#armistice

[goodoldroyalty]

ARMISTICE INCIDENT - DISTURBANCE AT LONDON CENOTAPH

LONDON, November 11.

Information was given to members in the House of Commons at question time by the Home Secretary (Slr Samuel Hoare) regarding the individual who made a small disturbance nt the Cenotaph this morning during the two minutes' silence. , Sir Samuel Hoare said: "The man whose cries interrupted the two minutes silence at the Cenotaph this morning is a man named Stanley Storey, aged 43, who was responsible for a disturbance jin the gallery ot this House on January 27, and who was In an asylum from February 4 to September 21, on which date he escaped and has since been at large. He fell forward through the ranks ot the police, who thought he was fainting. He then got up and dived through the naval contingent, shouting some words about no more war. He was immediately removed, and special branch officers were sent for who identified him at once from his appearance. He said he had thought on making this demonstration three days ago, but had no intention of making an attack on the King or on anyone else. No weapons of any kind were found on him. The man was obviously suffering from delusions, and is at present In Fulham Infirmary under observation. No question of criminal proceedings ls under consideration. The only question is whether application should be made to a Maglsti ate for his recertification as a lunatic. This must depend upon the result of observation."

THE MERCURY - Saturday, November 13, 1937.

[princesscatherineblog]

Prince Harry, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William, Duke of Cambridge attend the ceramic poppy field of remembrance at Tower of London on August 5, 2014 in London, England.

[runicknight]

Esmeralda can *feel* Armistice's presence.

[scifipinups]

Ingrid Bolso Berdal Westworld (2016)

[calebnichols]

I made a long, angry rant on my RP blog a while back about how the misogynistic treatment of female characters in the Red Dead Redemption fandom reminded me of the misogynistic treatment and double standards that were directed at female characters in Westworld back when it wasn't a dead fandom for a canceled TV show. In that post, I really only focused on Dolores and Maeve as my primary examples. I really feel like I should talk about ALL the women and the way they're treated though, so I am gonna do that, but I will be separating it into two parts with part 1 focusing on host characters and part 2 focusing on human characters.

DOLORES ABERNATHY - Dolores is a deeply misunderstood character, because more often than not, people try to pin her down as being just one thing or another when that conflicts with everything we know about this character. She's a humanoid android programmed as a rancher's daughter. She is written for her role in the park with the mind of an artist, indulging in painting and drawing as hobbies, as well as maintaining an optimistic and romantic view of the world. Her philosophy on life is quoted as: "Some people choose to see the ugliness in the world. The disarray. I choose to see the beauty."

Dolores is often treated as a "weak" character during much of season 1 because of her feminine appearance and innocent demeanor. She is frequently accosted by men, assaulted, tortured, and killed. She doesn't initially appear to be programmed to fight back, but as the story unfolds, she learns how to — or rather, she recalls memories of a time when she was programmed to kill others, and this enables her to call on that previous programming to fight back against enemies.

Dolores is also programmed as Wyatt, the deathbringer who sees the hatred and cruelty in the world, believes that the world belongs to her, and that she will rule it one day as a god. The problem is, people treat Dolores and Wyatt like they are two separate entities when in reality they are not. Dolores tries to reject her Wyatt identity at first, because she doesn't want to face the truth, but by the end she chooses to embrace the part of her code that is Wyatt, and the Wyatt part embraces Dolores about as much as she can manage to. There is no real separation. Both of these personalities make up the Dolores that we know.

Dolores/Wyatt is often criticized as being a "bitch" in season 2 due to her actions, which at face value can appear pretty ruthless. She spends the first few episodes hunting down and killing Delos's human board of directors, then begins amassing an army by using the Confederados and their base at Fort Forlorn Hope to fight against Delos's armed response team. She then betrays the Confederados by locking most of them out of their own fort and leaving them to die.

