Salvation War Criticism Thread

[Ryan Thunder]

Christ, man. I don't know what it is about how you write, but if you weren't typing this I'd say you're foaming at the mouth, nearly. Maybe its the lack of commas or something...

"But how is that interesting unless you're just hooked on the novelty of demons not being portrayed as invincible supernatural killing machines?"

Your implying that a story of invincible demons is somehow more valid then the salvation war, its right their in your text and that is what I responded to.

Erm... No? Where did I say that? How the hell would that be any better than this? That'd arguably be even worse because it's been done to death already.

So now you accept that a story where Demons CAN be killed is now acceptable yes? If so then TSW is the most logical version so far around no magic, no a wizard did it, its all based on scientific principles they are biological beings with certain evolutionary advantages, advantages that encouraged a certain way of thought that became engrained over their immortal lifespans and as such easily destroyed by a more adaptable innovative enemy force.

*sigh*

It does nothing to change the fact that the antagonists are basically cardboard cutouts on the shooting range for all they're worth, which was my criticism.

We are still back to the main point, liking the story so far from your view is based on the fact that the premise, the very most basic premise of the story that angels and demons have a reason based in reality and science as unattractive and uninteresting to YOU, thus making it subjective, thus making your picture spam an invalid criticism!

No, my criticism is that this premise has resulted in a story where the antagonists are useless and thus uninteresting.

Do you agree with this now? If the antagonists are based in reality then our reality based weapons can defeat and destroy anything that is "real" angels and demons in the biblical fantasy fiction sense of being eldritch beings are NOT based in reality and thus cannot be destroyed by reality its really one of the other if they are real then we can destroy them if they are not then we cannot without whatever magic they can use either, as it is now in TSW we can use SCIENCE!(tm) to defeat them, technology to crush them and with technology (tim curry voice) we will crush them flat!

For fuck's sakes, man, would it kill you cut back on the false dilemmas?

[Simon_Jester]

Except that was your complete argument!

"But how is that interesting unless you're just hooked on the novelty of demons not being portrayed as invincible supernatural killing machines?"

Your implying that a story of invincible demons is somehow more valid then the salvation war, its right their in your text and that is what I responded to.

For my own part, I do not see this implication. Classically, demons are portrayed as nigh-invincible and the only way to beat them is to outwit them (see any number of folk tales stretching back to the Dung Ages). Suddenly, Stuart writes a story in which demons are NOT nigh-invincible! They actually die when you stab or shoot them*! Wow!

*For sufficiently vigorous stabbing or shooting.
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But by itself, that isn't a big enough idea to carry a trilogy of novels. It's interesting, and it's more than a mere conceit, but:
1)In and of itself, it isn't actually new, even if Stuart is the first to explore the implications as thoroughly as he has. Other authors have written demons (and angels) as antagonists that non-demon, non-angels can defeat in direct combat by people who, strictly speaking, have no magic powers. It's even a major part of the premise of a couple of popular fantasy games.
2)By the time you've written up several hundred straight pages of demons and angels not being invincible, the reader may have a hard time remembering that he ever was supposed to think of them as invincible. You can only hammer your opponent for so long before "Ha-ha, you're not as invincible as you're made out to be!" becomes "Ha-ha, you're a pathetic irrelevant worm!"

So unless you're really really caught up in the novelty of that one idea of demons and angels being vincible*, sooner or later you're going to look for other things to carry the story and keep your interest. If they're not there, then that's a problem with the story. For me, they are there, at least there in enough quantity to keep me reading. But I understand why someone else might not see it that way. In some ways I have low standards.

And when someone says "they aren't there," it is most unreasonable to say "no, you dipshit, they don't need to be there, because instead something else that is awesome is there!" That might be a reasonable argument by itself, but not so obviously true that it can justify the "dipshit" part.

*For lack of a better term.
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Aaaah, so people reading fiction set in WWII or Iraq is thus 'boring' because we already know who wins?

You missed an important subtlety. In a World War Two story we know who wins (barring alternate history, of course). But the protagonists don't, and shouldn't. At the time the war was actually fought, the "good guys" were very much in doubt over their ability to beat the "bad guys" without paying an unacceptable price, and that doubt, the plausibility of the villains of the piece winning the war, carries through to a modern audience. Your heroes are fighting characters who operate more or less on their level of competence, and who are more than capable of inflicting dreadful reverses on the entire cause.

Here, that's not happening. We would have been able to infer that the villains of the piece were going to get their asses kicked almost from the beginning. All we needed to know was that the Legions of Hell (which are traditionally considered a fairly significant threat) turned out to be a bunch of exceptionally durable Bronze Age phalangites who only posed a "threat" in the sense that we might conceivably run out of ammo before killing the last of them. That gave away the ending one twelfth of the way into the overall story. It's as if World War Two had started with the rout of a German invasion of Poland and the Polish lancers had been parading through the streets of Königsberg by November 1939.

If someone wrote a story like that in a world where the real war never happened, it would be rather boring, especially if the Poles didn't have to fight very hard to make it happen. At that point, it doesn't matter how menacing and evil you made the Nazis look by having them beat up on defenseless Jews inside their country, because they're a pushover compared to any competent enemy outside their own borders.
_____

I don't need to reason my way out of a problem, I am explaining to you that your interpretation of the text you probably did not read is incorrect, I am answering your criticisms and providing an explaination for a potentially ambigious text as sometimes we aren't just supposed to rely on Word of God but by studying the text figure it out for ourselves. You took the lazy way out and just didn't care.

That would be a good idea if he were actually trying to interpret a text. He's not; he's trying to read a text and explain why it wasn't as good a read as he would have liked. I'm free to like it, and you're free to love it to pieces, but "Meh, there wasn't really enough dramatic tension for me" is still a valid criticism, because most readers of stories like a certain amount of dramatic tension in their fiction.

Keep in mind that "Story X can be criticized for reason Y" does not equal "Story X sucks and should be despised by all right-thinking people." It would be wrong and dumb to say the latter about the Salvation War stories, but not necessarily wrong and dumb to say the former.
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That the antagonists have been made vulnerable through the application of science and the understanding that the source of our knowledge of them is from a biased source of propaganda should clearly explain that this setting isn't your normal setting of Humans versus the Elritch and unexplanable, this settings background is that they are specifically explainable thanks to Humanities ability to study and understand things and because of that victory is a real possibility.

To be sure.

What I'd like to see (not as a variation on this story, but on some story) is a "science vs. magic" scenario in which the scientists actually have to figure out the magic. Where they are confronted with a problem that is outside their context and actually learn how to fight and beat it on its own terms, rather than entirely into a problem to be dealt with on their terms. Just as applying scientific chemistry to, say, metallurgy improved the art of metallurgy beyond what would be possible for a medieval blacksmith, I'd imagine that applying scientific study to the techniques of magic would yield more impressive magic.

