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A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (Blog)
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A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry is an educational blog by historian Dr. Bret C. Devereaux, focusing on history and popular culture. Devereaux specializes in military history and the ancient Mediterranean world (particularly The Roman Empire) but sometimes ranges further afield. Dr. Devereaux is also unabashedly One of Us, and many of his posts explore popular culture's depiction of various historical and pseudo-historical subjects from a more academic perspective, including media such as 300, Dune, The Lord of the Rings, and Game of Thrones. The blog discusses, often at some length, both history itself and the tropes common in historical fiction and history-inspired speculative fiction such as Medieval European Fantasy.Dr. Devereaux has also beaten Dark Souls. | |
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Defeat Means Friendship | |
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Defeat Means Friendship: According to Devereaux, this is how Rome conquered Italy, and later, the Mediterranean world. Defeated city-states and tribes were given autonomy, and required to send troops to reinforce the Roman armies on campaign. This deal allowed Rome to mobilize a far higher percentage of its population into combat than any of its great power rivals, which was the main advantage that allowed Rome to conquer them. Devereaux calls this "the Goku Model of Imperialism". | |
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Death from Above | |
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Death from Above: Deconstructed. Strategic bombing has never worked, and yet throughout history air forces keep insisting that this new thing(more bombs with new jets or guided bombs) now means that it will, that if they kill enough people they will capitulate. Historically people who are bombed tend to hate the enemy who are bombing them more than they hate their government for not surrendering. Note that this is distinct from tactical use of air power to directly strike at the enemy. That can work, but he also points out in another post that even this is harder than it seems. You just can't win wars without troops on the ground. | |
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Invented Individual | |
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Invented Individual: One point he brings up when discussing Sparta is the figure of Lycurgus, whom just about every popular source treats as "the founder of Sparta" and the guy who came up with all its codes of law that proved the bedrock of its society. He points out that, in fact, the timeframe of Lycurgus's reign happens to be a period from which we have essentially no actual sources, his story is clearly at least somewhat fantastical, he was deified, his story (along with his stated law code) was carried on by a culture that rarely wrote anything down, and his law code is largely based on a status quo of Sparta having a large slave population it wouldn't have had during his time. Consequently, it's very likely that Lycurgus never actually existed, or if he did, he was no less altered in the process of mythologizing him than figures like Theseus or Romulus—making the idea that the Spartan law code was written by him personally, and his words stayed unchanged for four hundred years, fairly cleanly propaganda. He brings this up specifically to ward off the idea that the Sparta we know of is just a debasement of Lycurgus's original "true" Spartan state, as that state is based on a figure who may well be completely imaginary, and points out that each source discussing this idea assumes this true Spartan state was close to the then-present, century after century. | |
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Anachronism Stew | |
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Anachronism Stew: In his essays on Game of Thrones's world building, he notes that despite claiming to be based on the Middle Ages, the world of the series includes many elements from the Early Modern Age or the Classical Era, such as kings holding a lot of individual power (medieval kings were hugely dependent on the consent of their lords), extreme levels of misogyny (the Middle Ages certainly wasn't great about this, but it was markedly much better than Westeros), large-scale wars steeped in political conflict with little attention paid to civilian casualties (only religious wars like the Crusades got that big in the Middle Ages), religion being held in lesser regard (definitely not the case), downright colossal cities (most medieval cities were stuck at a small size due to lack of a strong bureaucracy to feed them), and even much of the weapons and armor. At one point when discussing the films of Lord of the Rings, he brings up how the films heavily altered the weapons and armor of the books, which were mostly dated to the early Middle Ages, to be more all over the place, with significantly more usage of plate and quite a few designs that seem to be outright fantasy. He points out that this is probably due to the simple need for diversity; if the armies looked like the ones in the books, with everyone wearing mail armor and using one-handed weapons, hand-drawn bows, and shields, then they would broadly look the same, whereas the more motley arsenal of