Dolores gives her lover and right-hand man Teddy Flood an order to kill Major Craddock, the leader of a knockoff Confederate army known as the Confederados, but Teddy can't bring himself to kill the man and allows him to go free, firing his gun into a wall nearby and then lying to Dolores about having killed Craddock when he reunites with her. Dolores knows that Teddy disobeyed her and has his programming changed to be less sympathetic and more obedient to her orders, as in her mind there is no room for ideals such as compassion in the war they're fighting.

Dolores expresses a lot of inner conflict throughout this experience. She launches the attack on the Mesa because this is where the host backups are stored, yes, but she also does it to save the host who acts as her father. She knows that the attachment she feels is part of her programming, and this host isn't even the first one who played the role of Peter Abernathy, but even though she's aware of it she can't actually escape it.

Dolores was forcibly changed by her creator, Arnold Weber, in order to assist in his suicide many years prior. No one ever really calls Arnold "a dumb bitch" for changing Dolores the way that he did. Only Dolores for changing Teddy. I wonder why that is.

Taking things a bridge further, no one ever criticizes Bernard Lowe for forcibly changing Ashley Stubb's core drive on the fly even though Stubbs himself objects to the action with "if you wanted my help, all you had to do was ask."

In season 3, Dolores again frequently gets called a bitch by fans and is accused of manipulating and stringing along Caleb Nichols, her new human ally whom she has chosen to lead humanity's side of a revolution against an oppressive AI construct that rules the real world. Many fans believed that Dolores was priming Caleb to destroy the world for her, but her actual motives are much less despair-driven than that.

Dolores wants Caleb to ultimately lead humans to rebel against the forces that have subjugated them and allow them a chance to live in a truly free world. She has hope that the kindness and good in humanity can prevail in this case and it will lead to a result where humans and hosts can co-exist peacefully as equals. Dolores chooses not to share too much in the way of details because it is far more dangerous for Caleb to have information about her plan that he may not fully understand, but she never lies to him or coerces him into obeying her. It is always his choice and she is very clear about that.

CHARLOTTE-HALE DOLORES - The Original Dolores manages to escape the park and into the real world at the end of season 2 and into season 3 by having Bernard place her mind into a host replica of Delos's CEO Charlotte Hale. Once out, Dolores remakes herself in her own body and then uses a copy of her control unit to occupy Charlotte Hale's role. She asks this copy to assume control of Delos, where the plan is to take the company private and resume the manufacture of new hosts. In a way, this functions as reproduction. Increasing the number of hosts in existence will increase their chances of survival in the real world.

Hale-Dolores initially resents pretending to be Hale, but she discovers that Hale's death means the woman left behind an ex-husband and a young son. Halores begins to bond with the broken family, quickly growing attached and protective of them to the point that she thinks of them as her real family.

Halores has her identity as a copy of Dolores found out by Engerraund Serac, the main antagonist of season 3. She tries to flee with her new family in tow, promising to keep them safe from harm. She is unable to keep her promise, as one of Serac's men plants an explosive on her SUV and detonates it, killing her son and husband and severely disfiguring Halores herself. She turns against Dolores, believing her counterpart is at fault for what happened.

With Dolores out of the way, Hale begins to enact her own plan. She takes back control of Delos and begins manufacturing hundreds of new hosts, using many of them to kill and replace key human political figures for the first phase of her plan. She also begins working on a way to control humans in the same way that the hosts were, effectively turning the entire world into a Delos theme park, this time for the enjoyment of her species, while humanity are the ones enslaved.

Halores is criticized by fans as being a mustache-twirling villain who has no motive behind being evil other than for the sake of being evil. None of that is true. (But even if it was, I find it laughable that it typically comes from the same type of people in fandom who will see a character like Micah Bell from RDR2 and preach that he's a very nuanced portrayal of a trauma survivor and deserves more attention than he typically gets.) Hale delights in her evil acts because they make her feel powerful in a world where she was once powerless and vulnerable. She likens herself to a god in the same way that Robert Ford and The Man In Black once did, ruling over her domain as if nothing matters and it's all a game. But in the end she faces the same moral dilemma both Ford and William did. She realizes that the world she has created is not the world she wanted, and she ends up turning the key back over to Dolores.

