#so it's an imperfect and maybe offensive analogy but frankly the way a lot of writers handle war stories IS offensive

[chamerionwrites]

I realize I've also said this before in different words but the other problem is that a lot of people have unconsciously and unquestioningly absorbed "war story = story about soldiers," and thus "anti-war story = story about how sad and damaging war is for soldiers."

To be clear I don't think this is either an unnecessary or unimportant perspective, but if that's the sum total of how you conceptualize an anti-war story it's a cripplingly narrow one. At best incomplete. At worst, empire co-opting even criticisms of itself. In English-language media, high odds that story is written by an American or a Brit - aka someone swimming in the cultural soup of one of the last several centuries' largest empires. This is not to say that such writers are incapable of thoughtful anti-war critique OR that people with very different perspectives don't write great fiction in English, but I do think it immediately illustrates some of the potential pitfalls here. At risk of being That Person insensitively using fantasy fiction to discuss serious irl issues, imagine Star Wars except it's about a stormtrooper with PTSD. This sounds laughably absurd until you realize it's not that far off the structure of quite a lot of stories about Vietnam (and increasingly Iraq/Afghanistan).

Anyway my point is that if you're living in an empire and you observe that narratives successfully critiquing war are rare, perhaps "they're just impossible to tell" is not the occam's razor answer to this problem.