But the key is that there would be something that you would honestly call magic going on, something that really does operate in terms of "making things happen by wishing for them with the aid of suitable appliances," something that does not reduce gracefully to the Four Forces as we know them.

Whereas in this story, the "science vs. magic" conflict is resolved by saying there is no magic, only slight wrinkles on the science we already understand, at which point the fantastic beasts we're fighting become unusually primitive alien invaders. That's an interesting idea, and definitely worth its own military thriller novels, but in a perfect world I wish I could also see the one of that other type.

I'm tempted to believe I could write one... [wanders off into ideaspace]

[John Chris]

For my own part, I do not see this implication. Classically, demons are portrayed as nigh-invincible and the only way to beat them is to outwit them (see any number of folk tales stretching back to the Dung Ages). Suddenly, Stuart writes a story in which demons are NOT nigh-invincible! They actually die when you stab or shoot them*! Wow!

*For sufficiently vigorous stabbing or shooting.

IMHO, it's a difficult trick to pull off equal amounts of demon/angel asskissing and human counterasskicking, especially with our rapid-warfare technologies. It's going to take some serious thought as to how to pull it off. Although, I've been thinking along those lines and I've been thinking that it should involve magitech in some form or another. Like automatic magic-caster wands or something.

To be sure.

What I'd like to see (not as a variation on this story, but on some story) is a "science vs. magic" scenario in which the scientists actually have to figure out the magic. Where they are confronted with a problem that is outside their context and actually learn how to fight and beat it on its own terms, rather than entirely into a problem to be dealt with on their terms. Just as applying scientific chemistry to, say, metallurgy improved the art of metallurgy beyond what would be possible for a medieval blacksmith, I'd imagine that applying scientific study to the techniques of magic would yield more impressive magic.

But the key is that there would be something that you would honestly call magic going on, something that really does operate in terms of "making things happen by wishing for them with the aid of suitable appliances," something that does not reduce gracefully to the Four Forces as we know them.

Whereas in this story, the "science vs. magic" conflict is resolved by saying there is no magic, only slight wrinkles on the science we already understand, at which point the fantastic beasts we're fighting become unusually primitive alien invaders. That's an interesting idea, and definitely worth its own military thriller novels, but in a perfect world I wish I could also see the one of that other type.

I'm tempted to believe I could write one... [wanders off into ideaspace]

I believe David Weber wrote something along those lines. His books Hell's Gate and Hell Hath No Fury has similar premises where magic and technology clash, but as I've only started reading them, I can't yet tell you how it's going.

But I can say that I'd be highly interested in writing a story based on that other premise, if only to see a bunch of eggheads pull their hair out at some of the weirder magical effects! Oh, and Cthulhu should show up at some point for tea and crumpets!

[Simon_Jester]

IMHO, it's a difficult trick to pull off equal amounts of demon/angel asskissing asskicking and human counterasskicking, especially with our rapid-warfare technologies. It's going to take some serious thought as to how to pull it off. Although, I've been thinking along those lines and I've been thinking that it should involve magitech in some form or another. Like automatic magic-caster wands or something.

To be sure. It wouldn't be easy; I just think it would be awesome if it could be done. Many good stories are difficult to write.

I believe David Weber wrote something along those lines. His books Hell's Gate and Hell Hath No Fury has similar premises where magic and technology clash, but as I've only started reading them, I can't yet tell you how it's going.

Read both books. There are a few major drawbacks:

1) The books are largely written by David Weber, and therefore have a ridiculous exposition-to-plot ratio. I can live with that, but it's definitely a bad thing from an artistic point of view. And he's been getting worse over time, so unless his co-author, Linda Evans, puts her foot down, any future sequels risk becoming almost unreadable.
2) Certain aspects of the setting weaken the theme: the use of psionics on the "technology" side of the line is probably the biggest one, and the magitech applications on the "magic" side are a close second. It makes plotting easier (the use of telepaths for point-to-point communication instead of, say, telegraph lines, the ability of common soldiers to use magic weapons). But it also detracts from the core theme of the work by turning it from "technology versus magic" into "technology assisted by magic versus magic assisted by technology."

I have my own ideas about how to make this work. I think the best thing to do is to go straight back to late Victorian tech levels (at which point an army of howling swordsmen assisted by the occasional monster or wizard drawn from classic "sword and sorcery" stories might actually be a match for the Scientific Champions of Progress).

[Bakustra]

Let me use an example. TSW is not at all like WWII or Korea. It's frankly more like the US vs. Grenada. Feel free to nitpick this, but that is the impression I have received from reading through Armageddon and Pantheocide up to this point. Now, the criticism that I have to offer is that the style is flawed when it comes to this subject. Writing about the US command during the invasion of Grenada would result in a fairly dull work, unless you severely embellished and altered reality. Frankly, up until the last few chapters, the story lacked dramatic tension on the human end. There are several ways that this could be fixed. Altering the abilities of the demons/angels to make them more formidable is one way. I disagree that this is necessarily the best way, however. I think that the best way to incorporate the central thematic elements and premises of TSW would be to alter the focus for Armageddon and alter some things in Pantheocide.

For Armageddon, I would write the story entirely/primarily from demonic perspectives, and primarily from foot-soldier demons. This would entail removing the fetus-eating, the rapes, and the other elements designed to make people hate the demons. These demons would be more Miltonian and share a great deal in common with human soldiers as well, but with the unquestioning acceptance of torture and the more superstitious, religious mindset. As a result, I think the idea of the humans as an unstoppable force thanks to their technology would come through more clearly when you see them through the eyes of the demons, caught up in a war they don't understand. I wouldn't change the major plot developments, but rather have them be in the background of the war as Hell disintegrates, or possibly in asides to cover Sheffield, Detroit et al.

More alien demons and angels would reduce the power of the theme of rationality triumphing over superstition, in my view. Contrasting the viewpoints of demons/angels and humanity helps deliver the idea with a little subtlety, rather than requiring the author blaring out "rationality triumphs over superstition! See! See!" which the more alien supernaturals would, I think, require. Ultimately, I would portray the demons as being more like the peasantry of the middle ages, with angels being more like the knights and other nobility, to contrast blind obedience with arrogance and delusion.

I think that more mystical angels/demons would work better in a different novel, such as one that focused on accommodating the supernatural/magic into the rational mindset. Of course, that is not this work. I think, similarly to what RedImperator pointed out earlier in the thread, there are two novels, at the least, being forced together here. One is about the introduction of Heaven and Hell into the modern world and accommodating for them, and is classic science-fiction in its concept, but is fairly neglected in favor of the military sci-fi epic about the world preparing for total war against an otherworldly foe. Ultimately, I think that the second is better-suited to Stuart, given the whole affair with entanglement, the trumpeting, et cetera.

