Why does this light force me back to my childhood? I wore a yellow summer dress, and the skirt made a perfect circle. Turning and turning until it flared to the limite was irresistible…. The grass and trees, my outstretched arms, and the skirt whirled in the ochre light of an early June evening. And I knew then that I would have to live, and go on living, and go on living: what sorrow it was; and still what sorrow ignites but does not consume my heart.
the problem with knowing things about battle tactics is that an ever-increasing subset of popular media becomes impossible to enjoy properly because you have to sit there like ‘wow Captain Protagonist good to know all those dead people on your own side are a direct result of your total lack of anything resembling brains’
seriously i’m not talking about anything elaborate, just basic common sense, but common sense is so much harder to ignore once you’ve got systematized data to back it up, like
what do they even think a fortification is for???
what do you think a shield is for. what do you think ranged weapons are for????
make the other sonuvabitch have a hard time killing you without getting killed first! most basic goal of combat! why are movies so bad at writing characters who actually attempt this on even a very small 'army’ scale?
and like i said in the first post, it’s not just that it’s Dumb, the thing is that once you put the character in a command role, their ability to think their way through a combat situation with some degree of optimization becomes a reflection on their character on like. a moral level.
if your tactics are dumb and reckless but you usually win and it’s just you punching people that’s one thing. or even if it’s you and five guys who’ve decided they like how you roll!
but if you are put in charge of soldiers. and you throw their lives away because you don’t know what you’re doing. that’s not okay.
it’s not always avoidable! one of the basic problems with armies! but when it happens in fiction it needs to be on purpose, to make sure the military elements of the narrative remain thematically congruent.
when you have a bit where Main Character is in command and then makes avoidable bad decisions and people die who didn’t have to. either the protagonist has been put in a horrific position by whatever authority figure thrust them into a role they didn’t want and weren’t competent to handle, without support.
or the protagonist, voluntarily assuming a management job they suck at, has committed a grievous harm against others by not recognizing their own limitations.
even if they win! i don’t want to be watching a movie where the main character squanders every tactical advantage and loses 40% of their forces totally unnecessarily for Narrative Tension, but the enemy retreats or gets eaten by a dragon or loses the MacGuffin or whatever, and then there’s triumphant music and a party because They Won!!!
no! they fucked it up is what they did! this is some Light Brigade gaslighting shit! shut up. our boy just massacred people who trusted him.
This is reminding me of the extremely weird experience I had watching, of all things, The Kid Who Would Be King a couple months ago, because it was one of very few fantasy movies I’ve seen recently wherein actual tactical thinking is evidenced.
And like, granted, it wasn’t especially brilliant tactics, but it was weird as hell to be watching a bunch of middle schoolers fighting hell zombies display a better understanding of concepts like fortifications and ambushes and traps and bottlenecking an invading force than most purported “good leaders” in fantasy with far more adult target audiences
It’s funny, despite being the grandad of the genre, I seem to remember Lord of the Rings doing battle strategies pretty well. The only big exception is when Aragorn challenged Sauron and that was deliberate to get the guy’s attention.
Yeah, because Tolkien was 1) a soldier and 2) a medievalist and also 3) a person who gave a shit about things making internal sense, so he couldn’t have abided writing really bad strategy that was meant to be read as good, and he was equipped to know the difference.
Most fantasy is not written from that baseline, and Tolkien while a huge influence is often overblown in terms of impact because he’s a respectable antecedent as opposed to, say. Conan the Barbarian.
The thing is that I don’t want to be employed but I also don’t want to be unemployed. I actually want our entire economic system to explode but that’s not really a feasible option right now
Streamer who says “And now just a little break for an ad read, sorry guys, brb” and then they just pull out a newspaper and silently read some of the ads while scowling because they don’t enjoy this, occasionally muttering “That’s not even a good deal” and then calmly folds it back up and starts playing again.
ALT
