Salvation War Criticism Thread

[Simon_Jester]

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.

A better example would be The 300 Spartans, a movie made in 1962 about the same battle that wasn't ludicrously over the top in that respect. As in, actual Greeks cooperated in filming the thing on site, rather than gibbering the violation of their history. That sort of thing.

The mere fact that people can make movies about ancient times at all, despite the fact that only a small fraction of their audience have a classical education and know more than a few of the biggest parts, is a good sign here.

[John Chris]

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 existence. 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.

I understand where you're coming from, especially if you set the rules of the multiverse in that fashion. You're basically taking biblical mythology and putting a Baxteresque hard-science perspective on them. When you put it that way, TSW (at least, the way you write it) makes a lot more sense. I do point out, though, that it does have the danger of becoming inflexible, at least from a storywriting perspective, and that inflexibility can lead to a lack of tension. It'd read more like a clinical dossier of events rather than an actual story (which, I think, is where a large part of the criticism is coming from). Well, you did warn that it was a documentary and everyone knows that documentaries are drier than the Sahara.

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 reality 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.

Heh. Fundamentalism and scientific conundrums are like garlic and vampires, apparently.

I would say though that the legions of hell could have been given several additional advantages to spice up the story. Not the least of which is the fact that demons (including Satan himself) are often portrayed in modern culture as being extremely genre-savvy as well as in the know about mankind's technological prowess. I often wonder what could have been if you decided to write Armageddon with Satan knowing at least as much as Michael does about 21st century humanity. If both Heaven and Hell were in the know about Man's ability to fight wars the way he does, and they were able to fight accordingly (Portal Combat!), it would definitely ratchet up the danger factor, even if they lose in the end.

[JBG]

@ 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).

The guy or gal on the red ball express is a nice link between the tactical mano-e-mano stuff that Shroom Man, and many others including me, relish, and the operational. Given the number of fronts etc it cannot easily suggest at the strategic, which many others, me included, relish. High level meetings are a great way to give overall strategic apreciations.

The problem is space though Simon you've referred to a useful tool. If all of the strategic, operational and tactical ( down to individual combat ) points of interest were all catered for then Pantheocide would be bigger than War and Peace. Side stories are probably the answer though with two TBOverse stories running as well at the moment, Stuart would not conceivably have time.

NB Shroom Man, there's a great scene of an Argentinian frigate being trashed by light infantry shore fire in Lion Resurgent that you might enjoy! Angel in the Mist has some great combat too. The destruction of the German surface fleet in Winter Warriors is a coldly calculated curbstomp.

[Simon_Jester]

I understand; the trick is that there's a major artistic problem with trying to portray tension, drama, and the human element when half your story is taking place in air-conditioned bunkers and war rooms. I think I have to agree that Stuart's story is suffering from that problem. While there are surely logical reasons and motives for spending so much time looking at everything from a high top down perspective, that doesn't erase the problems that come with doing so.

Proving that there is an in-story reason for things to work in a certain way, or even an artistic reason to do them that way, does not confer immunity to artistic criticism in and of itself. That's one of the reasons that good art is so hard to do. It may be why people talk about a complex, qualitative, field of endeavor that defies analysis into a simple set of formulas an "art" rather than a "science," too: many arts trap the creator between a bunch of different constraints that are mutually exclusive and then force them to pick a balance point. In the sciences you can usually calculate an optimum point as prove that you've done it right; in the arts that's harder to do. I might reasonably come to your story looking for a well-thought out background world and leave disappointed because you were more interested in drama and character development, for instance.

[Shroom Man 777]

Instead of disjointedly depicting various different war room characters and various different constantly-shifting grunt characters, Stuart could just fix himself on a set and steady group of war room characters and grunts. In Armageddon, we had a set group of suits, a set group of grunts (Hooters, Broomstick, Trucker McElrond), and a set group of scientists (Kuroneko and Surlethe). We regularly cut between the suits and these familiar group of grunts for the human POV. The demon POV has a different set of constant characters. We have a constant set of characters and they are well-developed as the story progresses.

In Pantheocide, there's a lack of constant grunt-level characters. The key word being constant. I mean, we go from a bunch of guys who are on a boat experiencing red tide, we go to some people and puppies resisting Uriel attacks, we go to some people in a laser THEL plane, we go to some guys in an AEGIS cruiser, we go to some British B-1 pilots, we go to Mike Wong, we go to some firemen, we go to some hunters with their hunting dogs, etc. We don't have a constant set of characters, and their perspectives are disjointed.


I think the best "model" for these perspectives that switch from strategic to tactical would be none other than Stanley Kurbick's Dr. Strangelove. We often switch POV's from the all-seeing "strategic" perspective in The War Room, before switching to more focused "tactical" perspective in either the runaway B-52 with Major Kong or in the Burpelson AFB with the deranged General Ripper and Group Captain Mandrake. It also helped that the "strategic" perspective in The War Room also had a bunch of entertaining characters.