When it comes to Pantheocide, I would make Uriel's final attack kill most of LA, in order to create a succession of Pyrrhic victories like the ones with Michael and Dumah. This would, I think, better serve as a counterpoint to the easy victories of Armageddon, and bring a sense of humanity possibly losing before rallying and triumphing. Ultimately, since Pantheocide is only half-finished, critiquing it is far more difficult, except in the general sense of the Devils/old Gods, and the fact that they are poorly foreshadowed in Armageddon, and introduced in Pantheocide, wherein they will likely be killed, judging from the title. Introducing them in Armageddon, or at the least giving them more and better foreshadowing, will improve the work as a whole.

I do agree with some of the other critics that there are some awful scenes that should be ultimately cut, like the initial scene with Richard Dawkins, McNamara's place in the Ninth Circle, "Phlops", etc. but that is ultimately a job for editors and some of it was intended to only be in the online edition. I do think that it is a shame that none of the critics that have been linked to have made actual criticisms beyond the facile complaints on the level of "it sucks", "Mekratrig is a bad name", and "atheistwank" (which I find incredibly hilarious for some reason). Also, apparently they have decided that we are horrible. I guess that we are nerdier than they, fanfiction reviewers extraordinaire. Maybe there is something else that horrifies them about us, perhaps the casual swearing, the presence of atheists, or whatever. I will state that I don't agree with many of Stuart's political opinions and some of the weaker parts are where they shine through, as they are in most novels when the author lets his personal views intrude where they are not necessarily wanted.

Overall, I think that the stories need trimming. They are bulky, bulky, works, likely to daunt potential readers. Furthermore, they commit what I believe to be the cardinal sin of any novel. You can skip entire chapters without missing anything, as I did on my initial read through Armageddon. This literary fat, for there is no better word, should ideally be trimmed, perhaps made into a novella or short story. This is the sort of thing that makes me regret the initial online publication somewhat, as the books could use an editor, and one unafraid to use a hatchet in my opinion. Of course, this is something that would require a different author to fix, as from what I gather of TBO and Stuart's other works, he writes lengthy, novel or multi-novel length, works entirely. Armageddon could work as a novella or short story, and possibly better, with TSW as a set of linked short stories or a couple novellas, but that was not likely to happen.

Ultimately, I like the stories more than many of the critics, but I feel that they are flawed, and I didn't even touch on the writing style or characterization, mainly because other people have gone over them far more thoroughly. I do have one final criticism. The use of Dante's conception of Hell, in particular the ninth circle, is frankly nonsensical. The ninth circle is icy and frozen over, yet it is the neighbor of the firy bolgias of the eighth circle and the rivers of blood of the seventh. How does that work? I'd honestly just ignore the ninth circle altogether and say that Dante made up large parts, like the first circle, the area outside/zeroth circle, and Purgatory/Heaven, all of which are ignored by TSW, but that depends on how much of the MacNamara scene is excised from the finished version, of course. If it is fully excised, then the logical problems recede into the implied background.

Another major flaw: we are halfway into the second book and the reason for the title hasn't been revealed yet, beyond the vague mention of "devils". Pantheocide has been noticeably better than Armageddon, and hopefully the third book will be better, but it will also be a greater departure from Stuart's usual subject matter, making it far chancier as a read.

As long as we are discussing what we would do differently, I personally would write a totally different story starting from the premise of "supernatural returns/appears, reason triumphs over superstition", partly because I lack any experience with military matters and therefore do not rate myself competent to write about such, but more because I find myself attracted to the idea of rationality confronting magic and deciphering it. Further, I like the general idea of alien supernaturals, though I would prefer ditching the man-with-wings conceit for angels and having them be pure shapeshifters. Similarly, I'd go back to the bible itself for demons and have them be bodiless possessors. I'd also bring in ifrits and djinni as well, get some Islam in the Judeo-Christianity.

[CaptainChewbacca]

'Pantheocide' was defined on page 1. We're killing our gods.

[Shroom Man 777]

I think a curbstomp can be written interestingly.

Shit, the cooler parts of Armageddon where those Marines in Hit, as I've said; and the Misadventures of HOOTERS! rolling around taking on everything from demon hordes to FOOTBALL PLAYERS (whatshisface, mister President of Hell), to fucking up angel Apple-ons in the face, to giving chocolates to demon kidlings in VICTORY IN HELL DAY! to having General Pretaeus pin a medal on her big bleeding breasted chests; to those McElroys and Broomsticks fucking around in the afterlife running the RESISTANCE! I am Broomstick, if you're listening to this, YOU ARE THE RESISTANCE and screwing around with RAHAB and JULIUS CEASAR and creating IEDs in Hell! HELL-EDs!

The less cool parts that people, like Ryan, are now wailing at are the clinical depictions of just a bunch of suited shmucks in offices filing briefs for Shrubyas and Obamamangs and whoever. Those guys are, well, they serve as talking infodumps. That's it. They just REPORT the situation and not actually DEPICT it. Which is kinda boring.

That's a consequence of Stuart's writing style because since he's the dark apprentice of Herman Kahn and stuff, his whole livelihood involves talking to people in offices and reporting to them about the best way to murderkillfuck assholes with modern military massacre-machines.

But, ah, yeah. It's not really exciting.

Listening to a bunch of suits, even bombardier suits who make plants wilt, or seeing a bunch of bomber pilots press buttons, it's not as exciting.

Not as exciting as HOOTERS in a battle tank that's in ROUGH TERRAIN that makes HOOTERS' big titties bounce, while the MARINES IN HIT are SHOOTING DEMONS IN THE FACE while the demons THROW LIGHTNING SATAN-SPEARS IN THEIR FACES and catch grenades and EXPLODE and shit, and like THEY'RE COMING OUT OF THE WALLS! THEY'RE COMING OUT OF THE GODDAMN WALLS! And then some Marine gets killed and its GAME OVER MAN but then he is RESPAWNED in HELL and then he meets up with Trucker McElRonHubbard and Broomstick and Julius Rahab and they go fragging demons in hell - space hell! - because they're soldiers and Marines who are DOOMED and shit and now they are the RESISTANCE with SHROOM CONNOR and...

Yeah. That's exciting.

Like, Russian tank commanders saying tovarisch, and Iranians killfucking demons, and inflappable British guys who drink tea while commencing industrialized mass murder. Those are cool. Even when they're murdering demons by the shitfulls.

I mean, we still have a lot of that now. Like, when Mike Wong went to Heaven (and came back), and when those guys in the Arleigh Burke used OMG FUCK OFFF RADARS to fucking make Uriel's FACE MELT OFF OH MY GOD JESUS IT BURNS MEIN EEEYES, to those guys who shoot Micheal in the face with their hunting shotgun dogs, to MOHAMMAD JIHAD blowing up his Ford Explosion SUV (:lol:), to all that. Those are cool too.