the films allows for armies to be characterized through their equipment (Gondor's army using plate armor conveys their greater resources and willingness to equip their infantry compared to Rohan using mostly leather and chain, Isengard's use of crossbows shows their greater mechanization, etc). Muddy fields in fantasy wars are largely based on Tolkien's experience in World War I, as well as the fact that it was the first filmed war and so influenced our view of what happened earlier. The truth is that while you could get a muddy environment, it only occurred in unusual circumstances. Accounts even up to the American Civil War mostly show grassy fields. The First World War was unique, as it was a result of the destructiveness of modern explosive shells and the relatively static battlefield. Shells kept falling in the same spaces over and over, which prevented anything from growing back once the war had ended because the ground had taken so much damage. | |
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Sunk Cost Fallacy | |
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Sunk Cost Fallacy: He considers that one of the main reasons that World War 1 lasted as long as it did. By the second or third year of the war, nothing that could have been gained from it would be worth continuing, but giving up without some sort of victory would have meant that everything lost until that point would feel like a waste. It also applies to the politicians who supported the war at the beginning, as admitting that it had all been for nothing wold have ruined their careers. | |
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Awesome, but Impractical | |
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Awesome, but Impractical: War elephants, at least in the West. Though incredibly powerful and intimidating to face, elephants were also immensely costly in terms of resources, difficult to find in Europe, could potentially be dangerous to their own side if their driver was killed, and had rather exploitable weaknesses that could be broken by highly-organized Roman or Chinese armies. | |
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Cool, but Inefficient | |
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Cool, but Inefficient: He claims that Saruman's Uruk-Hai at Helm's Deep appear to be designed along these lines, such as massive Triumph of the Will-style formations with few clear officers, equipment kitted out with nasty-looking Spikes of Villainy, long sarissa pikes useless in a siege environment, a disorganized multi-pronged "hasty" assault with no clear means of succeeding apart from sheer numbers, and complex contraptions designed to fill the gap of major holes in the army's arsenal, such as minimal siege equipment (they fail to even cover the battering ram). He notes that while parts of it may well be just clumsy filmmaking, it actually works rather well for Saruman's character, suggesting he's invested his resources into lots of badass-looking gear and advanced technology, but overlooked the Boring, but Practical side of things as too simplistic or beneath his notice. | |
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Deadly Gas | |
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Deadly Gas/The Poor Man's Atomic Bomb: A discussion of why chemical weapons are banned points out that these weapons don't actually work all that well in the first place, because gas masks almost entirely negates the effects. Chemical explosives are almost always more effective per ton delivered, and modern mobile armies make them extremely hard to use in the field and irrelevant against more static armies, because mobile armies always win anyway(at least until they get bogged down in protracted warfare). In that final case, such brutal tactics are pointless. | |
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Falsely Advertised Accuracy | |
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Falsely Advertised Accuracy: invokedA recurring note in his critiques of A Song of Ice and Fire is noting that while George R. R. Martin often makes claims towards greater realism in terms of portraying medieval societies, his works frequently betray a lack of research into how those societies worked. This results in Easy Logistics, Hollywood Tactics, and nations that by all rights shouldn't even function. Ironically, he notes that the works of J. R. R. Tolkien show the opposite, as Tolkien did have an actual background in history, meaning that his works show a surprising amount of rigor in terms of those very things despite a much more fantastical presentation. | |
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Historical Hero Upgrade | |
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Historical Hero Upgrade: In his essay on Sparta, he contrasts the image of Spartans as presented in popular history (egalitarian, honorable, and a bulwark against Persia) with the reality as shown by historical account—the Spartans were a slave state that treated the majority of its population like livestock, and after the Peloponnesian War, were one of Persia's strongest allies in the Mediterranean. He argues this of Cleopatra, noting that a great deal of pop-history treats her as the first truly Egyptian leader of the Ptolemies, a dynasty infamous for refusing to follow the culture of the people they ruled. Though he does note that she learned the language, he also points out that she learned plenty of languages, and most of the signs of her adopting Egypt's traditions were done regularly by prior Ptolemies. Indeed, he argues that multiple points in Cleopatra's reign saw her choosing to impoverish Egypt in the name of advancing her ambitions, and that her priorities seemed to lie towards reviving the Macedonian Empire rather than strengthening Egypt. | |
