered about a couple of things and would just love to have a purely academic discussion about them; there's few places writers can do this so I thought to post it here.

The first is:
Does anyone write good sword and sorcery? Can it be done? I reread Beowulf recently and some other classics and nothing now compares. Why is that? Is there even a market for it . I'm just curious - I don't write to the market and that's a good thing considering this ms is 10+ yrs old.

The other thing is that I've read a lot about the who "sympathetic villain". Is it just me or can't we just have bad bad guys? Sometimes the bad guy just needs to be a selfish such and such who wants it all for his/her self. Yep, there's been some nasty overdoing of stereotypes but that aside... do we need to make our villains sympathetic. IME (and I've worked with no few villains IRL) many are self centered spooky people who lend little of themselves to sympathy.


Many thanks - I look forward to chatting with the lot of you.