EDIT:

I think that, yeah, for a war story the Pantheocide story focuses a large portion of its bits to guys who aren't IN war. Namely the suits and Obamamangs who are in, you know, white houses. The most strain they'd get is when they'd develop constipation after sitting too many hours in the office before going to the toilet and finding it hard to move their bowels.

Again, I reiterate, the best parts of Armageddon were when we see our rag tag bunch of scrappy heroes crawl in the fire sands of hell and undertake ORDEALS and experience DANGER and shit, even if the demons were just savages with lightning-shooting satan spears, our Elroys and Broomsticks and Hooters still had challenges and still had to kill people IN THEIR FACES and still had to see and experience a whole shitload of wonderous and horrible and frightening and freaky deaky shit.

Other good parts were also when Sheffield and Delta City, Detroit, got burninated by the SKY VOLCANOES (man, I think I was the one who made that word up! AWESOME!). We saw ORDEAL and DRAMA and ADVENTURE and people FIGHTING FOR THEIR LIVES in a GREAT and EPIC STRUGGLE of SURVIVAL and all that. THOSE were good.

That's how you build human connection and engage readers. Those were great.

(I mean, even if the enemy were retards or acid-blooded aliens or zombies or whatever, depicting it from the footsoldier grunt who actually experiences the difficulty first hand would make it far more palatable than just a bunch of office-drones telling Obama that xyz-number of people/demons/dinosaurs have been killed and that Norinco is making xyz-number of bullets and if we run out of bullets, we'll have to shove cutlery and bits of metal scraps in our gunpowder cannons to wage war or something)

Maybe if Obama and the suits like, go on a tour or something and meet people who've been hurt and injured, or go to the sites of the attacks or something, that would make for a good story too. It would, you know, characterize Obama and the head honchos in suits rather than relegating them to (rather large) bit-sized roles of just enunciating the current situation for the readers, in the situation room.

[Ryan Thunder]

The less cool parts that people, like Ryan, are now wailing at are the clinical depictions of just a bunch of suited shmucks in offices filing briefs for Shrubyas and Obamamangs and whoever. Those guys are, well, they serve as talking infodumps. That's it. They just REPORT the situation and not actually DEPICT it. Which is kinda boring.

Quite.

As another example, there would be quite a bit more tension in the scene involving the Angel of Death if people were to start dying immediately, tinfoil hats be damned. At least then it'd be less a question of "how long until they kill him" and more a question of "can they kill him before he kills the entire goddamned city."

[Shroom Man 777]

Hrm... I wonder how those angel screams, strong enough to killfuck fighter jets, would be like if - upon seeing the incoming bombers - Uriel decided to go INSIDE the city! He's actually in urban terrain, using his powers to kill people's souls, and while people are huddling inside we've got Uriel actually LURKING out there IN THE STREETS! Anyone who tries to shoot him, well, Uriel's pretty tough and if he's also ungodly fast, he could ruin shit by stabbing them in the face with his claws or using his angel scream to FUCKING KILL THEM and shit! The US has to bomb its own cities to get to Uriel!

Or, man, imagine if Uriel came with other angels. If Uriel didn't act alone but had a CHOIR OF DEATHSTROSITY! And when the fighter jets and bombers come, the angels would end up TAKING TO THE SKIES and they'd SCREAM and the epic furball of fighters and bombers won't just be dealing with one Runaway Uriel, but like a couple dozen freaking sword-wielding psycho angels whose screams are strong enough to disintegrate airframes, and who themselves are probably using their PSYCHOMINDPOWERS to bring Uriel's Peace on the pilots. Do the pilots have tinfoil hats? I bet those cockpits aren't insulated by tinfoil.

Holy shit! If Uriel had decided to bring his peace to the fighter and bomber pilots - WOAH! - you'd see a shitload of airplanes falling down once their pilots get killfucked!

Like, the pilots won't be PRESSING BUTTONS with impunity, but they too would be FIGHTING FOR THEIR LIVES!

I mean, shit, Uriel was totally killfucking civilians but he didn't even do shit against the military guys once they came in to fuck his ass. Damn.


But that's not really important since Uriel is now DEAD DEAD DEAD!


I think another thing that would've helped Pantheocide is if, like Armageddon, we had a consistent set of characters to focus the story on. Armageddon had guys like HOOTER and TRUCKER MCELRONHUBBARD and BROOMSTICK and just a few bunch of scientists and comparatively little stuff from guys like Shrubya and The Suits. Whereas Pantheocide, it's kind of disjointed since we don't have many "central characters". We know that the protagonists are the humans, but we don't have central hero humans.

In Armageddon, we see HOOTER and TRUCKER MCELRONHUBBARD and BROOMSTICK and so on's stories go forward in a direction, like, OPERATION SATANIC STORM and OPERATION SATANIC FREEDOM and OPERATION ENDURING INFERNO and stuff like that, and we see their stories progress to the point of victory with our heroes standing on an aircraft carrier deck in Hell that has MISSION ACCOMPLISHED on it.

While Pantheocide's characters are, well, inconsistent and disjointed. I'm not sure who we're following consistently. It jumps from a bunch of suits and a bunch of grunts, but there is no focus on a particular band of plucky heroes.

Instead of focusing on Luke and Han and Leia, we get guys like... uhh... Wedge and Biggs and Ackbar and Mon Mothra and Gavin Darkblighter and a bunch of... who are these guys? (I fucking hate Star Wars EU)

[open_sketchbook]

Actually, that's a really good point. When Pantheocide is published I hope we get some more solid viewpoint characters worked in.

Also, I'm sure it's been said but Shroom, I love the way you write and get giggles from every post you make. The word Killfuck brings warmth to my heart.

[Simon_Jester]

Not as exciting as HOOTERS in a battle tank that's in ROUGH TERRAIN that makes HOOTERS' big titties bounce, while the MARINES IN HIT are SHOOTING DEMONS IN THE FACE while the demons THROW LIGHTNING SATAN-SPEARS IN THEIR FACES and catch grenades and EXPLODE and shit, and like THEY'RE COMING OUT OF THE WALLS! THEY'RE COMING OUT OF THE GODDAMN WALLS! And then some Marine gets killed and its GAME OVER MAN but then he is RESPAWNED in HELL and then he meets up with Trucker McElRonHubbard and Broomstick and Julius Rahab and they go fragging demons in hell - space hell! - because they're soldiers and Marines who are DOOMED and shit and now they are the RESISTANCE with SHROOM CONNOR and...

Yeah. That's exciting.

Shroom, there are days when I honestly wonder how you manage to make it through a week without having your head explode from the sheer... something. I'm not sure there's a word for what you do, or at least not a word anyone but you could create. Wow.