Perhaps Stuart can "spice up" his strategic War Room POVs by having Obama and co. do some entertaining stuff. I mean, we had George Bush crack jokes, Karl Rove/Dick Cheney act like a prick, and all that stuff. Perhaps Stuart can write stuff with Obama trying to balance running the Salvation War and him trying to stick with his domestic policies (healthcare debate!) and dealing with domestic politics - like, right-wing guys attacking him for being too demon-friendly and for shaking or bowing Abrigor's hand or something. I mean, Obama is a funny guy and is cool.

[Jamesfirecat]

I think there's one small problem with asking for "grunt" characters in Pantheocide. It's that so far, there isn't a war going on that the grunts can take part in. It's sort of like during the early months of 1942 for the US. Germany is over there, but we don't yet have the means to actually get our boys to their doorstep.

There is no actual "war" going on at the moment at least in the normal sense, just countless tiny little gorilla actions, like playing around with the weather and sending Uriel after us.

Because of that, there's nothing for the grunts to do beside polish their boots/guns while they get ready to invade heaven. They might be involved in training Baldricks (I'll admit I'd like to see more of those scenes) but its unlikely since high command wouldn't know when they'd be needed to invade heaven and you don't want to take away the teachers halfway through the semester.

The grunts are all basically sequestered sort of like the English and American troops for that long period before D-Day.

So I don't think that Stewart is directly trying to cut out the grunt scenes, its just that those scenes would be horribly boring at the moment, do you have a suggestion for what the "grunts" could be doing right now that would be interesting?

[Shroom Man 777]

Damn, that's a fairly good point, actually.

[Jamesfirecat]

Damn, that's a fairly good point, actually.

Holy crap, people get the cameras, I think I may have actually just convinced someone of something via arguing with them over the internet!


That said, if you wanted to make Pantheocide a bit more personal, we could look into the story of a human in heaven who is suffering from a crisis of faith when he finds out that humanity defeated Hell and killed heaven. (Would something like that be common knowledge in heaven? What lengths might angels go to suppress it?)

But Yahweh has never been able to kill Satan and if humans can, then that means that humans must be more powerful than Yahweh. Cue crisis of faith, cue scenes of him trying to figure out how humanity could do such a thing, what humans must be like now, possibly him starting his own small cult that has to deal with worshiping humanity and having to run/hide from angels.

Not to mention possibly cue a second crisis of faith when he finally meets the humans who make their way into Heaven and finds out that they aren't as grand as he expected them to be.

Thoughts?

[Corvus]

Would, instead of a thunder-run, an insertion of Heaven be a more logical first action to be taken in Heaven itself?
(Send in a recon team, wire a lot of tempels with explosives, identify primary targets)
and after that a serious tunder-run.

[Sea Skimmer]

Would, instead of a thunder-run, an insertion of Heaven be a more logical first action to be taken in Heaven itself?
(Send in a recon team, wire a lot of tempels with explosives, identify primary targets)
and after that a serious tunder-run.

A recon team with no existing information to work from, not even a map, would be just kind of suicidal. Special operations like that need careful planning, which isn’t possible in this instance. Also a single strong angle might be too much for the weapons carried by a small team to deal with. They’d basically be batting around in the dark, limited by the human eye and legs, it’s just not a good situation.

An armored battalion meanwhile has the firepower to shoot its way out of trouble and it can cover much more ground much more quickly, before any organized resistance can assemble to oppose it.

[Simon_Jester]

Instead of disjointedly depicting various different war room characters and various different constantly-shifting grunt characters, Stuart could just fix himself on a set and steady group of war room characters and grunts. In Armageddon, we had a set group of suits, a set group of grunts (Hooters, Broomstick, Trucker McElrond), and a set group of scientists (Kuroneko and Surlethe). We regularly cut between the suits and these familiar group of grunts for the human POV. The demon POV has a different set of constant characters. We have a constant set of characters and they are well-developed as the story progresses.

In Pantheocide, there's a lack of constant grunt-level characters. The key word being constant. I mean, we go from a bunch of guys who are on a boat experiencing red tide, we go to some people and puppies resisting Uriel attacks, we go to some people in a laser THEL plane, we go to some guys in an AEGIS cruiser, we go to some British B-1 pilots, we go to Mike Wong, we go to some firemen, we go to some hunters with their hunting dogs, etc. We don't have a constant set of characters, and their perspectives are disjointed.

Damn. Good point; I should have thought to put it that way and I wish I did.