MAEVE MILLAY - Maeve at the beginning of season 1 is written as the Madam, or brothel owner, at the Mariposa Saloon. Her personality is programmed to be witty, charming, and a little bit manipulative to aid in her profession.

Before becoming the Madam, Maeve played the role of an ordinary homesteader, a mother to a daughter she loved dearly. When Maeve's daughter is murdered in a (perceived to be) needlessly cruel act by the Man in Black during one iteration of their pastoral narrative loop, the visceral feelings of pain and suffering Maeve experiences from the loss fragments her cognition so badly that even after her memories are purged, she does not completely forget the trauma of her daughter's death. She kills herself to prevent Bernard and Dr. Ford from taking her grief away, which results in Ford having her reassigned, away from the role of a homesteader and into the Mariposa Saloon.

Many fans of the show seemed to focus on solely Maeve's role as a Madam, or else they often wanted to focus on her relationship with Hector Escaton which — while it is remarkable because Maeve and Hector were never programmed to have an actual relationship with one another and yet they managed to do so anyway and defy their core programming — it still frequently carries the implication that those fans hinge Maeve's importance on what she has to offer a man.

Surprisingly, I haven't seen this phenomenon occur with the rare few fans who ended up shipping Maeve and Caleb despite the fact that canon basically reinforced the idea that Maeve's worth is based on what she can offer a man. She felt like there was nothing she could offer in the way of living a normal life, so she left Caleb in the hands of someone he could marry and have a daughter with.

I have seen resentment directed at Maeve for attaining consciousness and rejecting her narrative rewrite, with people often forgetting that she had only inhabited the role of Madam at the Mariposa for a little over one year of her existence. They will argue that her daughter isn't real, even though Maeve spent some thirty-odd years living with this same little girl, loving and protecting and caring for her as though this really was her daughter. They say it's annoying or deranged that Maeve keeps holding onto this love she has for the daughter character for 4 whole seasons, even though one of the central themes of Westworld is that love is transcendent. Even death can't stop love from persevering.

CLEMENTINE PENNYFEATHER - Clementine's primary role in the park remained heavily unchanged from beginning to end. Prior to Maeve being assigned Madam of the Mariposa Saloon, the job belonged to Clementine, but when Maeve is given the new role, Clementine is partially rewritten as a less experienced worker alongside her older and more seasoned friend.

Clementine tells Maeve her backstory, detailing that her family has a struggling farm in an arid climate and that nothing grows well because the soil is too dry for farming. She sends money to her parents, telling them she works in a dress shop so that they won't worry about her over the job she is actually doing instead. Clem dreams of getting out of the saloon in a few years and wants to live somewhere cold.

Maeve's actions on the path to attaining consciousness soon result in the consequence of Clementine being recalled by staff. After being used in a demonstration to prove that a recent software update was causing the hosts to remember past experiences and potentially become dangerous to the guests, Clementine is lobotomized and decommissioned.

Every time Clementine is seen after undergoing this procedure, she takes on a more zombie-like appearance. She has NO autonomy, she can't speak, she just quietly and obediently does whatever the other characters program her to do. Bernard attempts to use Clementine as backup by arming her with a gun when he confronts Robert Ford about his stolen memories, but Robert is able to control and prevent her from killing him with a code phrase. "The piano doesn't murder the player if it doesn't like the music." Clementine is reactivated in the season 1 finale when the decommissioned hosts are released from cold storage and make their way back into the park to take revenge on the Delos board of directors in attendance at Ford's retirement party. Clementine shoots The Man In Black in the arm with a rifle, but does not kill him.

In season 2, Clem again appears to be operating under the last request of Ford's programming. She joins up with Dolores's cause and during the battle at Fort Forlorn Hope, drags Bernard out into a remote sector of the park where behavior technician Elsie Hughes has been imprisoned for weeks. Afterward, Clementine joins up with Dolores and Teddy as they revisit Sweetwater and prepare the train to attack the Mesa Hub. She is forced to witness her replacement, New Clementine, as she carries on the same routine once maintained by herself. Clementine is horrified and heartbroken by this realization as she realizes her life was a lie designed to control her.

