#Major Military Things

[anonymousgayrobot]

is there any clarification on what this means or was that task just assembling all of those tank kits after failing miserably to assemble alisa

[brw]

"but hamas is getting funded by extremist islamic hate groups!" do you think the U.S. government and military giving funding for israeli's war efforts against palestinians is a morally neutral and inherently righteous body that had no influence in the politics of southwest asia as a global colonial superpower. do you really think anything you can say about the people resisting oppression can't be said about the oppressors.

[lazyveran]

i think the thing that makes azula so impressive beyond just her raw skill and power at firebending is that the majority of the time she ensures she's never alone when fighting others. like sure, she'll duel when she needs to and whip ass at it, but more often than not she's strategically placed allies around her. mai and ty lee, the dai li, backup soliders and fire benders - she never refuses assistance on egotistical terms. and she really has every right to, i mean her fire is blue, that puts her in a league that no one else touches. yet that ego doesn't translate to her battle tactics

azula operates with personal arrogance, and tactical humility. i think thats one of the reasons she's such a terrifying opponent

[vulpinesaint]

kind of unfortunate that so many fantasy epics are also war novels because i will be honest i just do not like war novels that much... the grand clashing of forces is compelling obviously but it requires characters to talk about so much practical battle strategy and while i can get my brain to comprehend all these fantasy maps and kingdoms and borders and battalions and front lines and army movements it takes up. so much space in the book. feels like i'm fighting a war of my own trying to get through it sometimes

[amethysttribble]

Woke up to two comments today.

One was a sweet person enthusiastically telling me how much in my DBZ fic they enjoyed watching Vegeta freak out and make everything worse, his hot mess was “beautiful”.

The other was a Maedhros simp telling me on the fifth chapter of North to South that I “white-washed” Mae by not having him be a 10,000 iq giga brain running circles around the smartest people in Westeros. It included the phrase “do better author”.

Something something the duality of man, something something all things in balance, lol

[nostalgia-tblr]

you can tell a lot about where my priorities lie with history from the fact that i went to some effort to explain why an anglo-saxon woman would have her hair uncovered in front of a man she wasn't married to yet i'd written about 90% of that fic before it even occurred to me to check whether 9th century england actually had big stone castles with windows and courtyards and so on.

[essektheylyss]

Sometimes I learn an additional piece of information about the extent to which the United States has traded any semblance of privacy for the illusion of security and I get mad all over again

[raayllum]

like don't get me wrong it could happen with enough narrative (currently completely unseen) legwork but Pharos freeing Aaravos when 1) he's miles away from the prison, 2) Karim has no awareness or interest in the prison whatsoever, 3) a corrupted Pharos freeing Aaravos would just be the same as "Callum under possession doing it" but with zero amount of the emotional impact and 4) one of the most important plot points in the entire series being given to a beyond minor character is like... it's just not structurally that sound y'know?

[akpaleyreblogs]

DAV fundamentally doesn't believe that power structures can contain people who are both competent humans and not cartoonishly evil.

In fact it doesn't seem to believe that there exist different mutually exclusive forms of evil. All evil is the same evil. All good is the same good. Good thing there's no ambiguity or complexity in the system for anyone to worry about.

[neonstatic]

Straight men are not it!!!! They make me Sick!!!!!

[dykedvonte]

The side of the NCR we see in New Vegas so intricately shows every side of the military industrial complex through minor and major ways/characters especially through the lens of active war and combat but none of you are ready to get into that conversation.

[bethrnoora]

actually would be very funny if I did have a canon fem lavellan inquisitor who romanced solas because she and my rook would one hundred percent have a fling during veilguard

[medicinemane]

Seriously, you don't know just how long I've been shaking my fist at the screen any time this policy comes up because I've wanted it changed

This isn't just me reblogging a standard "contact your representatives" about something I care about but also... it's more of a "oh god would you stop trying to bring the 50th version of SOPPA back"

Where as this is something that I've been following every day, and I can directly draw a line for you between this policy and dead civilians

So that's why I care so much

[kastlequill]

its so Fun being iranian in a fandom where iran is always the bad guy (sarcasm)

[mantisgodsdomain]

I'd like to hear about Marble and the exact context behind her... unfortunate demise.

Why, yes - we absolutely can!

Let's start with this: Marble is a Wasp Bomber, by game terms. She is very competent in making and employing explosive charges. She is, in fact, so competent at making and employing explosive charges that she is capable of producing bombs that can melt a hole in a kaiju. She was also banned from military service for collateral damage before the Wasp King turned up.

Wasp Kingdom military attitudes tend to, overwhelmingly, be shaped by the environment they live in - they border on deadlands, but more specifically Northern deadlands, where them being classified as Deadlands because of the sheer number of hazards to bug life that they have around there meaning that anything that isn't specifically adapted to the environment will be incapable of surviving well enough for any children it might produce to not end up Lesser.

