History Blog / ACollectionOfUnmitigatedPedantry

** At one point when discussing the films of ''Lord of the Rings'', he brings up how the films heavily altered the weapons and armor of the books, which were mostly dated to the early Middle Ages, to be more all over the place, with significantly more usage of plate and quite a few designs that seem to be outright fantasy. He points out that this is probably due to the simple need for diversity; if the armies looked like the ones in the books, with everyone wearing mail armor and using one-handed weapons, hand-drawn bows, and shields, then they would broadly look the same, whereas the more motley arsenal of the films allows for armies to be characterized through their equipment (Gondor's army using plate armor conveys their greater resources and willingness to equip their infantry compared to Rohan using mostly leather and chain, Isengard's use of crossbows shows their greater mechanization, etc).

* ArmorIsUseless: A regular discussion topic. He often analyzes armor designs and discusses common errors with them, including scenes where armor is broken by things that really shouldn't be able to break it, and how people historically dealt with an armored warrior. (A recurring gripe of his is how infrequently gambeson shows up, despite it having been ''the'' BoringButPractical armor of the Middle Ages.) He also seems to consider the image of a completely unarmored berserker to be a PetPeeveTrope, pointing out that the classic example of such (the Gauls, who were known to fight naked) at least had the common sense to carry shields. However, he notes that this is one of the AcceptableBreaksFromReality for storytelling, as WeaponBasedCharacterization allows for theming and character traits to be conveyed visually to the audience.

** EasyCommunication: The blog has a similar verdict in regards to the extreme control the player usually has on their troops in a strategy game compared to what the generals would have in the pre-modern period, as having to blindly rely on a pre-conceived plan without much ability to influence the things that happen on the battle wouldn't be very fun.

* ComplexityAddiction: Devereaux argues that Saruman had this problem in ''The Lord of the Rings''. Saruman's overall strategy had several major moving parts running independently, all of them with a high chance of failure, and all of them totally dependent on the others succeeding to actually advance his goals. So once Saruman's raid to capture the Ring failed, he was completely boned because he'd already started a war with Rohan, tipped his hand to Sauron, and made the Ents more than a little mad at him. Once his siege failed, Saruman's defeat wasn't a matter of if it would happen, but when it would happen.

** It has a similar verdict in regards to the extreme control the player usually has on their troops in a strategy game compared to what the generals would have in the pre-modern period, as having to blindly rely on a pre-conceived plan without much ability to influence the things that happen on the battle wouldn't be very fun.

* InventedIndividual: One point he brings up when discussing Sparta is the figure of Lycurgus, whom just about every popular source treats as "the founder of Sparta" and the guy who came up with all its codes of law that proved the bedrock of its society. He points out that, in fact, the timeframe of Lycurgus's reign happens to be a period from which we have essentially no actual sources, his story is clearly at least somewhat fantastical, he was deified, his story (along with his stated law code) was carried on by a culture that rarely wrote anything down, and his law code is largely based on a status quo of Sparta having a large slave population it wouldn't have had during his time. Consequently, it's very likely that Lycurgus never actually existed, or if he did, he was no less altered in the process of mythologizing him than figures like Theseus or Romulus--making the idea that the Spartan law code was written by him personally, and his words stayed unchanged for four hundred years, fairly cleanly propaganda. He brings this up specifically to ward off the idea that the Sparta we know of is [[NoTrueScotsman just a debasement of Lycurgus's original "true" Spartan state,]] as that state is based on a figure who may well be completely imaginary.

** [[MuckingInTheMud Muddy fields in fantasy wars]] are largely based on Tolkein's experience in World War I, as well as the fact that it was the first filmed war and so influenced our view of what happened earlier. [[https://acoup.blog/2019/10/18/collections-the-battlefield-after-the-battle/ The truth is that while you could get a muddy environment,]] it only occurred in unusual circumstances. Accounts even up to the American Civil War mostly show grassy fields. The First World War was unique, as it was a result of the destructiveness of modern explosive shells and the relatively static battlefield. Shells kept falling in the same spaces over and over, which prevented anything from growing back once the war had ended because the ground had taken so much damage.

