YMMV / Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War

• Accidental Aesop: Both the hero's and antagonist's actions make a surprisingly good case that it's important to allow even intolerant extremists basic rights or they will become violent and you may be less prepared to handle that than you think.
• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • The Confederation can be seen as an incredibly hardline authoritarian regime rather than the paragon of libertarian, limited government and "Western values" the novel tries to present it as. The same applies to the individual characters, such as Kraft and Rumford himself. It is also common for some to believe they are actually a vassal state of Russia, given what a huge role it played in granting it independence.
  • As mentioned elsewhere on this page, it's not hard to buy that the book is an in-universe Propaganda Piece being circulated by Victorian citizens. Their enemies are easily defeated, deserve what they get, and are falling apart through sheer incompetence in the face of manly Victorian patriots.
  • The neo-pagan female Episcopalian bishop who is burned at the stake in the prologue, Cloaca Devlin, was given a choice by the Victorian government: admit she was not a Christian (and be exiled), admit she was not a bishop (and be free to go), or be executed. She chose to die. There are parallels between this and the early Christian tradition of martyrdom—Devlyn refused to renounce her faith and so went to her death willingly. Rumsford (and quite probably Lind) never seems to consider this interpretation.
• Anvilicious: The bad sides of extreme leftism, multiculturalism and political correctness are really played up (to the point of Strawmanning) by the narrative, and there is no subtlety about it. The victory of the Christian Marines over the evil forces of feminism, homosexuality, political correctness, communism, etc., is basically the entire purpose of the story.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: Neo-reactionary fundamentalists, who decide who's a "good Christian" and what kinds of thinking are "cultural Marxism," smash all the forces of "cultural Marxism" (liberalism, multiculturalism and progressivism) one-by-one, setting up a perfect agrarian-regressive state where everyone is a "good Christian," or else. It's not for everyone.
• Badass Decay: The Azanian feminists start out with high levels of competence, but rapidly become far less formidable when facing Rumford.
• Catharsis Factor: Presumably, at least part of the book's appeal in right-wing circles is due to this. Strands of thought they hate get villainized to hell and back, then smashed left, right and center, from global crusades against Islam to "cultural Marxist" professors being butchered and their ideas replaced with reactionary traditionalism, to silly feminists proved wrong and put in their place, namely either in the home as a traditional wife or sold into slavery.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Those of a left-wing or moderate mindset who aren't horrified by the book's many, many ethnic, sexist, and homophobic stereotypes might find them laughable. As a general rule, having the protagonists be a group of rural gun-loving fanatics waging open war against one particular interest group is offensive, almost terrifying... having the protagonists be a group of rural gun-loving fanatics waging war against every other interest group (and winning) is hilariously absurd.
• Designated Hero: The story runs on Black-and-Gray Morality, but the actions the Christian Marines, Rumford, and Kraft undertake would suffice to make them villains in many/most other works: condoning slavery and indentured servitude, evicting minorities, massacres of political opponents, tarring and feathering a judge, nuking downtown Atlanta (albeit to bring down a genocidal regime), racism and homophobia galore, to name a few examples.
• Designated Villain: As mentioned under Alternative Character Interpretation, the neo-pagan Episcopalian bishop, Cloaca Devlin, whose burning at the stake by the Christian marines opens the book. She's given a chance to admit that she is not a Christian, abdicate her bishopric, or die, and she chooses the latter, with the resulting execution presented as a justified and righteous deed. While her strongly heretical theology surely gives her church the right to expel her (she does not believe in the Trinity or even God, while openly worshipping pagan goddesses) and she behaves generally obnoxiously throughout the courtroom negotiations and beyond, she does not really seem to have committed any real crime by real life, early 21st-century American legal standards; there are some hints that she was a fellow-traveler with the Azanians earlier in the story, but even then only an ideological supporter, not a spy or any such thing.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: While Victoria is explicitly intended as a warning against the evils of liberalism by showing what it (supposedly) leads to when put into practice, this message is somewhat undermined by the fact that at least some of the "liberal" villain factions can easily come across looking better, or else just cooler, than the heroes.
• Epileptic Trees: Certain fans speculate that the book is really an in-universe Propaganda Piece told by an Unreliable Narrator.
  • Really, much of the story that struggles makes perfect sense if you presume it to be in-universe propaganda. The foreign hordes invade, but are easily beaten back, the corrupt old empire falls to it's own hubris, and all the forces of liberalism and Cultural Marxism cannot stand before Real Victorian Men.