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Easy Communication | |
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Devereaux has a similar verdict in regards to the extreme control the player usually has on their troops in a strategy game compared to what the generals would have in the pre-modern period, as having to blindly rely on a pre-conceived plan without much ability to influence the things that happen on the battle wouldn't be very fun. | |
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War Is Glorious | |
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War Is Glorious: He does a whole essay on the work of Bertran de Born, a French nobleman who wrote a number of poems glorifying war and battle. He notes that de Born was not an Armchair Military chickenhawk or a Miles Gloriosus, being an experienced knight who'd been involved in a number of battles, meaning he was writing from experience. Devereaux argues that de Born's cavalier view of warfare originates from the fact that to a noble like him, well-protected by armor and almost certain to be captured for ransom rather than killed, war really was an opportunity for glory and victory moreso than a harrowing experience. Further discussed in the essays on warfare in Europa Universalis IV and Victoria II In the pre-industrial era (represented in EUIV), when most of the state income came from agriculture, conquest of new arable land and peasants had far better returns than investing the same amount of resources in internal improvements. This created a situation where the most bellicose states expanded at the cost of weaker and more pacifist ones, meaning societies that glorified warfare and conquest were the most likely to survive. Starting with the Industrial Revolution (represented in Victoria II) this was subverted. Access to new sources of energy (from coal to atom) greatly increased returns that can be achieved from infrastructure investments, while at the same time making warfare much more destructive. By the time World War 1 happened it was clear that the balance has changed, since even the states on the winning side ended up in a worse situation than before the war. | |
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Unfortunate Implications | |
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Unfortunate Implications: invokedMuch of the reason he dislikes the Dothraki so much is that he sees them as a repackaging of stereotypical tropes like The Savage Indian and the Hordes from the East as Always Chaotic Evil Proud Warrior Race Guys with no culture beyond Rape, Pillage, and Burn. He's especially critical of this since George R. R. Martin has often claimed that the Dothraki are based on those cultures, which might give people the impression that the Dothraki is what they were actually like. | |
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We Have Become Complacent | |
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We Have Become Complacent: Discussed in "The Fremen Mirage," regarding how "civilized" writers often used the figure of the "Fremen" (used as a shorthand for a variety of Proud Warrior Race/Had to Be Sharp non-state societies in different contexts) to comment on the perceived deficiencies of their own societies. The discussion of Sparta also points out that some of this view was based on the Athenians believing this trope. | |
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AlternateCharacterInterpretation | |
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Alternate Character Interpretation: invokedHe makes this argument with regards to Saruman in Lord of the Rings, claiming that Saruman's rather poor tactics and strategy on display in both the book and the film are deliberate, or if they aren't at least make a lot of sense with his character. Saruman is Too Clever by Half, obsessed with his own ego, and has no respect for those around him, and consequently he creates an overcomplicated gambit that is very likely to fail and builds an army that looks impressive on paper but is actually a Paper Tiger. In contrast he gushes about the Witch King's masterful operation against Gondor, proving Tolkien knew what a good medieval general looks like. | |
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Fantasy Counterpart Culture | |
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Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Discussed, in the "That Dothraki Horde" series of essays. Devereaux comes to the conclusion that the Dothraki in both the books and TV series have more in common with the Theme Park Version of horse nomads than they do with actual Eurasian steppe nomads or Plains Indians (their purported inspirations). | |
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Skill Gate Characters | |
