but you can't be free...cause I'm shellfish I'm obscene.....
Say what you will about the politics of A Song of Ice and Fire, 'a feudal army marching through the countryside doesn't become any less horrific, abuse-filled and starvation-causing for the local peasantry just because they're the Good Guys' is really a point that like 90% of epic fantasy that's trying have any sort of serious/coherent morality could stand to learn.
Been (slowly) reading the Wolf series and recently re-read the Witcher series, both of which shined a light on that exact topic. Both had commanders go "we want the local peasantry to like us and not be mad we're marching through their farms so no raping or pillaging and try to stay on the roads" and their soldiers went "okay got it boss" and then proceeded to completely terrorize the local peasantry. Often to their downfall because it makes it really easy to get the local peasantry to say "hey actually fuck these guys even if they're technically on our side" when The Good Guys are acting like your typical army doing Army Things.
As much as I do love stories like LOTR where The Good Guys Would Never and anyone that does is Actually Secretly A Bad Guy, the former is definitely more realistic.
(Image ID: tags from user doberbutts that read: the difference is Tolkien was a soldier and sapkoswi watched his country put itself back together after a fascist steamrolled it. Tolkien says war is horrible but the good and moral and just soldiers would never do such a thing. Sapkowski says war is horrible and there is no such thing as a good and moral and just soldier. End image ID.)
Lmk if you want me to delete your tags, but I thought they were too good to pass by.
I also think this lines up with something I saw another user post recently along the lines of how lotr is a response to the cultural paradigm after the Great War, but asoiaf is a response to the paradigm of the Vietnam War, hence the tone difference. Mesh that with the Tolkien’s identity as a soldier, vs the (for good reason) anti war movement of grrm’s generation, and yup. (Someone left a similar comment in the notes too)
Oh no you can keep those up I'm flattered.
Witcher/Sapkowski to add to that is WWII, he was born in 1948 and so would have grown up watching a fractured country try to rebuild... well, damn near everything. In his books it's very clear that really it doesn't matter what army it is, militaries are not good things and war is hellish and horrific no matter whose "side" you're on or what morals you claim to espouse.
LOTR/Tolkien is all the Great War, where war is shocking and terrible and filled with dread and dispair and the lives lost are too many to count and each of them tragic and avoidable. But, also, the Good Guys Would Never, only Bad Guys do things like that. And maybe Tolkien's specific troupe was made up of Good Guys Who Would Never. Who knows.
ASOIAF/GRRM and the Vietnam War and being an objector while living in a country in a war that he hates the very principal of... yeah, of course, that's why all the people making military decisions are written to be Like That, and all the soldiers are also written Like That. War is a terrible and grotesque thing. It makes people into monsters. It encourages the very worst in a human being. If you think your Good Guy Army isn't performing war crimes casually as they march where they need to go, you're an idiot and you practically deserve to be war crimed.
All three are anti-war statements made in reaction to the aftermath of various wars. Unfortunately pop media focuses on the cool battle scenes and not on the "war is bad and should be avoided as much as possible" message surrounding them.
So, just to add a bit about Tolkien here, in his defence: WWI as he experienced it did not involve an awful lot of marching through occupied territories (or even friendly territories.) It was, famously, a war of entrenched positions - with enormous human costs being paid for tiny advances in terms of land. Now, obviously, that is not how the whole war looked, there were civilian casualties and invasions, and all the usual war crimes etc, etc, but broadly, his experience of soldiering was a group of men whom you trusted (for whom he was responsible), working together in the face of senseless, indiscriminate violence.
Getting there was a question of crossing the territory of your allies in a very organised fashion - usually by boat and train. In that way, it looked neither like most modern warfare, nor the hock-Medieval warfare of the genre. His experience of war crimes (besides the ones committed by his commanding officers…) were likely broadly those shown in propaganda material. Most of his fellow soldiers were not professional soldiers, or even highly trained - and he relates to them as such - as well as being critical of the way a state of perpetual war can brutalise otherwise Noble Characters (Boromir, Denethor). So, essentially, whatever the character of the men he is with, whatever their capability for cruelty, their *context* is different. They are not being set loose on an unsuspecting population, but rather are bonding in the face of highly probable death, in periods of long boredom and sudden, horrible violence. They are not marching through villages, terrorising civilians - but arriving at a blasted, ruined landscape, where they are expected to remain indefinitely.