  • How is the federal government so very efficient and powerful in stamping down on smokers, and raiding people's houses for loose jewelry and furniture without receipts, yet utterly helpless in the face of the Christian Marines and New Orleans Flu? Well, this just lends credence to the idea of the book as in-universe propaganda, the enemy Other, after all, must simultaneously be threatening enough to require all one's strength to defeat, evil enough to justify any authoritarian measures taken to counteract them, yet weak and contemptible enough to collapse easily once the work's put in.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: By the 2050s, Victoria has vanquished all of its foes, that means rampant racism, sexism and homophobia are left to rule the day in Victoria. Non-Christians are actively persecuted, and the Christian world is planning a globe-spanning war with Islam as a whole. North America is now under a new Retroculture regime that resembles Apartheid-times South Africa more than anything, with a particular emphasis on "voluntary" exile of African-Americans to the countryside settlements (with the exception of a hand-picked few "useful professionals"), and other analogous movements do the same throughout most of the world. Huge sections of technological progress and art are rejected entirely because a cabal of societal elites find they clash with their ideological ideas about how a society should work rather than whether or not they actually bring benefits. Liberal America's values of equality, respect and acceptance are regarded as anathema by the new regime, ensuring that the last century of human progress was All for Nothing. William S. Lind believes all this would be a good thing, and he wants his readers to believe it as well.
• Evil Is Cool:
  • The Landwehr neo-Nazis follow Nietzsche-derived superman philosophies that at least sound cool (if obviously villainous), and also use updated versions of the iconic, classical Waffen-SS ranks and uniforms. For a personal example, Captain Halsing is one of the most memorable characters in the book, and arguably the one who displays the most badassery, even with Rumford and Kraft included in the comparison.
  • The other cool evil faction is Azania, the Amazonian Lady Land with stealth fighters and the most high-tech aesthetic in general in the setting.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Some fans sometimes refer to Rumford as "Rumlind" (a portmanteau of his name and the author's), since they consider him an Author Avatar.
  • Others refer to Governor Kraft as "Fuhrer Kraft", in apparent homage to Fuhrer Bradley in Fullmetal Alchemist. And at least one fan also calls him "Kaiser Billy."
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The 2020 War in Ukraine completely debunked 'Fourth Generation War' as defined in the book. Ukraine, despite being massively outgunned and outnumbered has managed to not only bring Russia to a halt but actually reclaim taken territory with the vastly much more technologically advanced weapons. Even worse is that the weapons they're being given are up to 30 years out of date but still decades more advance than what Russia and the even older technology that the Christian Marines would be using.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The Confederation shares certain similarities with ISIL. Among other things: creating a right-wing government and Church Militant, punishing leftist intellectuals with death and making said murders a public spectacle, discriminating against racial minorities in various ways, and forcing women to live as second-class citizens while using Double Think to make themselves think that they'll be happier that way.
  • The N'Oleans Flu pandemic starts in 2025, five years after the global COVID-19 pandemic that started in real life. Both pandemics saw national governments try to contain the plague with controversial measures, though in real life many also criticized governments for doing too little too late to stop the spread of the disease at least as often as they criticized the measures the government did take. The fictional flu saw city residents pour out into the countryside rather than hole up in their homes. Also, the fictional flu turns out to be a genetically-engineered bioweapon; conspiracy theories abound about COVID-19 being some sort of Chinese bioweapon cooked up in a lab that accidentally got loose in Wuhan.
  • As this page suggests, a lot of people laughed at the ridiculous idea of a movement of rural, reactionary, white and Christian nationalists trying to overthrow the United States government based on a bunch of conspiracy theories about it being subverted by "cultural Marxists," so that they could start killing everyone who disagrees with them. Then, on January 6th, 2021, a mob attempted to do just that at Capitol Hill, with right-wing media mainstreaming conspiracy theories about shadowy left-aligned boogeymen controlling American society to try to legitimize it. Relatedly, the idea that they'll eventually bloodily purge America of everyone who doesn't think like them to bring about a great national rejuvenation is a cornerstone of the "Q-Anon" movement. Both Retroculture and Q-Anon also claim that their enemies are quite literally servants of the Devil.
    • All of which said, the January 6th riot was just part of a larger plot that was intended to both interfere with the certification of votes and to give then-President Trump an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and take control of the country with the regular military...and it all failed, leading to the incarceration of many of the rioters, including many movement leaders. Arguably, this renders the idea that a movement of rural, reactionary, white and Christian nationalists could overthrow the United States government by itself even more ridiculous, if significantly less funny.
• Inferred Holocaust: Deprived of the support of the neocon lobby, Israel was destroyed by the Arabs in the global wars that followed the downfall of the corrupt United States. Nothing is said directly about the fate of the population, but given how things went elsewhere in the world (even without the historical baggage of this particularly bitter conflict), it is probably safe to assume that it was nothing nice that happened to them.
• Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: If you couldn't tell from this page already, there are a number of left-wing, independent-leaning, and minority/LGBTQA+ readers who appreciate this book because they find its politics hilarious.