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Skill Gate Characters: In his analysis of Sparta, he describes the classical hoplite phalanx as essentially a military equivalent of this trope. Fully armored hoplites with their shields locked together presented a wall of spears and metal, and it required relatively little training to pull off, making it a great pick for the largely non-professional Greek armies. However, a hoplite phalanx had terrible maneuverability and situational awareness, due to requiring a tight formation and very cumbersome gear, meaning that any tactic more complex than "march forward" was usually beyond it. He notes that Spartans were special for their ability to perform fairly basic maneuvers mid-battle, and that accounts of the time actively considered hoplite training pointless because individual skill mattered so little. Devereaux blames the tactic's lack of flexibility on the various Greek city-states ultimately being curbstomped by Macedon and Rome, both of which used much more sophisticated formations that allowed their troops to maneuver and reposition freely. | |
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Game of Chicken | |
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Game of Chicken: He considers that cavalry on cavalry encounters on the pre-modern period are this to a degree. Two formations smashing into each other at full gallop would cause catastrophic damage to both the riders and their horses, but the first one to turn aside or slow down would be at a huge disadvantage. However, the risk was generally so high that he considers that the "press" was the standard tactic, in which both sides push through each other at non-lethal speeds in a tight formation using their weapons. | |
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Armor Is Useless | |
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Armor Is Useless: A regular discussion topic. He often analyzes armor designs and discusses common errors with them, including scenes where armor is broken by things that really shouldn't be able to break it, and how people historically dealt with an armored warrior. (A recurring gripe of his is how infrequently gambeson shows up, despite it having been the Boring, but Practical armor of the Middle Ages.) He also seems to consider the image of a completely unarmored berserker to be a Pet-Peeve Trope, pointing out that the classic example of such (the Gauls, who were known to fight naked) at least had the common sense to carry shields. However, he notes that this is one of the Acceptable Breaks from Reality for storytelling, as Weapon-Based Characterization allows for theming and character traits to be conveyed visually to the audience. | |
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Had to Be Sharp | |
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Had to Be Sharp: Explored and deconstructed in "The Fremen Mirage." | |
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Inferred Holocaust | |
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Inferred Holocaust: invokedHe makes this argument with regards to the ending of Game of Thrones, claiming that the system of elective monarchy that the council has set up is likely to crumble in a matter of decades due to the system tending to be historically unstable or prone to interference. | |
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Easy Logistics | |
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Easy Logistics: In any discussion of an army depicted on the march or in camp, expect Dr. Devereaux to raise the question of where all the supplies are. He also brings this up in his essay on Game of Thrones's historicity, pointing out that considering what we're shown and the population figures given, King's Landing should not be able to feed itself. This becomes the entire focus of his discussion of the loot train in the seventh season, which is all about the difficulty of transporting food long distances overland; his ultimate prognosis is that Jaime's army would end up running out of supplies, eating their way through the very food they're trying to transport, and starving to death long before they reached their destination. | |
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Historical Badass Upgrade | |
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Historical Badass Upgrade: According to "This. Isn't. Sparta.", the Spartans have been major beneficiaries of this over the centuries. He points out that the Spartans lost about half the recorded battles they were involved in, including being rolled over by Rome and Macedon, and were woefully bad on a strategic level, concluding that they were, at best, somewhat stronger than other Greek city-states on a troop-to-troop basis but not insurmountably so. He surmises that this is because, for much of Sparta's history, it was mostly bullying small neighbors for slave-taking, which allowed it to develop a reputation as an unbeatable force, and Athenians had a fascination with Sparta and frequently bigged it up in propaganda. His breakdown of Cleopatra notes that she tends to be on the receiving end of this, partially as an attempt to counterweight the nakedly biased Roman propaganda. Though he acknowledges she was probably one of the better rulers of the Ptolemaic dynasty in at least a long time, he also emphasizes that this wasn't hard, when the dynasty as a whole was abysmal. Far more of Cleopatra's gambits failed than succeeded, her military record was flat-out bad, and in general, Egypt under her reign performed well below the expectations of a state of its population and wealth (it did so under the prior Ptolemies as well, but there's no sign that Cleopatra actually tried