...and who themselves are probably using their PSYCHOMINDPOWERS to bring Uriel's Peace on the pilots. Do the pilots have tinfoil hats? I bet those cockpits aren't insulated by tinfoil.

Nitpick: Aircraft cockpits are generally insulated by better-than-tinfoil. Like, gold foil. But hey, you're on a roll, who cares?

[Instant Sunrise]

I think a good test-case for what a lot of the people in here have been trying to get at would be the battle for Los Angeles. Even though it's said that LA is severely depopulated by Uriel's attacks, the way that the battle is written is just so flat and anticlimactic, that the audience is looking at our proverbial watches, just waiting for it to happen. The stakes, that LA will become an empty ghost town, are just not communicated to the readers and we're not at all engaged in the drama.

The problems that I have the The Salvation War are not with the concept, it's just that the execution falls completely flat. I get the concept that the demons and angels aren't this unstoppable forces of death to the modern world, but there has to be a middle ground between that and being complete pushovers.

To be perfectly honest though, the story doesn't need more than the battle of Hit. By then the message of the story is clear and it's obvious that the demons are going to lose. The rest is just an extended epilogue. But to me, the real meat of the story isn't the one-sided curbstomp battles that we see. What I really wanted to see more of was the resistance, people who don't have the ability to kill with the press of a button forced to fight the legions of hell with nothing but stolen equipment and fighting on the same level as the demons.

[Shroom Man 777]

But Simon Jester, the glass canopy doesn't have tinfoil and like Uriel can so totally reach in with his MINDBULLETS to SHITSOULSLAUGHTERIZE those guys and man, see, you'd see a DUEL OF THE FATES as Mike Wong's heart slows as Uriel gnaws on his very soul, and it is a RACE AGAINST TIME between the both of them and like instead of just a rapid pass things would happen in SLOOOOW MOOOTION and Mike Wong hears every single heartbeat of his and STRUGGLES and RESISTS while ALL AROUND HIM the pilots and bombers who are LESS MANLY AND FEEBLE AND WEAK end up SUCCUMBING TO URIEL's BLACK DEATH and CRASH AND BURN but Naval Aviator MICHELANGELO "DARTH" WONG shows him that THIS IS THE SOUL OF THE UNITED STATES AIR FORCE POWER! (or was it THE SPIRIT OF THE UNITED STATES GO NAVY, FIGHTER WARFARE SCHOOL TOP GUN) and in that last, glorious moment, he launches missiles and goes FOX TWO FOX TWO and the sidewinder hit Uriel's testicles and they explode in BALLS OF FURY and like as Uriel's murderostrocious manhood is killfuc(k)astrated and he is reduced to a eunuch, his vice grip over the souls of the CITY OF ANGELS is emasculated and in that second, Mike Wong's vision clears and so does his soul and once more his BURNING HOT BLOOD FLOWS FREEDOMLY THROUGH HIS AMERICAN VEINS and he presses his gun button and SHOOTS URIEL IN THE FACE!

WITH A GUN!

God-damn.


We can even be treated with Mike Wong and the victorious few naval aviators celebrating with... Beach Volleyball!

[Bakustra]

'Pantheocide' was defined on page 1. We're killing our gods.

I wasn't quite clear. I mean that said gods haven't appeared yet, and indeed have only been vaguely implied through the "devils" and Caesar's roaming free in Hell. Yet we are halfway through Pantheocide, and the critical individuals of the title have yet to show up to turn this from deicide into something bigger.

[Stuart]

But Simon Jester, the glass canopy doesn't have tinfoil

Actually, fighter aircraft have canopies inlaid with gold foil and gold is a much more effective screen than aluminum. So, the aircraft are quite
well protected against the death-power.

Although, I've been thinking along those lines and I've been thinking that it should involve magitech in some form or another. Like automatic magic-caster wands or something.

There's a big problem with this. We're governed by the laws of physics etc, let's call them the Laws of Reality. They're the basic scientific rules that underpin our existance. Now, if we start playing around with those, we're in an area that has repercussions very quickly. In fact, if we play around with them too much, we very quickly get to a point where the laws of reality are so mangled that people from that dimension cannot interact with us - and by implication, we cannot interact with them.

Take this example. There's one angel whose dimensions are quoted as taking 500 years to walk from his toe to his chin. Doing the maths, that means that angel is 18.25 million miles tall. That's about 21 times the size of the sun. There is no way that a creature that large can exist in our dimension and thus there is no way that it can interact with us or we with it. At this point I invoke the aether argument. (The ancient idea of an omnipresent aether was disproved by experiments that showed we couldn't interact with it, it couldn't interact with us and that, if it existed, it had no impact whatsoever on anything we did. Therefore, there was no reason to assume it existed at all. Note the actual existance of aether has never positively been proven but whether it does or not doesn't matter. It can't affect us or anything we do.

So, the extent of "magic" in Universe-Two (the dimension one step removed from ours that contains the Heaven and Hell bubble worlds Spoiler

Plus some more. In fact a lot more.

is constrained by the necessity of making Universe-Two sufficiently like Universe-One that interaction is possible. If there is no difference in the laws of reality then magic just can't happen and the daemons/angels are just other species of humans with bronze-age culture and the subsequent ass-kicking will be even more one-sided. So, there's a narrow window between the point where the laws of reality are the same and the laws of reality are so different that they make interaction impossible. Put another way, the inhabitants of Universe-Two can't be that different from us or they would be so different that they might as well not exist at all. In TSW, I pushed that window as wide as I could. As a simple example, it's impossible using our laws of reality to throw an aimed lightning bolt. The darned thing will just arc to ground. In Universe-Two, it is possible to throw an aimed lightning bolt and that has all sorts of interesting implications (one of which, to the engineeringly-astute, has already been hinted at). So, far from underpowering or undermagicking the daemons, using the basic rules of the situation, we pushed their powers just about as far as they can go.

This gives rise to an interesting ethical conundrum for our fundamentalist brethren. If they assume that the existing mythology is literally true, it presupposes a relaity that is so different from ours that interaction is impossible and therefore, invoking the aether argument, it doesn't exist. If the TSW version of that mythology (ie giving the "supernatural" every break possible while retaining the option of interaction) is correct, it means that God, Satan etc are going to get the mother of all ass-kickings the moment they show their face down here. So, dear fundie brethren, which is it? Non-existence? Or walking No.11?

I posed that conundrum to a fundie on another site and he ran away and hid.