** One of the main reasons he attacks the Spartan military is that he argues it was historically very poor at accomplishing operations (as opposed to individual battles, which it had an okay record in). He specifically cites the Peloponnesian War as the prime example of this. Sparta and Athens were about 150 miles apart by road (about a ten-day march, which should be well within the means of a good army), and a lot of that road is through Spartan-allied territory, with the city of Corinth being right on the way. This should be a logistical slam dunk, but instead the Spartan invasions peter out multiple times when the Spartans run out of food and have to go home.

* UnfortunateImplications: [[invoked]]Much of the reason he dislikes the Dothraki so much is that he sees them as a repackaging of stereotypical tropes like TheSavageIndian and the HordesFromTheEast as AlwaysChaoticEvil ProudWarriorRaceGuys with no culture beyond RapePillageAndBurn. He's especially critical of this since Creator/GeorgeRRMartin has often claimed that the Dothraki are based on those cultures, which might give people the impression that the Dothraki is what they were actually like.

* FantasyCounterpartCulture: Discussed, in the [[https://acoup.blog/category/collections/that-dothraki-horde/ "That Dothraki Horde"]] series of essays. Devereaux comes to the conclusion that the Dothraki in both the [[Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire books]] and [[Series/GameOfThrones TV series]] have more in common with the ThemeParkVersion of horse nomads than they do with actual Eurasian steppe nomads or Plains Indians (their purported inspirations).

* WonTheWarLostThePeace: [[https://acoup.blog/2021/05/07/collections-teaching-paradox-europa-universalis-iv-part-ii-red-queens/ His discussion of the problem of industrialized warfare leading to the "Long Peace" is about this issue. Modern weapons are both too destructive and expensive, meaning that you waste money and blow up the very thing you wanted to win in the first place. At the same time, the benefits are less significant when contrasted with just spending that money on domestic economic investment.

** The discussion of Sparta also points out that some of this view was based on the Athenians believing this trope.

** [[MuckingInTheMud Muddy fields in fantasy wars]] are largely based on Tolkein's experience in World War I, as well as the fact that it was the first filmed war and so influenced our view of what happened earlier. [[https://acoup.blog/2019/10/18/collections-the-battlefield-after-the-battle/ The truth is that while you could get a muddy environment,]] it only occurred in unusual circumstances. Accounts even up to the American Civil War mostly show grassy fields. The First World War was unique, as it was a result of the destructiveness of modern explosive shells and tbe relatively static battlefield meaning that shells kept falling in the same space, which prevented anything from growing back.
* ArmorIsUseless: A regular discussion topic, unsurprisingly. He often analyzes armor designs and discusses common errors with them, including scenes where armor is broken by things that really shouldn't be able to break it, and how people historically dealt with an armored warrior. (A recurring gripe of his is how infrequently gambeson shows up, despite it having been ''the'' BoringButPractical armor of the Middle Ages.) He also seems to consider the image of a completely unarmored berserker to be a PetPeeveTrope, pointing out that the classic example of such (the Gauls, who were known to fight naked) had shields.
* AwesomeButImpractical: War elephants, at least in the west. Though incredibly powerful and intimidating to face, they were also immensely costly in terms of resources, difficult to find in Europe, could potentially be dangerous to their own side if their driver was killed, and had rather exploitable weaknesses that could be broken by highly organized Roman or Chinese armies.
* ComplexityAddiction: Saruman again. His overall strategy had several major moving parts running independently, all of them with a high chance of failure, and all of them totally dependent on the others succeeding to actually advance his goals. So once his raid to capture the Ring failed he was completely boned no matter what because he'd already started a war with Rohan ''and'' tipped his hand to Sauron.
* ConspicuousConsumption: He suggests that a large reason for why war elephants stayed in usage in India and various other countries was this: elephants are so difficult to feed, house, and train for war that any king capable of maintaining a proper elephant corps for battle would have to be phenomenally wealthy and powerful (and it's important to give this impression when you're a king).