• Moral Event Horizon: More or less every villain gets at least one event horizon-worthy event; often, the trouble is picking out which atrocity constitutes it.
  • The Federal Government is already totalitarian and tyrannical well before, but the atrocity that viscerally rams home their evil is unleashing the Division Numero Uno (a small army of gangbangers, rapists and murderers) on upstate New York. This applies mostly to Secretary Mowukuu, who is the Division's main advocate, but to a lesser extent to the whole cabinet, who approve the decision.
  • In the New South, the far-left Commune starts a real, Third World-style genocide in Atlanta, slaughtering whites and Asians throughout the city.
  • For the Azteca hierarchy, the ritual sacrifice and eating of US Ambassador Zimmerman immediately establishes them as beyond the pale.
  • The Paleopitus turn Cascadia into a North Korean-style or Khmer Rouge-style dictatorship with mass famines, notionally to protect the environment — and so, their true evil becomes apparent when they bring in Chinese corporations to strip-mine the state in order to line their own pockets.
  • Azania's ruling junta do believe in their ideology, and are less sadistically bloodthirsty than many other enemies, but still commit atrocities in the pursuit of their utopia. If outlawing male-female relationships wasn't the event horizon, the apocalyptic nuclear suicide strike they prepare once their defeat becomes obvious, is.
  • The Nazis in Wisconsin cross it when they set up a concentration camp.
  • If the Northern Confederacy itself hadn't crossed the line with the mass murder of the so-called "Cultural Marxist" professors at Dartmouth on live television, they almost certainly had by the time of their response to the aforementioned Commune bloodshed with nuking downtown Atlanta to cinders.
• Narm:
  • After its liberation, Rumford and his allies have New York State get rid of New York City, referred to as the Babylon on the Hudson, which should tell you why he wanted to get rid of it. What becomes of the city? They try to sell it to Puerto Rico... But they don't want it. No, this isn't treated as comedy at all.
  • Every time Lind tries to write a Maine accent, it can turn out incredibly jarring and ridiculous. This includes writing "well" as "waal", for one example.
  • The sheer insanity of the caricatures of leftists is mind-bogglingly hard to take seriously. For example, the black Secretary of Defense makes a big speech about how only black men are warriors, at one point saying George Patton got his famous pistols from his black grandfather, who in turn stole them from Simon Legree. Yes, that Simon Legree.
  • The idea of Retroculture thinking technology invented after the 1930s is frivolous and overly complicated and that things before then were just as good in not better than modern equivalents. Ignoring the fact that the heroes frequently use weapons from well beyond that date, any engineer could tell you that there is a reason certain inventions become popular and that basically anything on the thirties could at best hope to have a small advantage over modern machines. And that's if and only if modern consumers don't consider that advantage to be important anyway.
  • The book repeatedly mocks the Azanians for essentially being woman pilots and repeatedly asserts that men can fly so much better as to make up for the huge technology gap between the two groups. This is probably because women could only be pilots at the time the novel was written, but by then it had also been proven that women could serve effectively (and with few complications) as combat pilots. For those familiar with the modern US Air Force to any degree, the idea in the book is empirically outdated and laughably so.
  • When explaining the difference between toleration of homosexuality (basically a sort of Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell) and approval of it (encouraging public homosexuality and advocacy), Rumford says that while he is willing to tolerate it, he would sooner give his approval to "an act involving three high yellow^note light-skinned mulattoes, or people with predominantly white, but some black African ancestry whores, a wading pool full of green Jello, and Flipper." He's, ah, thought a lot about the limits of depravity, clearly, and miscegenation is apparently part of it. Though in the setting, this sort of thing is broadly representative of the villains; for example, in New Orleans, "Big Daddy" Tsombe has "high yellow beauties" cavorting in syrup as part of his Mardi Gras celebration.
  • At one point the Nothern Confederates have a US Special Forces pinned by a creek. The Special forces are unable to retreat or maneuver because of the water. Basic research shows that the creek in real life, while wide and somewhat fast, is only ankle deep.
  • When Victoria decides firmly on Retroculture, the last gasps of technological corporations are mentioned. Including men in long trenchcoats lurking outside schools to give children free video games.
  • The main storyline begins when Rumford blows up his career in the Marines and becomes a far-right militant solely because he was outraged that a female Marine said the words "Iwo Jima" in a memorial service for those who fell in that battle - he felt a woman giving such a speech was disrespectful because women did not then (and should not now according to him) serve in the Marines, an objection he voiced by interrupting the memorial service. It comes off as a massive, incredibly disproportionate hissy fit over a minor dispute in which he was clearly in the wrong, making him look like a clown rather than a brave man standing up for his beliefs. The sheer weirdness of the whole thing led to a Memetic Mutation on SpaceBattles.com about how Rumford believes that women are physically unable to say the words "Iwo Jima."