There are monsters. The Wasp Military is, on a regular basis, pitted against a very large number of Beasts of all sorts, which means that having a decent supply of bugs capable of fighting them off is a necessity. Pretty much any wasp with capacity to serve is set to work as some part of fighting forces at some point, be it out in the field or repairing equipment for those who can be out in the field. Conscription is very much mandatory, and it is considered a deeply important role and a core part of a wasp's duty in the hive to, at one point or another, contribute to the fighting fitness of the Hive.

This demand - and the need for bugs associated, especially when the general danger of the territory will lead to wasp lives lost even on very standard patrols, goes to the point that the Wasp Kingdom will actively pull from demographics that most kingdoms prefer to either avoid or keep out of the line of fire - drones, kept out of the line of fire in nearly every other kingdom, are drafted just as often as workers, and the Wasp Kingdom is just about the only kingdom to actively welcome brood parasites and random out-of-kingdom bugs for the potential strategic advantages that they may offer.

With this established, Marble was been banned from active service the Wasp military forces after approximately two months of service due to her flagrant disrespect of safety procedure and astronomically high risk of friendly fire. She is, in fact, not actually allowed to do mechanical work without supervision, because not keeping track of what she's doing has an extremely high risk of her including improvements that, even while working as intended, are capable of maiming or killing their users if mishandled even slightly.

Even if Marble herself is capable of handling her inventions safely, for the most part, the Wasp Kingdom under Vanessa was entirely unwilling to take that risk. As such, she was banned from military service, as she was deemed unsuitable for just about any other potential role available to her and no one was really willing to put her within reach of any sort of potentially volatile equipment that absolutely anyone else might handle, and she spent a few years mostly just hanging around Defiant Root and making friends with the inhabitants of the Black Market.

Hoaxe put her back into military service after taking over the Wasp Kingdom.

Unfortunately, a Marble who is being actively mind controlled by someone who doesn't know shit about bomb safety and is simply setting her to whatever will be most effective offensively is even worse at safety than a Marble who is creating highly volatile explosives constructed with the assumption that whoever is using them Also has exactly as much knowledge of her own work as her.

She blew herself up. Badly.

Technically, it wasn't immediately lethal - the specific bomb that did it wasn't something that would instantly vaporize her like some of the other options! It was, instead, a crowd-control weapon, which released a fucking massive amount of heat energy and cooked everything in a hideously wide radius to cinders.

Technically, there are forms of treatment available to Bugaria that could keep her from straight-up dying to that, if they got to her in three minutes or so - mostly just Gold save crystal restoration or flat-out replacing most of her body with charmcraft, and definitely not without major damage to just about every organ in her body. Depending on the specific circumstances that she blows herself up in, it might even be survivable - it's possible for her to die even while handling the bomb properly due to things like "it has an effective range that can be measured in human-size metres" and "Hoaxe is not an effective strategist". However, this is a very remote chance, and most of the time she just dies badly.

[bugsbenefit]

i really wonder what the UD fauna is actually going to be like in s5, especially with how we've slowly gotten introduced to it over the course of the show

while we only see the demogorgon in s1 as an introduction to the UD, s2 features the demodogs which official graphics tell us will grow up into a demogorgon?

but then s4 only has the demobats which are an entirely new thing and we get no demodogs

now, i guess you could argue that the demodogs ALL died in s2, that all of them were through the gate when El closed it. and the bats are just a separate UD creature that survived the s2 gate nuke due to not being sent though (i wonder if the bats would grow up to be something bigger we might see in s5 too, or if they only come in uni-size standard bat form)

but the idea that they could be entirely extinct by now feels odd given that s4 goes out of it's way to show how they're such a longrunning part of the fauna of non right side up dimension(s) (depending on if the Hawkins UD is it's own separate thing) so making them extinct post s2 would feel a bit cataclysmic (the mains just nuked an entire species and didn't notice until years later? congrats?)

so going into s5, obviously the bats are still everywhere. and eventually we'll have to get some "giant monster with a gaping mouth" (that can swallow people whole). some kind of dragon essentially (if it doesn't look like one they'll at least call it one at some point). but what are they going to do with the Demogorgon branch of UD evolution

they could ofc also throw something semi new in there as well (aside form the gaping mouth monster). maybe they'd actually go for another bat evolution, flying monsters can be really scary, also something new and exciting if they make them bigger instead of going the swarm way s4 did. would also kind of fuck as foreshadowing a final dragon-esque monster for the end. and they'd have the set up with the bats there so it wouldn't feel like they just invented a new problem for problems sake out of nowhere. or maybe not, who knows