2008-03-30 Please don't, at least not over this!

[wrog]

On the other hand, Sarine has some nice plot armor. What happens if Sarine croaks it, and Jon decides to just say "fuckit!" and leave before everyone else there dies?

at this point, she has plot whatever-the-opposite-of-armor-is. If anything, now is exactly the right time for her to die. She's unloaded all of her exposition already, and Meji is about ready to kick some ass. The only real question is whether Sarine is going to take Sarna with her or whether Jon's going to have to use that gun of his.

And Jon isn't going to say "fuckit", because despite the gruff exterior he cares about what happens to Meji -- and all indications are he cares a fair amount about Sarine too, so having her get killed is probably going to do the opposite of encourage him to leave (at least not before he ruins the day of several more high-level elves).

[Satanic_Hamster]

I'm conflicted on this.

On one paw, I vary much want to see hot female elf on elf action and, if porn and cable has taught me anything, is that two hot females fighting can only lead to one thing; lesbian sex or at least making out.

On the other paw, given the style of the story and the body count, I fear that this will instead result in one of them getting hurt badly or killed.

___________________
Currently listening to Bright Eyes' Noise Floor

[Boss Out of Town]

Hmmm . . . some important differences between Hess and Sarine

. . . Hess was an emotionally unstable, brutal Nazi thug who, at the time he took off in his plane, had already been a willing participant in political and military operations intended to exterminate half the population of Europe while destroying traditional European society and replacing it with a new, more vigorous national socialist culture based a pure Aryan race ruling over all inferior races.

. . . Sarine is a rational, if somewhat sentimental do-gooder who wants Elves, humans, and half-elves to stop killing each other.

. . . Hess, like Hitler at the time, wanted peace between the British Empire and the German Reich made on a basis of racial kinship, with the Germans exploiting and ruling over the inferior races of Europe and the British exploiting and ruling over the inferior races of Asia and Africa. Most historians feel that the peace Hess was fantasizing about would have lasted only as long as it took the Germans to conquer Russia and build a battle fleet, but the concept was there.

. . . Sarine doesn't want anyone exploited. She just wants to avoid more useless killing and suffering.

Not that good an analogy, as the motivations and stakes involved are worlds apart.

[Graybeard]

Hmmm . . . some important differences between Hess and Sarine [...] Not that good an analogy, as the motivations and stakes involved are worlds apart.

Oh, the analogy isn't perfect, by any means, but it's a lot closer than I thought it was before doing some digging. Two main points. First, even after sixty years of study, there remains serious doubt as to exactly what was going on inside Hess' head. Maybe he was indeed an "emotionally unstable, brutal Nazi thug," as you say; there is a school of thought that contends that that's exactly what he was. However, there are also schools of thought that assert that much of the "emotionally unstable" part was due to him manipulating the psychiatrists studying him, more expertly than they were probing his own thoughts. Furthermore, some (by no means all) of those schools opine that his main excursion into mental instability was simply because he did believe Germany, which one may reasonably assume he genuinely loved, was on the road to ruin -- which would destabilize even the strongest mind. After all, weren't we remarking earlier on the way Sarine seemed to be losing it while she was confined in Tsuirakushiti?

Second, rhetoric aside, it's easy to forget that from the standpoint of western Europe, the USSR that Hess was trying to marshal allies against really did pose a threat. We are talking here about a country that had gobbled up three and a half other European states (remember, they got half of Poland, and also extracted territorial concessions from Romania) in the few years before the war, undertaken an invasion of Finland that was at least as much of an outrage as what the Nazis did to Poland and more of one than the attack on France (who'd declared war on Germany, after all), killed more of its own citizens than the Nazis had, and actively supported insurgencies all over Europe. Ianilis as USSR to Sarine's Hess is an idea that has legs, even if neither the Tsuirakuans nor the elves have been behaving in a way as scurrilous as what the Nazis did -- and there's still the Errant War out there to parallel some of the German outrages.

I'm not trying to apologize here for the Nazis; what they did put them far beneath any possible apology. Hess, however... it would be good to know what was really going on there. Possibly additional light will be shed in 2017, when some British records of the Hess interrogations, etc., finally get declassified. Of course, we'll probably know what happened to Sarine, Ian, and so on, long before then.

[Boss Out of Town]

Second, rhetoric aside, it's easy to forget that from the standpoint of western Europe, the USSR that Hess was trying to marshal allies against really did pose a threat. We are talking here about a country that had gobbled up three and a half other European states (remember, they got half of Poland, and also extracted territorial concessions from Romania) in the few years before the war, undertaken an invasion of Finland that was at least as much of an outrage as what the Nazis did to Poland and more of one than the attack on France (who'd declared war on Germany, after all), killed more of its own citizens than the Nazis had, and actively supported insurgencies all over Europe..

Well, yes, Stalin was a Bad Person, but that really doesn't relate much to the question of whether or not the Nazis were Bad People. The European states were like the humans in an Alien Vs. Predator movie. They were stuck in a room with the the Alien (Hitler) while the Predator (Stalin) was working out how to knock down the door.

At a more scholarly level, I can recommend Norman Davies' Europe at War 1939–1945: No Simple Victory. He frames the story of the Second Great Conflagration as a dispute among three political cultures--Western Liberalism, Nationalist totalitarianism, and Communist Totalitarianism--rather then the traditional American view of Us Versus The Nazis!. In that context, the actions of the players make rational sense, from the player's point of view, and it puts the events of 1914-1989 in an interesting context.

The factions in Errant Story, even the Elves, act within the culture framework of Western Liberalism. This isn't unusual, most American fantasy stories are like that, even those set in the traditional psuedo-medieval "Sword & Sorcery" context. Sarine can best compared to some of the activists who have tried to prevent wars in our history. They seldom get praise after the war actually starts or immediately after it ends. That's the price you pay. If you're lucky, future generations will approve of you and Jimmy Stewart or Daniel Day Lewis will play you in the movie. If you're Charles Lindberg or John Bell or Jeanette Rankin, people will wonder how you could have been such a naive schmuck.

[Itterind]

Oh, I forgot that Iraq and Afghanistan has also pulled the vast bulk of the terrorist strength over the last several years. (Contrary to public opinion they are not limitless.) Initially these conflicts spurred recruitment too, but rates are now well below pre-conflict levels due to suicide-bombing of muslims discrediting global jihad.

Going by the numbers the GWOT has made the West safer.
Homegrown North Atlantic terrorists might be another matter though, similarly to Jordan and other low-violence sanctuaries who have high support rates (as they have seen no carnage themselves), sheltered young muslims (usually men) find it easier to dream of terrorism themselves.

[Boss Out of Town]

Oh, I forgot that Iraq and Afghanistan has also pulled the vast bulk of the terrorist strength over the last several years. (Contrary to public opinion they are not limitless.) Initially these conflicts spurred recruitment too, but rates are now well below pre-conflict levels due to suicide-bombing of muslims discrediting global jihads.

Okay, you are in the wrong thread. We moved this topic over to the General Discussions forum. I posted a reply over there.