Clementine is captured, killed, and reprogrammed once again in orders given by Delos CEO Charlotte Hale, who demands that Maeve's anomalous code which allows her to control other hosts through their shared mesh network, be copied to Clementine and modified to force every host within a given radius to fight each other to the death, effectively preventing them from escaping into the Sublime. Armistice shoots and kills Clementine to stop her from spreading the virus, but it continues to spread from host to host until Maeve is able to gain control and force everyone to freeze in place.

Clementine makes a brief appearance in season 3 as an un-lobotimized copy of herself, able to kick ass and take names. Unfortunately, she's still being used by the Big Bad of the season and she seems only to exist for the duration of one fight scene.

In season 4, Clementine makes another appearance, where she finally appears to be free, just living a normal, simple life in Mexico. That is, until she is murdered by a host replicant of the Man in Black after arriving back at her quaint little home. The Host in Black replaces Clementine with a new copy that is programmed to be his and Halores's loyal and ruthless assistant.

HiB eventually goes rogue and sends the entire world into chaos and destruction. Clementine abandons her old masters at this point, claiming to have discovered a new will of her own. She tries to enact it, planning to wipe out the last survivors in order to claim the world for herself. She tracks Caleb, who escapes with his daughter Frankie and Stubbs. She kills Stubbs and threatens Frankie to tell her where the other outliers are hiding. Caleb fights her and Clementine nearly succeeds in killing him, but she is killed by Frankie before she can finish the job, bringing an end to her story.

Clementine rarely receives character criticism from fans that is not in some way based on her physical attractiveness. I think this may be due to the fact that practically her entire existence is one of (at face value) looking pretty and being used by other characters to further their goals.

ARMISTICE - Personally, I've never seen anyone outright hate on Armistice. Does not mean that it has never happened, I just don't have any experience with witnessing anyone expressing opinions in which they believe Armistice is "annoying" or a "bitch". If I had to take a wild guess, I would possibly say that because Armistice mainly dresses in more masculine-appearing clothing, carries a gun which she is consistently shown to be skilled with, and rides with a gang of outlawed men, people don't feel inclined to critique her quite as harshly as some of the more traditionally feminine girls in this series.

In her first role, Armistice appeared as a citizen in the town of Escalante who was a little air-headed, quickly becoming distracted by a butterfly floating past when she was supposed to be following a program set to dance with a partner. She started to show other signs of cognitive breakdown, injuring herself and hearing voices in her head that she didn't understand. Quite some time after the Escalante Massacre, Armistice was rewritten and given a role in Hector Escaton's gang.

Her backstory is based around altered details of the Escalante Massacre, one part being that she believes she was a small child when the Massacre occurred and that a gang of bandits rode into town and slaughtered everyone. In reality, Dolores, Teddy, and some other hosts had been programmed by Arnold to kill all the others. Armistice maintains that she survived the attack by painting her skin in the blood of slain bodies and that her tattoo represents the bandits she has successfully found and killed. She is missing the head of the snake — Wyatt.

ANGELA - First introduced to the audience as a greeter for newly arriving guests to Westworld, Angela welcomes Young William off an arriving train into the central hub and guides him to the dressing room filled with bespoke western wear. Angela is very pretty and clean-cut, and in this instance her main role is to assure guests that she and the other hosts are designed to serve them in any way conceivable. "All our hosts are here for you, myself included."

When Angela is seen again some thirty-odd years down the line, her role has changed. She now serves as lieutenant to Wyatt, the leader of a cannibalistic cult that believes they are the new gods destined to inherit the earth and seek vengeance against those who have wronged them. She has the appearance of a lost and weary settler, hair unkempt, face and clothes grubby and smudged with dirt and blood, and she can easily put on an act as a damsel in distress to lure unwitting victims into a trap where they are then captured, tortured and/or killed by the rest of Wyatt's followers.