For Armageddon, I would write the story entirely/primarily from demonic perspectives, and primarily from foot-soldier demons. This would entail removing the fetus-eating, the rapes, and the other elements designed to make people hate the demons. These demons would be more Miltonian and share a great deal in common with human soldiers as well, but with the unquestioning acceptance of torture and the more superstitious, religious mindset. As a result, I think the idea of the humans as an unstoppable force thanks to their technology would come through more clearly when you see them through the eyes of the demons, caught up in a war they don't understand. I wouldn't change the major plot developments, but rather have them be in the background of the war as Hell disintegrates, or possibly in asides to cover Sheffield, Detroit et al.

There's no reason why that story can't be written; in fact it might make an interesting companion piece. Take a daemonic foot-soldier and trace his history through the war up to the end. However, it would be an additional side-story, it couldn't be the main story because it would leave what was actually happening untold. It wouldn't really make sense unless the reader had already read TSW:A. That's the problem, your proposed story could only be written if TSW:A already existed.

That's why so much of the story is told through the eyes of high command authority. It's a world-wide war, the only way to get that over is to tell it from a high-up viewpoint. We do drop down to individual soldier/daemon grunt level at times to illustrate the impact of the situation at that level (for example the daemons in Abigor's Army under the hammer of artillery and airstrikes, the harpies getting gassed et al) but to cover the scope of a world-wide war, the viewpoint necessarily has to be high.

[Ryan Thunder]

Stuart; all the reasoning and logic in the universe is irrelevant if the result is a boring story. Unless you're trying to write a boring story, anyway.

I'm not sure why this is so difficult to understand. We point out that the way you've written the antagonists is flat, boring, and uninteresting, so your response is to explain why it makes sense (to you) for them to be that way. We're talking past each other.

[Shroom Man 777]

@ STUART:

I can understand why you'd like to use the high command authority perspective to depict the war in all its details as seen in their comprehensive viewpoint. But sometimes, lotsa times, it's also more entertaining to go down into the nitty gritty dirty and grimy "low" perspective of the grunts in the form of the Marines at Hit, the McElroyHubbards, the Hooters, the Broomsticks, even the poor demons and harpies who get gassed and bombed and murderfuckerized. It's funner that way.

It's like how we like depictions of World War 2 in the form of Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers, and how documentaries or movies that might focus more on the generals in their offices with their maps are more informative but are not necessarily as entertaining as watching people scream their lungs off while being blown by mortar fire or chewed up by machineguns at Normandy or getting shot at in the face by Nazis.

Hrm... maybe a more balanced work could be... A Bridge Too Far? We got to see a lot of the high command authority perspectives in that, but the majority of the movie still involved the soldiers in their desperate fight against the Nazis - and Sean Connery being laughed at by mental asylum escapees.

I am sorry Stuart if my incoherent rabid ramblings might cause offense or annoyance. I was just being silly.


EDIT:

Ryan, you are a horrible communicator. I personally focus on what I enjoy about the Salvation War stories and instead of going "rar boring!" at Stuart like you, I think I'm trying to positively encourage him to do more of the stuff I found enjoyable. I think it is more constructive that way.

[Bakustra]

*snip*

For Armageddon, I would write the story entirely/primarily from demonic perspectives, and primarily from foot-soldier demons. This would entail removing the fetus-eating, the rapes, and the other elements designed to make people hate the demons. These demons would be more Miltonian and share a great deal in common with human soldiers as well, but with the unquestioning acceptance of torture and the more superstitious, religious mindset. As a result, I think the idea of the humans as an unstoppable force thanks to their technology would come through more clearly when you see them through the eyes of the demons, caught up in a war they don't understand. I wouldn't change the major plot developments, but rather have them be in the background of the war as Hell disintegrates, or possibly in asides to cover Sheffield, Detroit et al.

There's no reason why that story can't be written; in fact it might make an interesting companion piece. Take a daemonic foot-soldier and trace his history through the war up to the end. However, it would be an additional side-story, it couldn't be the main story because it would leave what was actually happening untold. It wouldn't really make sense unless the reader had already read TSW:A. That's the problem, your proposed story could only be written if TSW:A already existed.

That's why so much of the story is told through the eyes of high command authority. It's a world-wide war, the only way to get that over is to tell it from a high-up viewpoint. We do drop down to individual soldier/daemon grunt level at times to illustrate the impact of the situation at that level (for example the daemons in Abigor's Army under the hammer of artillery and airstrikes, the harpies getting gassed et al) but to cover the scope of a world-wide war, the viewpoint necessarily has to be high.

I was actually operating under the idea of a story that communicates what I see as the central themes of TSW in what I feel is a more effective way. I decided to dispense with the idea of showing a world war for that proposal. It seems that we differ in our approach to the central theme of the story. I threw in the Sheffield/Detroit part, but if I wrote it, it would probably diverge significantly from Armageddon in the major plot movements. I doubt that I could write it, at least not without a great deal of research. Granted, I am somewhat biased in that I do not enjoy most military sci-fi that focuses on the strategic or even the operational level, so this may just be me talking.

When it comes to magic, you do have the advantage of writing fiction, and you already have telekinesis from Satan, Yahweh's thunderbolts, and so on, which all are far beyond the abilities of the angels/demons, which in and of themselves are pretty out there. You already have ball lightning being thrown by demons, so adding a little more magic shouldn't necessarily diverge from reality more than it already does. My problem with the idea of an industrialized (mystically speaking) Heaven/Hell, regardless of how cool it would be, that it doesn't work as an initial condition with the themes of the story. If Heaven and Hell have adopted rationality, what is their for reason to triumph over? The Greek gods? The Hindu Trimurti? Then why is there a Heaven and a Hell?

@ STUART:

I can understand why you'd like to use the high command authority perspective to depict the war in all its details as seen in their comprehensive viewpoint. But sometimes, lotsa times, it's also more entertaining to go down into the nitty gritty dirty and grimy "low" perspective of the grunts in the form of the Marines at Hit, the McElroyHubbards, the Hooters, the Broomsticks, even the poor demons and harpies who get gassed and bombed and murderfuckerized. It's funner that way.

It's like how we like depictions of World War 2 in the form of Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers, and how documentaries or movies that might focus more on the generals in their offices with their maps are more informative but are not necessarily as entertaining as watching people scream their lungs off while being blown by mortar fire or chewed up by machineguns at Normandy or getting shot at in the face by Nazis.

Hrm... maybe a more balanced work could be... A Bridge Too Far? We got to see a lot of the high command authority perspectives in that, but the majority of the movie still involved the soldiers in their desperate fight against the Nazis - and Sean Connery being laughed at by mental asylum escapees.

I am sorry Stuart if my incoherent rabid ramblings might cause offense or annoyance. I was just being silly.


EDIT:

Ryan, you are a horrible communicator. I personally focus on what I enjoy about the Salvation War stories and instead of going "rar boring!" at Stuart like you, I think I'm trying to positively encourage him to do more of the stuff I found enjoyable. I think it is more constructive that way.

