Ukraine War Cleanup

We cut it. Not only is it a hindsight shoehorn, but these horrific attacks have happened in damn near every war.

This was added as a bullet on Harsher in Hindsight on YMMV.Chernobyl a while back.

• The "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue notes with a somewhat triumphant tone that some of the major characters— including two of the three divers and Lyudmila Ignatenko— survived until the release date of 2019 and were living safely in Kyiv. In March of 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, shelling Kyiv heavily and laying siege to the city, putting these survivors at risk; the Daily Mail reported that Alexei Ananenko was forced to flee the city with his wife.

Just wanted to check here if this should be removed since it's referencing a specific event that happened more than six months ago at this point and not the whole war, though I assume it's still not kosher.

Also if they're still alive I don't think it counts?

Found this in YMMV.World Of Tanks

• One of the reasons why the Friendly Fire mechanic was completely removed was due to numerous incidents in which Russian and Ukrainian players would act maliciously toward each other during the game because of "national differences and past grievances". Come February 2022 and Russia ends up going too far...
  • "Russian Bias" arose from a universal consensus in the fan community that the Russian Tech Tree was getting preferential treatment due to Wargaming's roots of origin in Belarus. Further reinforcing this is a quote from the Creative Director, Sergey Burkatovsky (Ser B), who said that "Germanophiles must suffer". Now with the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine, Wargaming has come to show regret by firing Sergey Burkatovsky and some other employees for making Pro-Russian statements and deciding to leave Russia and Belarus, implying that "Russian Bias" will no longer be tolerated.

Additional tidbits from YMMV.World In Conflict

• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In some cases, the story of Soviet's failed invasion of Washington State became this for the 2022 Ukraine Invasion as the Russians launched an invasion with the expectation of a swift victory before becoming bogged down and pushed back by the local defense force after months of fighting.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The entire cutscene of Soviet Invasion became uncomfortable in 2022 with early days seeing Russian tanks rolling down the street and paratroopers dropping into the cities of Ukraine.

Keep or remove?

Edited by HamanaHamanaHamana on Dec 18th 2022 at 2:17:37 AM

Found this in Toppled Statue:

• The invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022 caused several instances of this upon some remaining Soviet era and Russian monuments:
  • Several Ukrainian memorials to the Soviet-Hero Cities (which resisted the Germans during World War II) were purged from the names, statues, and symbols of Russian and Belarusian cities (since Alexander Lukashenko's Belarus is a passive ally/pawn of Vladimir Putin and served as launchpad for the failed Russian assault on Kyiv in February and March 2022).
  • In Kyiv, the People's Friendship Arch was dismantled in April 2022. The bronze statue depicting a Russian worker and a Ukrainian worker holding up the Soviet Order of Friendship of Peoples was removed (the Russian one was beheaded). The arch will remain and is planned to be renamed and illuminated with the colors of the Ukrainian flag.
  • In Odessa, the statues of Catherine II of Russia and Alexander Suvorov will be removed.
  • Several remaining Soviet-era memorials were destroyed in Poland and the Baltic states (in Lithuania especially).

I think all of those should be removed; policy has been that the war is an ongoing event and can't be troped in any sort of Hindsight entry. The only reason I'm uncertain about the Chernobyl one is because it's referring specifically to the March bombing of Kyiv, though I'm leaning on that one probably not being suitable also.

Some of those entries are referring to instances that haven't yet happened, so at least those can go.

Bumping for any further thoughts on the last few posts, since it has been a bit and this got kind of buried.

Agreed.

I removed the Odessa bullet and the last sentence of the Friendship Arch bullet. Anything else need to go?

I realized there was another Harsher in Hindsight entry on Chernobyl pertaining to the war, so I zapped both it and the entry I initially brought up.

UsefulNotes.With Europe But Not Of It has a whole paragraph about the Ukraine War (under "The Bear and the Lion — Russia"), and coming up on a year since the invasion I'm not sure if the blanket ban on adding info about it to Useful Notes still holds?

The blanket ban will hold until the war is over (whenever that happens). Although the initial panic the war caused on the wiki has numbed a bit, it's still best to not discuss it as being on top of current events should not be our focus on this site.