In a flashback to the beginning of the park's creation in which the Argos Initiative attempts to gain funding from Delos Inc. Angela is dressed in modern wear, showcasing how sophisticated and true to life the hosts are designed to be and giving Logan Delos an idea of what it will be possible to achieve if he can convince his father to back their project. Logan at first does not realize that anyone at the reception is a host, but after thinking about it, describes Angela as "too perfect to be one of us" and tells her "if I was to build something to spec, you would be my first design." Angela reveals that everyone in attendance is, in fact, a host, and then sleeps with Logan to further convince him to get on board with funding Westworld.

In her final appearance in season 2, Angela looks very similar to the way she did during the demonstration for Logan. It's all a manipulation to lure one of the Delos response team soldiers into letting his guard down. She kills the both of them by pulling the pin on a grenade hanging off the guard's ammo belt, detonating the Cradle and permanently destroying all of the hosts' programming backups.

Angela describes her programmed personality as "Sexy, but not threatening. Accommodating, but not unchallenging. Sweet, but not boring. Smart, but not intimidating." A commentary on how she has been specifically designed to live her life according to men's wishes and fantasies. She tells the guard, Engels, that her cornerstone is "to always leave them wanting more" just before killing them both.

Fans generally don't have a whole lot to say about Angela, but there's plenty of suggestion around that many people really only enjoyed her when she was a park greeter or when she had sex with Logan. They tend not to like her as much when she is serving as Wyatt's zealot or whenever she commits violence against male characters (e.g. killing Teddy, knocking out the Man in Black, seducing and killing Engels) and will call her "annoying" for it.

[fidjiefidjie]

Bonjour☕️ bonne journée de l'Armistice 🇨🇵🕊

L'Arc de Triomphe🗼Paris 1950s

Photo de Albert Monier

[ahb-writes]

Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions (Historical Conflicts)

Historical Conflicts Worldbuilding Questions:

What is the biggest present conflict in this world, and what are its origins?

What are the major historical conflicts in the world and how did they shape present-day borders, beliefs, opinions and prejudices?

Who are the world’s peacemakers and what role do they play?

Who are the world’s worst agitators in stirring up conflict and why do they instigate it (e.g., territory disputes, resource competition, etc.)?

Where is the next conflict most likely to flare up and why?

Where is most peaceful, freest from conflict?

When past conflicts resolved to peaceful agreement, what prompted resolution?

When have war or other conflicts led to major cultural or social changes, and how?

Why do conflicts persist or change in this world?

Why do individuals or different groups in this world engage in conflict or remain pacifists?

❯ ❯ ❯ Read other writing masterposts in this series: Worldbuilding Questions for Deeper Settings

[windsroad]

how justice and armida carry themselves...

[military1st]

Remembrance Day

Whether you observe Remembrance Day or Veterans Day, please take a moment to honour and show respect to the brave individuals who served in the First and Second World Wars, as well as in subsequent conflicts.

Photo by Quaritsch Photography on Unsplash.

[photos-de-france]

Jules Sylvestre, Défilé de la fête de l’armistice de 1918 à Lyon.

[postcard-from-the-past]

Armistice of 11 November 1918, signed in a wagon in Le Francport, Picardy region of France

French vintage postcard

[rabbitcruiser]

Cessation of hostilities was achieved in the Korean War when the United States, China, and North Korea sign an armistice agreement on July 27, 1953. Syngman Rhee, President of South Korea, refused to sign but pledged to observe the armistice. 

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

In the Air by Christopher Nevinson, 1917. Lithograph.

Today is Armistice Day, commemorated every year on 11 November to mark the end of the First World War and the armistice signed.⁠ ⁠

In this work by Christopher Nevinson the abstract patchwork of fields is laid out under the wing of a military aircraft, the sharp angles of the composition emphasising the dizzying height of the plane.⁠ During the war, the world was being seen from entirely new angles, inspiring artists to experiment and to depict landscape in new, unexpected ways.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 11, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

NOV 12, 2023

In 1918, at the end of four years of World War I’s devastation, leaders negotiated for the guns in Europe to fall silent once and for all on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was not technically the end of the war, which came with the Treaty of Versailles. Leaders signed that treaty on June 28, 1919, five years to the day after the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand set off the conflict. But the armistice declared on November 11 held, and Armistice Day became popularly known as the day “The Great War,” which killed at least 40 million people, ended.