Well, I'm just funny that way. I can enjoy the perspectives of commanders when reading nonfiction, but in fiction I tend to find it lacking. I think that part of this is that people can sympathize better in most cases with the doughboys in the trenches than with Haig and Petain, as most of your readers no doubt have more in common with said doughboys than with Haig.

[Stuart]

I can understand why you'd like to use the high command authority perspective to depict the war in all its details as seen in their comprehensive viewpoint. But sometimes, lotsa times, it's also more entertaining to go down into the nitty gritty dirty and grimy "low" perspective of the grunts in the form of the Marines at Hit, the McElroy Hubbards, the Hooters, the Broomsticks, even the poor demons and harpies who get gassed and bombed and murderfuckerized. It's funner that way.

It's a difficult balancing job, I agree. I tried to mix the two up, shifting down to the low-level grunts, tank crews, cavalrymen and sicari for the fighting. That was essential to show one of the things I wanted, which was to impress upon people what weapons do to the people they are used against. I believe people are all too casual about recommending the use of modern weaponry without understanding what the consequences will be.

It's like how we like depictions of World War 2 in the form of Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers, and how documentaries or movies that might focus more on the generals in their offices with their maps are more informative but are not necessarily as entertaining as watching people scream their lungs off while being blown by mortar fire or chewed up by machineguns at Normandy or getting shot at in the face by Nazis.

I agree, but the difference is that more or less everybody knows what WW2 was, why it was being fought and more or less what happened. So, stories like Saving Ryan's Privates, Band of Brothers or The Longest Day are already fitted into a known and established frame. With TSW, the framework was literally alien and, in addition, turned a lot of preconceptions on their heads (sacred cows, meet Burger King). So, a lot of explanatory work had to be done and top-down looks was the best way of achieving that.

Hrm... maybe a more balanced work could be... A Bridge Too Far? We got to see a lot of the high command authority perspectives in that, but the majority of the movie still involved the soldiers in their desperate fight against the Nazis - and Sean Connery being laughed at by mental asylum escapees.

It's still a film that takes place in a known and understood setting. A better example might be a film that is placed in one of the battles of the Babylonian War. Nobody knows anything about that war, why it was being fought, where it was fought or who the Seleucid Army was actually fighting. We're not even certain who won. Now, one can try and tell a grunt-level story about that battle (we do know how the Seleucid Army fought) but it would be very hard to make that story intelligible or consistent. Nobody would have any familiarity with the motivations for the battle, what the issues at stake were or who the goodies and baddies were. After all, what do the Seleucids and the Antigonids (assuming they were the opposition and that's a big assumption) mean to the average cinema-goer today?

I am sorry Stuart if my incoherent rabid ramblings might cause offense or annoyance. I was just being silly.

No need for any apologies. I always enjoy reading your posts and I also take on board the points you are making. And you are very, very right about constructive approaches.

[Stuart]

When it comes to magic, you do have the advantage of writing fiction, and you already have telekinesis from Satan, Yahweh's thunderbolts, and so on, which all are far beyond the abilities of the angels/demons, which in and of themselves are pretty out there. You already have ball lightning being thrown by demons, so adding a little more magic shouldn't necessarily diverge from reality more than it already does. My problem with the idea of an industrialized (mystically speaking) Heaven/Hell, regardless of how cool it would be, that it doesn't work as an initial condition with the themes of the story. If Heaven and Hell have adopted rationality, what is their for reason to triumph over? The Greek gods? The Hindu Trimurti? Then why is there a Heaven and a Hell?

This was another problem I was stuck with. The appropriate theologies and mythologies were all written in the Bronze Age and they portray a fundamentally bronze-age culture with all its mores, capabilities and limitations. Even a degree of advancement wouldn't help things very much. As I've explained before, if we went from (say) 330 BC to 1632 AD, there really isn't much change in human armies. About the only difference is that arquebusses replace bowmen and slingers (with arguable effects) and that siege work is made slightly easier by heavy cannon. Both sides still depend on the push of pike and shock charges by heavy cavalry for their mainstream work. The big change was made by people starting to ask questions and challenge authority which is the one thing that are absolutely forbidden by the mythology. So, I was stuck with a bronze age story. Pitched up against a modern army, that's a one-sided massacre no matter how one writes it. Also, mythology tells us how the battle at the end-days will be fought. Giant satanic army invading Earth and all that. So really, I had very limited flexibility in how things were done.

Now, if one wanted a fairer or more balanced conflict, I'd pitch a daemonic invasion in (say) 1860 or 1914. The idea of Union and Confederate troops allying to fight the daemonic horde is interesting but its a bit like Turtledove's The Race stories. But, that option was closed, the initial situation said "now".

[Ryan Thunder]

Ryan, you are a horrible communicator. I personally focus on what I enjoy about the Salvation War stories and instead of going "rar boring!" at Stuart like you, I think I'm trying to positively encourage him to do more of the stuff I found enjoyable. I think it is more constructive that way.

Well, uh, sorry. I'm just trying to help.

[Simon_Jester]

@ STUART:
I can understand why you'd like to use the high command authority perspective to depict the war in all its details as seen in their comprehensive viewpoint. But sometimes, lotsa times, it's also more entertaining to go down into the nitty gritty dirty and grimy "low" perspective of the grunts in the form of the Marines at Hit, the McElroyHubbards, the Hooters, the Broomsticks, even the poor demons and harpies who get gassed and bombed and murderfuckerized. It's funner that way.

Thing is, you can get a surprisingly good picture of an overall war from this too, especially if your ground-level perspective includes mid-ranking field commanders. Look at some of what Harry Turtledove does in his numerous, strikingly similar novels set in some variation on the theme of World War Two. Even though (with a few exceptions) you don't see things from the perspective of the high command, you still get a good idea of what's happening just from having characters talk about the news and directly observe the situation in front of them.

So it's doable. You don't have to use a Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting to get across the concept that "we're winning, but the logistics is a mess and we're running out of ammo." A trucker can deliver pretty much the same message easily enough, because they're the one working 14-hour days trying to get stuff to the front and they're still being yelled at for not delivering enough ammunition to the troops who need it.

It's still a film that takes place in a known and understood setting. A better example might be a film that is placed in one of the battles of the Babylonian War. Nobody knows anything about that war, why it was being fought, where it was fought or who the Seleucid Army was actually fighting. We're not even certain who won. Now, one can try and tell a grunt-level story about that battle (we do know how the Seleucid Army fought) but it would be very hard to make that story intelligible or consistent. Nobody would have any familiarity with the motivations for the battle, what the issues at stake were or who the goodies and baddies were. After all, what do the Seleucids and the Antigonids (assuming they were the opposition and that's a big assumption) mean to the average cinema-goer today?