  • The mayor of New Orleans is named Mr. Tsombe "Big Daddy" Toussaint L’Overture Othello Jones. It's like the author couldn't pick a stereotypically Black name he wanted to use and just decided to use them all.
• Only the Author Can Save Them Now: In two major instances in particular:
  • First, the Christian Marines and the embryonic Maine Free State manage to fight off the Federal Government and successfully establish their independence, with minimal resources against a military superpower. There are a lot of extenuating circumstances, from foreign assistance to the government being massively crippled by unpopular wars, economic depressions and ethnic strife, but even so the protagonists still get a lot of lucky breaks.
  • Then more obviously showcased in the Azanian War. With the economic, technological and military capabilities Lind piles onto the Azanians (in some cases even surpassing the United States before its fall), the plucky underdog heroes are able to defeat them only due to interlocking plot contrivances and, of course, the fact that their enemies are just women in the end.
• Rooting for the Empire: Those who don't fit into the author's very narrow category of what a hero entails are likely to find themselves rooting for basically anyone but the Victorians to win. In addition, the atrocities committed by the protagonists (torture, hostage taking, mass executions, nuking a US city) in many cases exceed those committed by the many, many villainous factions. Plus, the Azanians have high-tech planes and technology which arguably makes them cooler than the protagonists (though they still lose, of course) and unlike the protagonists, they actually put their prisoners in jail instead of openly torturing them to death. It also doesn't help that antagonists' evil acts are usually confined to three sentences at most (paraphrased: "They started concentration camps, which was going too far.", "Gangs were roaming the countryside, stealing and raping") while protagonists' actions are all described in lurid detail, including torturing their opponents to death and summary executions with swords. The end result is that crimes of anyone else but Victorians are not given much details and sounds like in-universe hearsay.
• So Bad, It's Good: While some readers take the book perfectly seriously and love it (and others do so and hate it), there are also those who enjoy it as a sort of semi-comedically exaggerated right-wing fantasy, a little like a less self-aware Judge Dredd, Warhammer 40,000 or (the movie version!) Starship Troopers. While Victoria incorporates themes that are serious enough, the delivery is sometimes so over-the-top that this becomes a valid interpretation.
• Spiritual Antithesis: It can be argued that it's one to The Handmaid's Tale. A theocracy violently overthrows the US government and makes its version of Christianity law, women are stripped of their rights, people of color are expelled from the country, gays are forced into the closet or outright killed, and brutal punishments and executions become the norm. However it's seen as a utopia, while Gilead was very clearly the opposite.
• Spiritual Successor: Go read the parody version of the Atheist Professor Copypasta. You would think the copypasta was a parody of Victoria itself had it not been for the fact that the copypasta was older.
• Strawman Has a Point: Somewhat surprisingly, the Nazis. After being treated to a Character Filibuster by Kraft on the matter of why not only Nazism, but any and all ideologies ever invented are always evil and dysfunctional and will cause the states that believe in them to fail, Hauptsturmfuehrer Halsing asks him whether this also applies to his own ideology of Retroculture. Kraft then essentially attempts to sidestep the issue by arguing that Retroculture of course is not an ideology, merely the practical application of basic common sense, but proves unable to convince Halsing of this view. While the author evidently expects the audience to agree with Kraft, his argument can easily come across as the weaker one.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The Azanians, for a nation of high-tech lesbians who reproduce by cloning, are surprisingly bland and dull and exist, like all the villains, to be near effortlessly smashed aside by the heroes. Notably, their resistance did amount to a little unlike most groups, and while most successor states to the US save the Nazis and the New Confederacy are mocked and their culture dissected, the only jokes here are about women fighting.
• This Is Your Premise on Drugs: Right-wing militia rebel separatists on meth.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Various of the straw villain factions can come across this way, due to the heroes' ruthlessness as well as general Values Dissonance.
  • Azania, the high-tech Lady Land, is painted by Rumford as a dystopian Communist tyranny, and furthermore as the embodiment of everything stupid and evil about feminism. At the same time, they are essentially a progressive science-fiction power in an otherwise mostly tech-regressive and reactionary world, as well as the only major faction that still appears to believe in women's issues and LGBT rights. Between that, the ridiculous amount of plot fiat needed for their advanced near-future military to lose to plucky militiamen, and not least the rampant misogyny of the protagonists, it is not all that difficult to sympathize a little with the beleaguered Amazons. Plus, given the Strawman Ball every faction is given, many detractors are quick to assume that Azania's less admirable qualities are entirely fabricated.
• Villain Decay: After ceasing bombing due to humanitarian concerns, and hostages, and lifting the blockade after a Russian sub sinks a ship, the Federal Government stews in ever increasing impotence until it is decapitated by an assassin unrelated to the heroes, and finally put out of its misery when the foreign funding dries up.

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