to fix this). However, he points out that this does not mean Cleopatra was an idiot or talentless, merely that she was a poor ruler—a person can be highly knowledgeable, charismatic, and intelligent while still not having any skill at governance. When discussing the Marian Reforms, he notes that actual historians (even Wikipedia) tended to do this with Gaius Marius, noting that while Marius was definitely a powerful and successful leader, there was a habit of proscribing every army-based innovation between the Late Republican era and the reign of Augustus to his top-down commands, essentially creating a Marius who singlehandedly modernized the Roman army. He then goes on to point out that most of these are things that Marius has little to no evidence of having even attempted, outright predated him and were simply considered good tactical sense even at the time, are only ascribed to him by the somewhat unreliable source of Plutarch, have a paper trail leading them back to Augustus rather than him, and/or are simply not true. He notes that this seems to have arisen from a viewpoint that there was an undeniable shift during that period, and Marius's long reign seemed as good a reason as any for it to have happened (not to mention further shifting the light on what historians saw as an ideal of a great commander), rather than it happening from the ground up from cultural necessity and circumstance. | |
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Soldier vs. Warrior | |
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Soldier vs. Warrior: Gets its own blog post. Perhaps not surprising for a Roman Empire specialist, Devereaux seems to favor soldiers. This is brought up in The Fremen Mirage, where he argues that historically, large organized societies with professional militaries tended to treat "warrior" societies as speed bumps or nuisances, and many so-called "warrior" societies (i.e. the "barbarians" who sacked Rome) were actually pretty soldier-y. He notes the Mongols to have been largely the exception that proved the rule, claiming that they had both a very good kind of troop that most societies couldn't cultivate, and a great reformer in Chinggis Khan who managed to solve the weaknesses of his army long enough for it to conquer half the world. This is also discussed rather differently in his essay on the Battle of the Hornburg, noting that the battle is largely one of a heavily-organized professional army (the Uruk-Hai) versus a far less formalized levy army of people defending their home (the Rohirrim). He argues that while a professional army may seem inherently better than the rugged levy or militia, it's more a case of picking the right tool for the right job. Building a true professional army requires a lot of work and a strong system to support it and mold men into proper soldiers, making it largely Difficult, but Awesome—if you don't have the tools to make it work, you end up with an over-equipped rabble where the troops lack cohesion, morale, and brotherhood, which is what the Uruk-Hai turned out to be. He contrasts this with the Rohirrim, which have a much simpler and more individualistic army structure but make it work much better, the soldiers being unified by existing personal and communal bonds rather than harsh drilling. | |
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Proud Warrior Race Guy | |
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Proud Warrior Race Guy: Frequently discussed, usually critically or skeptically. In particular, the "The Fremen Mirage," "That Dothraki Horde," and "This. Isn't. Sparta." essays contrast Proud Warrior Race stereotypes with the complexity of historical real-world societies. | |
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Strategy Versus Tactics | |
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Strategy Versus Tactics: A regular topic of discussion, and he frequently throws in the oft-forgotten third category of operations. ("Operations" refer, more or less, to the large military movements and decisions to go to battle that aid in accomplishing a strategic goal.) His essay on Saruman argues that one of the reason Saruman fails is that he prioritized the success of the operation (destabilizing Rohan) and the tactics as part of said operation (burning the Westfold and killing one of its princes) over the strategy (winning the war, which requires Rohan stay neutral as long as possible). Consequently, Saruman ends up being forced into the track of open warfare with Rohan, and as it turns out, his army isn't up to the task and ends up completely destroyed at Helm's Deep. One of the main reasons he attacks the Spartan military is that he argues it was historically very poor at accomplishing operations (as opposed to individual battles, which it had an okay record in). He specifically cites the Peloponnesian War as the prime example of this. Sparta and Athens were about 150 miles apart by road (about a ten-day march, which should be well within the means of a good army), and a lot of that road is through Spartan-allied territory, with the city of Corinth being right on the way. This should be a logistical slam dunk, but instead the Spartan invasions peter out multiple times when the Spartans run out of food and have to go home. | |
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Horse Archer | |
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Horse Archer: Discussed at length, with both historical (Mongols) and fictional (Dothraki) examples. | |