The warfare of LOTR mostly reflects this - the Good Guys come from peaceful or inhabited places, across peaceful ground, to the site of war - meanwhile the war itself has occurred mostly between the two entrenched positions of Gondor and Mordor - with very little movement between them, and huge desolation of the intervening land. Similarly, the Forces of Darkness are brought to selective front in what seems to be fairly good order, despite all the obvious villainy. Even Sauron, as a sort of Fifth Column, creates a front and a stronghold from which to wreck violence - he doesn’t invade anywhere until the Shire at the end.
The fact is, if Tolkien had been somewhere else, or experience the infantry in WWII, or even simply been a naval man in WWI, he likely would have had a different perspective on it. His experience of it was different, so his understanding of how war destroys things was also different.
when i was post op after top surgery i had a good friend there with me to help recover. but the nurse didnt get the memo and when i woke up she was like “ok i’m gonna go get your girlfriend and bring her in to see you!” and i remember being so zonked on anesthesia and so disoriented i just laid there thinking wow…… all that an they’re bringing me a girlfriend too this place is amazing
some things i’ve learned about adulthood that no one warns you about
- you will in fact continue to have acne past the age of twenty
- you will eventually hit a point where you start to feel icky inside if you go too long without eating some sort of vegetables
- depending on your current level of athleticism/physical activity as well as the kind of activities you did as a kid/teenager, your joints may start acting whack in your twenties, despite what everyone says about that not happening until middle age
- eventually you will reach a point where you wonder how you were able to stay up until 3am nearly every night and be perfectly fine the next day (and this moment will come much younger than you expect)
- it is much harder to meet new people after you’re done with school than sitcoms would have you believe
- don’t let society tell you shit: it is perfectly acceptable to live with your parents after you graduate, there’s no need to be broke and miserable just so you can have some misguided attempt at independence straight out of school
- aging in general will catch up to you much sooner than you think. you’ll notice your first grey hairs ~25. crows feet appear when you smile ~30. aging is a slow and gradual process that’s happening throughout your life, including your 20’s. it’s not like an Old switch flips when you turn 40, any more than a Puberty switch flipped when you turned 13.
- same thing with not being Cool anymore. you’ll be vibing one day and suddenly media is saying your favorite style of jeans or hairstyle “date” you. (on the up side, you probably won’t care about that kind of thing anymore.)
- taking care of your body and your home is Relentless. nobody will make you do chores or eat your veggies. it can wear at you if you let it. setting and keeping good habits lessens the strain.
- measuring success is harder as an adult. in school you get graded most days, sports are measured in points. feedback at work regarding performance will be largely arbitrary. nobody can tell you if you’re on the right track to raise children into well-adjusted adults (though there’s plenty of conflicting advise out there). are you happy? how happy?
- outside of some obscene luck, you probably won’t build the life you want at the speed you want. that’s normal.
- you don’t have to stop liking “kid” stuff when you grow up. if you can still like ice cream or sports, you can also still like disney or nerf guns.
- you’re gonna have a favorite burner on your stove.
- You will start to genuinely enjoy those ‘boring’ gifts like socks or hand soap (because now you don’t have to buy socks or hand soap)
- It’s not the bending over for an extended period of time that’s gonna get you, it’s the standing back up after that’s gonna throw out your back. Take your time
STRETCH. Just do it. It will save, do you a world of good when stuff starts feeling stiff/breaking down.
Get his ass
If someone cut down whole fucking trees on a property I owned without my permission this would instead be a post about the graphic details of my murder trial (worth it)
Dealing with auditory processing disorder
LAWFUL: take the parts you heard and turn it into a clarifying question, e. g. "you saw your cousin where?" or "she's writing a what?"
NEUTRAL: "what did you say?"
CHAOTIC: take a wild stab at what the person said, e. g. "you want to baptize a mackerel?"
actually children of Athena do have one (1) power they can turn their heads 270 degrees like an owl but Chiron told them they had to stop because it “gave the other campers nightmares” or something idk
woke up today and realized that tumblr entirely killed fuck ya life bing bong so here ya go again
the trope of 'this entity exists only because we think it does' is so so so fucking good and cannot be overdone in my opinion
like the idea that you built the monster hunting you, that you invited the entity into our world, that your fear is what it feeds on, and that once made real, it cannot possibly be killed because you're stuck in this loop of 'he's real because i'm scared' and 'i'm scared because he's real'
