#the Sun Coast principality has been defending a giant fortification this whole time

[whetstonefires]

...well now you put it like that, the novel i've been poking away at since NaNo 2020 centers on a character who achieved victory as an untrained (though not thoroughly green; she did kind of informally apprentice with some veteran insurgents and also is a bandit) hero rallying an army to overthrow the evil regime.

and key notes include that the only reason this was feasible is she started out with funding and a core force of troops and officers from a neighboring power.

(which is now ofc looking to establish hegemony over the whole region and expand its borders now that its neighboring country is in total disarray; this provides one of the main sources of tension in the actual plot, as the war is backstory, and the fact that this outcome was obvious is one of the reasons she kept such a grip on power during the war, rather than gracefully becoming a figurehead.)

also she severely bungled her first major engagement wherein she made most of the decisions, the defense of a ford, but got injured pulling most of her troops out in a heroic fighting retreat, preserving her reputation. she proceeded to spend her entire recovery cramming theory in her patron principality's military academy.

she fought a pretty conservative campaign when it comes to acceptable losses, but the fact that there was no way to fight a war without accepting the premise of acceptable losses is her number one cause of PTSD, which i had not articulated so clearly until this moment.

😂 yeah okay you have me dead to rights. gonna go use this to even out the tone of some scenes that couldn't decide what their focus was beyond infodumping lmao.

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'