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Mucking in the Mud | |
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Muddy fields in fantasy wars are largely based on Tolkien's experience in World War I, as well as the fact that it was the first filmed war and so influenced our view of what happened earlier. The truth is that while you could get a muddy environment, it only occurred in unusual circumstances. Accounts even up to the American Civil War mostly show grassy fields. The First World War was unique, as it was a result of the destructiveness of modern explosive shells and the relatively static battlefield. Shells kept falling in the same spaces over and over, which prevented anything from growing back once the war had ended because the ground had taken so much damage. | |
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Crippling Overspecialization | |
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Crippling Overspecialization: Discussed in "This. Isn't. Sparta." A major problem facing Sparta was their over-reliance on hoplite phalanx infantry tactics in situations where logistics, siege craft, naval warfare, or even diplomacy were more important. | |
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General Failure | |
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General Failure: He tends to point this out whenever it comes up, bringing up cases where a character seems to be an intentionally bad strategist (such as Saruman) and cases where a character seems to be meant as a good leader but is anywhere from flawed (Théoden in the films) to a complete mess (Jaime Lannister). One of the few cases in which he discussed a real life case of this was Luigi Cardona, who he considers the worst general of the first World War by some margin. | |
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Hollywood Tactics | |
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Hollywood Tactics: Discussed often enough to get its own tag. Being a military historian, Devereaux finds plenty to criticize in cinematic battles. | |
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War Elephants | |
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War Elephants: Get a series of essays discussing their tactical use, advantages, and disadvantages. | |
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Warrior Poet | |
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Warrior Poet: A few historical examples: 'Antarah Ibn Shaddad, from the pre-Islamic Arab world, and Bertran de Born, from medieval France. | |
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The Queen's Latin | |
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The Queen's Latin: Referenced by name in the essay series The Queen's Latin, which starts with "why are ancient Romans so often portrayed by white British actors with posh accents?" and develops into a broader discussion of the complexities of historical Roman identity. | |
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Acceptable Breaks from Reality | |
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Acceptable Breaks from Reality: He often points out in his essays on Lord of the Rings when the filmmakers had to change things to make scenes possible to film. For instance, the skirmish between the Rohirrim and the warg riders in The Two Towers features a lot of ahistorical elements, such as minimal tactics besides charging in and the Rohirrim using few spears and not wielding their shields. He points out that the rather basic tactics on display are likely because the scene is supposed to be a short appetizer before Helm's Deep and therefore going simple is favorable, and filming a horseman with a spear and shield in an action scene is rather difficult (shields are cumbersome, and prop spears are much more dangerous than prop swords). Devereaux has a similar verdict in regards to the extreme control the player usually has on their troops in a strategy game compared to what the generals would have in the pre-modern period, as having to blindly rely on a pre-conceived plan without much ability to influence the things that happen on the battle wouldn't be very fun. | |
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Willing Suspension of Disbelief | |
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Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Discussed heavily in his breakdown of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, as he notes that a major reason that he found the series so hard to get into was that the world failed to feel like a real place. Though he explains that it is, of course, a fantasy world where out-of-the-ordinary things are expected, the world still has to feel consistent and its deviations from reality have to feel like deliberate choices rather than born out of accident or laziness. If the world fails to feel real, then it becomes difficult for the audience to get invested in the stakes, because the circumstances stop depending on the rules the world has set up or what makes sense in real life, and start depending on whatever happens to be convenient at the moment. | |
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Won the War, Lost the Peace | |