True. On the other hand, in this story, how much do you really need to establish? The Legions of Hell are invading, we beat them and march straight into Hell after them to kick their butts. God is being a jerk, so we declare war on him too. The motivation is fairly simple.

And unlike a story about the Seleucids, you don't need to establish as much historical context, because most of the context is historical events. Everyone knows what the US military is and roughly what it is capable of, for instance; you don't need to explain why we're fighting an invasion from Hell (sort of self-explanatory), or how we'd go about doing it (like the Gulf War, only with more explosions).

[Junghalli]

You know, I've commented before that one of the things that kind of works against the drama in Pantheocide is that unless they're fighting Uriel basically none of the (First Life) human characters are actually endangered. It's sort of hard to get anxious about whether or not somebody will survive if you know they'll just respawn like a video game character if they don't.

A good way to fix this would be to simply have Heaven shut off the Minos Gate from wherever the "central switching station" is after humans seize control of it in Armageddon, and either leave the souls in nonexistance or shunt them off to somewhere they can't survive (the cold entropic universe that was suggested as a place where Uriel might dump his victims, maybe, or just some place with conditions like the surface of Venus or Pluto). For that matter, if that doesn't work with the rules you envision they could just let everybody into Heaven and set up some sort of killing machine in front of Heaven's equivalent of the Minos Gate (like, a pit that leads to some sort of meat-grinder like apparatus or something along those lines). After all, sending the bulk of the dead off to Hell was presumably part of their agreement with Satan, and they have no such agreement with humans. This would make us care much more about the human characters that die or are endangered in Pantheocide, because now that the Minos Gate is shut down if you die you actually honest for real die; there's no respawn and bungalo on the Styx waiting for you. It would also inject a sense of real urgency into the war against Heaven, because every day that the switch stays shut means millions of people condemned to oblivion.

I suggest this because unlike many of the other suggestions that have come up it's actually something that could be implemented with a minimum of revision. You'd have to write an extra scene or two, and maybe tweak some of the other scenes a little to reflect the horror and sense of urgency that this development would create, and eliminate the scenes with the guy who blew himself up trying to kill the Scarlet Beast in Hell (kind of feel sorry for him, but on the other hand this would make his sacrifice much more poignant) and the scene with Madeuce and Kim (which honestly IMO was a great example of the "literary fat" that could afford to be trimmed; the story if anything already suffers from diluting its focus across too many characters and the exposition about Ceasar's New Rome was fundamentally unessential fluff).

In fact that's a second point: I think part of the characterization problems might stem from TSW being overstuffed with bit characters. Take Madeuce for example. He's a wireframe character. His characterization so far is entirely contained in the fact he got silicosis in Hell and volunteered to go on a dangerous mission because he figured he was dying anyway and might do something with what was left of his life on Earth before going to Hell. That's something and you could potentially build him into something interesting, but I bet it won't happen because so much stuff is going on that well-established characters from Armageddon are being shoved into the background. When the narrative barely seems to have time for a well-established character like Kim the last thing it needs is yet more recurring characters to compete for the spotlight. I wonder if perhaps part of the reason the Angels and Demons read better than the human characters is that they have less viewpoint characters, so the story has time to build them into something interesting, whereas there are so many human characters that there's little time for the story to build on any one of them and so they end up coming off as generic and interchangeable. I think a tighter focus on a smaller number of humans might be a good idea.

[Blayne]

I dunno the fact that they get to be reborn in Hell generally doesnt occur to me when reading the text its like they die and I'm like "oh no!" and then its like "oh phew, they'll be okay sorta".

[Shroom Man 777]

It's a difficult balancing job, I agree. I tried to mix the two up, shifting down to the low-level grunts, tank crews, cavalrymen and sicari for the fighting. That was essential to show one of the things I wanted, which was to impress upon people what weapons do to the people they are used against. I believe people are all too casual about recommending the use of modern weaponry without understanding what the consequences will be.

Ah, yeah. The difference between Pantheocide and Armageddon though was that in Armageddon, we sorta had a consistent set of low-level grunts, tank crews, cavalrymen, sicari, demons and Spartans and samurai who we could grow attached to and whose converging and related stories we could follow as the plot goes on. In Pantheocide, we see many of these grunts but the story hardly focuses on them in the way Armageddon focused on the misadventures of HOOTERS and Trucker McElroyHubbard and Broomstick and Spartan and Samurai Gaijin and stuff.

In Armageddon, we focused on those characters and by the time we reached Pantheocide, we still see those characters from time to time. We know, for example, that after the war we got the Spartan and Samurai becoming demon drill instructors and that Spartan got pissed about watching 300. Broomstick is now Queen of Hell Rome. Trucker is, uh, I dunno. Hooters got promoted by Pretaeus. Abrigor is President of Hell and Luga is a celebrity.

When the next Salvation War story comes out, Pantheocide doesn't seem to have as many memorable "grunt" characters that'll get the same memorable "treatment" as those Armageddon guys.

Yeah, Pantheocide should have replaced those Armageddon guys who "moved on with their lives" by developing another group of characters. Pantheocide did that with Micheal Lan, that memorable motherfucker, and those other guys in Heaven. But otherwise, we don't have many dudes to follow around. At least, not to the same extent as Armageddon.

I agree, but the difference is that more or less everybody knows what WW2 was, why it was being fought and more or less what happened. So, stories like Saving Ryan's Privates, Band of Brothers or The Longest Day are already fitted into a known and established frame. With TSW, the framework was literally alien and, in addition, turned a lot of preconceptions on their heads (sacred cows, meet Burger King). So, a lot of explanatory work had to be done and top-down looks was the best way of achieving that.

It's still a film that takes place in a known and understood setting. A better example might be a film that is placed in one of the battles of the Babylonian War. Nobody knows anything about that war, why it was being fought, where it was fought or who the Seleucid Army was actually fighting. We're not even certain who won. Now, one can try and tell a grunt-level story about that battle (we do know how the Seleucid Army fought) but it would be very hard to make that story intelligible or consistent. Nobody would have any familiarity with the motivations for the battle, what the issues at stake were or who the goodies and baddies were. After all, what do the Seleucids and the Antigonids (assuming they were the opposition and that's a big assumption) mean to the average cinema-goer today?

Hmm... how about 300? I am sure the everyman doesn't know jack shit about ancient Greece, or Peloponnesian League stuff or classical Persia. Yet we got the situation explained to us very quickly in that film and we got a good handle on the scenario and why both sides were fighting without lengthy explanations.

And with just a bunch of half-naked psychopaths screaming their lungs off (about SPARTA!).

Of course, that movie also had fucking mutated elephants and steel-faced uruk-hai ninjas.

Hmm... this is a terrible example.

No need for any apologies. I always enjoy reading your posts and I also take on board the points you are making. And you are very, very right about constructive approaches.