Thanks - in that case, should the paragraph be removed right away?

I'd say so yeah.

Edited by MacronNotes on Feb 8th 2023 at 7:37:49 AM

You can mention when a media work brings it up though right?

The bad guy of an episode of FBI: Most Wanted is a Russian Oligarch involved in the 2022 invasion.

This was one of mine on YMMV.Radio Tapok. FWIW I posted it before I learned of the blackout on troping the war. Thoughts?

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • On 8 February 2022, Oleg announced his first full-length studio album, about Russian military history. Later that month, he was in Mykolaiv, Ukraine for a tour when Russia began a full-scale invasion of its southern neighbor. He posted a message on his YouTube page about it.
    "Украина, я здесь, я с вами."^Trans. Ukraine, I'm here. I'm with you.
  • He also noted in the captions for the video of "Operation Allied Force" that he had recorded the video, which depicts a TV screen showing shots of the NATO bombardment of Belgrade from the Serbian side, in January, before the war started.

Note that the artist in question, who is Russian, has come out as tactfully against the war as he's probably safe doing.

Forgotten Trope has this entry:

Seems premature without any examples to point to in fiction.

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Feb 18th 2023 at 1:42:07 PM

The entry also suggests that that Russia is the only world power ever to possess nukes and/or pose a nuclear threat (it's not like North Korea exists, there is any tension with China, or Iran has a certain nuclear deal that made headlines a few years ago). I could have sworn that a nuclear war was a standard setup for an After the End situation, but I guess that was only the case for works made before the collapse of the USSR.

Edited by AnotherOnlinePersona on Feb 19th 2023 at 9:22:44 AM

Recently a whole paragraph was added to UsefulNotes.COVID 19 Pandemic here, which brings up the Ukraine invasion as part of its wider point. Bringing it here to ask if the entire paragraph should be cut, or just the part mentioning Ukraine?

Some have compared the pandemic to The Spanish Flu of 1918-1920, when similar precautions like mask-wearing and social distancing took place there (alongside similar public resistance, government downplaying, censorship, and misinformation). Some of the analysts, including Nicholas Christakis, suggested that the pandemic fatigue would usher in a new era of hedonism, spontaneity, and sexual frivolity akin to The Roaring '20s or The Swinging Sixties: however, this appears unlikely, with the current situation similar to the 1930s in Europe – widespread attacks on democracy and human rights, the continued surge in the far-right, worsening climate change, and the increased likelihood of World War III as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the breakdown in respect for international law.

Edited by harryhenry on Mar 5th 2023 at 4:02:54 AM

I am leaning on cutting the whole paragraph because the pandemic is still ongoing even if it's not as bad it was three years ago. I think it's too early to compare Covid to other pandemics when we are still living it.

Edited by MacronNotes on Mar 4th 2023 at 10:06:14 AM

I think we should review, reframe, or cut the "Where do we go from here?" section for being wild mass guessing.

I apologise for having a rather bad time when I added the paragraph: at the time I was reeling from a bad wave of hopeless political doom-scrolling, and I felt that we were nowhere near something like the Roaring '20s or The Swinging Sixties.

For the record, I abhor Putin's invasion: otherwise I would have called it a "special military operation", and that is obviously not true.

From Notable Popes, referring to Francis:

Emphasis mine. This isn't kosher, or whatever the Catholic equivalent of that is. I'd cut the sentence entirely, but I'm looking for a second opinion.

Cut the sentence entirely. Useful Notes IIRC is mainly for information that's there to help writers write about different RL things—I fail to see how that sentence does that.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Mar 9th 2023 at 8:17:29 AM

This appears as a bullet point on Analysis.Do Not Do This Cool Thing:

• In case more proof was necessary, in the whole Russia's war in Ukraine situation, even as the war raged and fears of a possible World War III were once again justified, companies such as Disney try to enforce their standing due to how the sanctions against Russia might hurt their profits from the lack of copyright royalties.

That just seems like misuse. I say cut on that principle along with being an unnecessary shoehorn about the war.