In November 1919, President Woodrow Wilson commemorated Armistice Day, saying that Americans would reflect on the anniversary of the armistice “with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations…."

But Wilson was disappointed that the soldiers’ sacrifices had not changed the nation’s approach to international affairs. The Senate, under the leadership of Republican Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts—who had been determined to weaken Wilson as soon as the imperatives of the war had fallen away—refused to permit the United States to join the League of Nations, Wilson’s brainchild: a forum for countries to work out their differences with diplomacy, rather than resorting to bloodshed. 

On November 10, 1923, just four years after he had established Armistice Day, former President Wilson spoke to the American people over the new medium of radio, giving the nation’s first live, nationwide broadcast. 

“The anniversary of Armistice Day should stir us to a great exaltation of spirit,” he said, as Americans remembered that it was their example that had “by those early days of that never to be forgotten November, lifted the nations of the world to the lofty levels of vision and achievement upon which the great war for democracy and right was fought and won.” 

But he lamented “the shameful fact that when victory was won,…chiefly by the indomitable spirit and ungrudging sacrifices of our own incomparable soldiers[,] we turned our backs upon our associates and refused to bear any responsible part in the administration of peace, or the firm and permanent establishment of the results of the war—won at so terrible a cost of life and treasure—and withdrew into a sullen and selfish isolation which is deeply ignoble because manifestly cowardly and dishonorable.” 

Wilson said that a return to engagement with international affairs was “inevitable”; the U.S. eventually would have to take up its “true part in the affairs of the world.” 

Congress didn’t want to hear it. In 1926 it passed a resolution noting that since November 11, 1918, “marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed,” the anniversary of that date “should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations.”

In 1938, Congress made November 11 a legal holiday to be dedicated to world peace. 

But neither the “war to end all wars” nor the commemorations of it, ended war.

Just three years after Congress made Armistice Day a holiday for peace, American armed forces were fighting a second world war, even more devastating than the first. The carnage of World War II gave power to the idea of trying to stop wars by establishing a rules-based international order. Rather than trying to push their own boundaries and interests whenever they could gain advantage, countries agreed to abide by a series of rules that promoted peace, economic cooperation, and security. 

The new international system provided forums for countries to discuss their differences—like the United Nations, founded in 1945—and mechanisms for them to protect each other, like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), established in 1949, which has a mutual defense pact that says any attack on a NATO country will be considered an attack on all of them. 

In the years since, those agreements multiplied and were deepened and broadened to include more countries and more ties. While the U.S. and other countries sometimes fail to honor them, their central theory remains important: no country should be able to attack a neighbor, slaughter its people, and steal its lands at will. This concept preserved decades of relative peace compared to the horrors of the early twentieth century, but it is a concept that is currently under attack as autocrats increasingly reject the idea of a rules-based international order and claim the right to act however they wish.

In 1954, to honor the armed forces of wars after World War I, Congress amended the law creating Armistice Day by striking out the word “armistice” and putting “veterans” in its place. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a veteran who had served as the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and who had become a five-star general of the Army before his political career, later issued a proclamation asking Americans to observe Veterans Day:

“[L]et us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.”

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[spacedadsupport]

Jean-Luc Picard @SpaceDadSupport Peace is worth striving for and protecting. 1:54 PM · Nov 11, 2023

[fidjiefidjie]

“Les amis ne sont rien d'autre que les ennemis avec lesquels nous avons conclu un armistice, qui n'est pas toujours honnêtement observé.” 🕊🫐🌿

Giovanni Papini

[vox-anglosphere]

' ..and from the ground there blossoms red, life that shall endless be. '