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Won the War, Lost the Peace: His discussion of the problem of industrialized warfare leading to the "Long Peace" is about this issue. Modern weapons are both too destructive and expensive, meaning that you waste money and blow up the very thing you wanted to win in the first place. At the same time, the benefits are less significant when contrasted with just spending that money on domestic economic investment. | |
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Damned by Faint Praise | |
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His breakdown of Cleopatra notes that she tends to be on the receiving end of this, partially as an attempt to counterweight the nakedly biased Roman propaganda. Though he acknowledges she was probably one of the better rulers of the Ptolemaic dynasty in at least a long time, he also emphasizes that this wasn't hard, when the dynasty as a whole was abysmal. Far more of Cleopatra's gambits failed than succeeded, her military record was flat-out bad, and in general, Egypt under her reign performed well below the expectations of a state of its population and wealth (it did so under the prior Ptolemies as well, but there's no sign that Cleopatra actually tried to fix this). However, he points out that this does not mean Cleopatra was an idiot or talentless, merely that she was a poor ruler—a person can be highly knowledgeable, charismatic, and intelligent while still not having any skill at governance. | |
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Conspicuous Consumption | |
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Conspicuous Consumption: Devereaux suggests that a large reason for why war elephants stayed in usage in India and various other countries was this: elephants are so difficult to feed, house, and train for war that any king capable of maintaining a proper elephant corps for battle would have to be phenomenally wealthy and powerful (and it's important to give this impression when you're a king). | |
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Traveling at the Speed of Plot | |
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Traveling at the Speed of Plot: He discusses here how small Middle-earth feels in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. In episode five and six, time and distance can be traced very well because of the sun rising and falling between scenes. The Numenorians make it from Numenor to Barad-dur in less than 24 hours, while it took even Aragorn eight days in his dead sprint to cover the distance from the Paths of the Dead to Minas Tirith, to have an idea at what alert pace the characters move in The Rings of Power. | |
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Onrushing Army | |
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Onrushing Army: Given how much he discusses fantasy battles, bringing this up is perhaps inevitable. In particular, he analyzes both the Rohirrim charges in Lord of the Rings and the Dothraki charges in Game of Thrones. He considers the former to have gotten a lot right but still had some major errors (i.e. heavy cavalry was indeed used in those kinds of headlong charges to break enemy formations, but they wouldn't have been able to outright flatten the enemy as they do in the Jackson films, and should probably be instead backing away and going for another charge rather than trying to penetrate enemy lines), and is incredibly critical of the latter (claiming that it's not only a terrible use of troops like the Dothraki, but it doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to how their supposed historical inspirations fought). | |
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Complexity Addiction | |
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Complexity Addiction: Devereaux argues that Saruman had this problem in The Lord of the Rings. Saruman's overall strategy had several major moving parts running independently, all of them with a high chance of failure, and all of them totally dependent on the others succeeding to actually advance his goals. So once Saruman's raid to capture the Ring failed, he was completely boned because he'd already started a war with Rohan, tipped his hand to Sauron, and made the Ents more than a little mad at him. Once his siege failed, Saruman's defeat wasn't a matter of if it would happen, but when it would happen. In his discussion of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, he argues that this is a major reason behind Hollywood Tactics in fiction. As he points out, certain filmmakers want to surprise and outsmart the audience, and so rather than using the expected tactics, they like to come up with crazy, "innovative" tactics that leaves the audience shocked and wowed. However, in real life, battles were almost always won by Boring, but Practical tactics that happened to be executed better than the opponent's, and the reason those tactics were expected was that they worked. This results in a situation where Arondir and Bronwyn come up with a battle plan that throws out constant surprises, but also makes so many mistakes (destroying a highly defensible tower to take out some uncertain fraction of the enemy army rather than using it as a base, not engaging the enemy at the nearby bridge but rather in the middle of their village, setting half of said village on fire, and walling the enemy in to ensure they fight to the death rather than letting them break and run) that it almost seems like they're trying to lose the battle. | |
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