Of course, we had a lot of cameo grunt-level characters in Armageddon, too: the Chinese village headman, the random berserk demon attack in the mall, the guys running around trying to save Sheffield and Detroit from sky-volcanoes, and so on. But the ratio of cameos to persistent characters seems to have gone up in Pantheocide: some of our beloved grunts have vanished into the stratosphere after winning one promotion too many, others don't appear at all, no new ones are being created, and new cameos are being introduced all the time so we can see whatever bits of this conflict happen to be interesting at the moment.

Even if it's a problem with no clear solution, it's still a problem. The story might profit from introducing someone who can plausibly be hopping back and forth between all these disasters (for continuity), but who's close enough to the action to get some of the benefits of the grunt effect. Maybe a roving troubleshooter-type attached to the HEA who gets sent to help with liaison work wherever something big and nasty happens or something.

I think there's one small problem with asking for "grunt" characters in Pantheocide. It's that so far, there isn't a war going on that the grunts can take part in... The grunts are all basically sequestered sort of like the English and American troops for that long period before D-Day...

So I don't think that Stewart is directly trying to cut out the grunt scenes, its just that those scenes would be horribly boring at the moment, do you have a suggestion for what the "grunts" could be doing right now that would be interesting?

A lot of the information on the occupation of hell could be delivered through Kim (some of this is being done already) or Stevenson (not so much of this).

It's not so much the shortage of people with a rifleman's eye view of battlefields that's a problem; it's the shortage of any persistent character with a ground-level perspective on anything. Stylistically, what Stuart seems to be trying to achieve is similar to the style Harry Turtledove favors for portrayals of large-scale wars: hopping back and forth among many viewpoint characters to get a good overall picture of what's happneing. And that's a good way to handle this kind of situation, but when Turtledove does it, he writes something like 90% of the book from the point of view of a dozen or fewer persistent characters. Those characters aren't just viewpoints on events: they are people, with real development and opportunities to grow and mature as the story perceives.

Here, we have so many one-off appearances that there's no chance for that. We just see an endlessly changing stream of faces zipping by, each giving us a new snapshot of the situation. That tells you the shape of the war very effectively, but if you want characterization and continuity it leaves you starving.

[Vanzetti]

Was the undead fetus thing retconned, or is it still canon? Because I find it hard to believe that it can be kept in secret for long, even if Minos gate is tightly controlled by some US secret agency...

Also, what happens to pregnant women who die?

[Blayne]

The undead fetus thing makes me grimace a bit, as it has a lot of potential for misuse along story telling lines so far its had the effect of making GWB more human and likeable (although maybe not realistically so) but other things were probably doing a better job without having to be so cut and dry about it.

Its one of those things that yes make sense but we really wish it didn't. It has the problem where detractors could make the argument that if we make it more significant to the story we run the risk of it politizing the story if we don't mention it ever again its something to provoke a cheap emotional response in its one scene.

[Stuart]

Was the undead fetus thing retconned, or is it still canon? Because I find it hard to believe that it can be kept in secret for long, even if Minos gate is tightly controlled by some US secret agency. Also, what happens to pregnant women who die?

It was a good idea that didn't work. It's been removed from the later versions of the story (usual reminder - the version that was put up here was very much a first draft. Like all first drafts, it needed a lot of cleaning.

[Vanzetti]

It was a good idea that didn't work. It's been removed from the later versions of the story (usual reminder - the version that was put up here was very much a first draft. Like all first drafts, it needed a lot of cleaning.

Still, there must be some conditions by which Minos Gate defines who to resurrect. Is birth a must? What about premature born babies that can only survive in an incubator?

And what happens to dead children? Do they grow in hell until they reach adulthood? Or, if they don`t grow, can they still develop adult cognitive abilities?

[Stuart]

And what happens to dead children? Do they grow in hell until they reach adulthood? Or, if they don`t grow, can they still develop adult cognitive abilities?

Well, the rule established so far is that younger people (up to middle age) arrive through the Minos gate (from whatever is the other side of it) at the age they died at. However, older people arrive at a set age corresponding to early middle age. In both cases, people are reborn perfect, ie without trauma or amputations etc. It's important to note that the bodies are not human; they have a human "soul" in them but they are not human.
Spoiler

This is very important because it's going to turn out that Jade Kim has lost her muscle memory on how to fly a helicopter; things she used to do reflexively don't happen any more. She's effectively a new pilot and is having to relearn how to fly. The same applies to all other physical skills, mental skills remain unaffected by physical skills are gone. So intellectually people know how to do things like drivem fly, shoot etc and their brains tell their bodies what to do but the body still has to learn how to do things.

[Vanzetti]

Well, the rule established so far is that younger people (up to middle age) arrive through the Minos gate (from whatever is the other side of it) at the age they died at. However, older people arrive at a set age corresponding to early middle age. In both cases, people are reborn perfect, ie without trauma or amputations etc. It's important to note that the bodies are not human; they have a human "soul" in them but they are not human.

But do younger people grow in hell till they reach middle age? If not, we face the creepy possibility of thousand years old infants.

Spoiler

This is very important because it's going to turn out that Jade Kim has lost her muscle memory on how to fly a helicopter; things she used to do reflexively don't happen any more. She's effectively a new pilot and is having to relearn how to fly. The same applies to all other physical skills, mental skills remain unaffected by physical skills are gone. So intellectually people know how to do things like drivem fly, shoot etc and their brains tell their bodies what to do but the body still has to learn how to do things.

But, Stuart, cold weapons training must be 99% muscle memory (as every sport activity is). And yet your undead samurai and spartan kicked some serious demon ass. It makes no sense at all.

[Samuel]

But do younger people grow in hell till they reach middle age? If not, we face the creepy possibility of thousand years old infants.

Hopefully they will be less messed up than Rini. If they get a sex drive pedophiles are going to have a field day... I'm not sure if that is good or bad.

But, Stuart, cold weapons training must be 99% muscle memory (as every sport activity is). And yet your undead samurai and spartan kicked some serious demon ass. It makes no sense at all.

That is a good point. The best I can think of is that they knew enough to conciously remember the moves they needed to do. That and they were fighting the demon equivalent of prison guards.

[Vanzetti]

Hopefully they will be less messed up than Rini. If they get a sex drive pedophiles are going to have a field day... I'm not sure if that is good or bad.

Probably good, as they will be legally adults. But 4chan will go crazy (NSFW).

Anyway, being locked in a body of an infant for all eternity still sucks, I would guess.

That is a good point. The best I can think of is that they knew enough to conciously remember the moves they needed to do. That and they were fighting the demon equivalent of prison guards.

I`m 100% sure piloting a helicopter is less physical and more theoretical than fighting with a sword.

[Simon_Jester]

But, Stuart, cold weapons training must be 99% muscle memory (as every sport activity is). And yet your undead samurai and spartan kicked some serious demon ass. It makes no sense at all.

Also, the undead are shown as being able to walk and speak almost as soon as they arrive in Hell; those abilities are not automatic and rely on muscle memory too. Otherwise, at best, they could make weird mouth noises and lurch around awkwardly, like movie zombies.

[Blayne]

Maybe that is why they arrive unconscious?

[JBG]

And what happens to dead children? Do they grow in hell until they reach adulthood? Or, if they don`t grow, can they still develop adult cognitive abilities?

Well, the rule established so far is that younger people (up to middle age) arrive through the Minos gate (from whatever is the other side of it) at the age they died at. However, older people arrive at a set age corresponding to early middle age. In both cases, people are reborn perfect, ie without trauma or amputations etc. It's important to note that the bodies are not human; they have a human "soul" in them but they are not human.
Spoiler

This is very important because it's going to turn out that Jade Kim has lost her muscle memory on how to fly a helicopter; things she used to do reflexively don't happen any more. She's effectively a new pilot and is having to relearn how to fly. The same applies to all other physical skills, mental skills remain unaffected by physical skills are gone. So intellectually people know how to do things like drivem fly, shoot etc and their brains tell their bodies what to do but the body still has to learn how to do things.

Pardon the quibble, but what about Aeneas's and Ori's skills with their preferred weaponry? Or unarmed a la the scene where Aeneas comes out of the river of fire?

[CaptainChewbacca]

Aenas and Ori have been 'free' and fighting long enough to relearn some of their skills. I would guess Aeneas 'knew' enough to take a single demon by surprise, since his 1% that he did have was still enough to take the demon.

[Vanzetti]

If you remember, Aeneas was able to easily overpower a marine right after he was released.

[Stuart]

If you remember, Aeneas was able to easily overpower a marine right after he was released.

That's one of the things that will have to be ammended. See what I mean about how first drafts are always changed? This was made particualrly so in TSW:A because usually I write a fairly complete plot summary and expand it to full length later. In TSW:A, the first part came out very soona fter inspiration struck and Iw as several parts in before that plot summery was completed. Also, several other people contributed and I had to make sure their material fitted said plot line. In some cases, it didn't and some good material had to be deleted.

In this case, we have to assume that the bodies of the recovered humans aren't actually human bodies. In fact, they can't be for obvious reasons. So, old "souls" have to be put into new bodies. That means the new bodies have no muscle memory and the story as finally constituted has to accommodate that fact. So, the sections involving Aeneas and Ori get recast so that they take place while they are trying to recover their old skills. It's a faster process than originally learning their skills was since they know what has to be done; its justa matter of training their bodies to do it.