#(adjacent)

Wait, hold on. I should start by noting the sexism, which is tooth-grinding although not necessarily the fault of this particular adaptation, since I doubt they cut some crucially important or cool female character who has a bearing on the plot beyond 'accessory to the men'. This is structurally sexist in ways that are quite boring to discuss. Women in LotGH:DNT exist merely as satellites to the men or symbols of what those men want to achieve. That's it. Dull, predictable, unimaginative, and not something spurring me to any particular degree of reflection.

No, the big 'however' here concerns the fact that I have seen this story before. Not beat for beat, not exactly identical, yet it puts me in mind of basically every military sci fi story I encountered as a teenager and young adult. Take Yang Wen Li, the nearest this show has to a 'big good' character. A fundamentally decent person who happens to have stumbled into the role of tactical genius through no fault of his own, he dislikes the military, wants to retire and study history, and is unfailingly pleasant and kind in his personal interactions. But, aww shucks, he's also the Free Planets Alliance's most capable space warfare commander and they will not let him go, so he keeps having to pull off the impossible, further shoring up his image as 'the unbeatable magician'.

It's a very familiar sop. A very familiar dodge, to get around the innate unpleasantness of centring a story upon somebody whose job is to kill people in large numbers. The reluctant military mastermind who really would prefer to be elsewhere, who must nevertheless do what nobody else in the entire godsdamned space navy seems capable of and think further than 'more ships=more winning'.

(Seriously, I know militaries tend towards extreme stupidity at scale but it would be nice to see tactics that actually felt clever rather than merely not as dumb as literally every other character is being for some reason.)

The point is, this is one of the ways to avoid actually giving Yang's mithering about being a murderer for a living enough weight to sink the audience's sympathy for him. Because he doesn't want to be there, you see! He's doing it to save as many lives as he can!

Then again, caring about that would probably require feeling for a single second that the space battles carried meaningful consequences beyond the occasional death of a main character. This show depicts fleets consisting of thousands of ships, each battle regularly killing off hundreds of thousands of people, and yet there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of ships and people to slaughter in the next one. Oh, I know imbalances in resources is stated at various points but the raw numbers have been inflated to the point they are utterly meaningless.

Which is not the only way the usual sci-fi conceit of 'this thing but much bigger' works to sterilise the subject matter. For the most part, the space battles get to be nice and isolated, concerning only the fortunes of the fleets engaged. They might as well be a bunch of drones kicking seven kinds of brick dust out of each other in the middle of nowhere. And that got me thinking a bit about what it means to fictionalise warfare in this manner.

I don't often talk about what I actually believe regarding violence and warfare, as a matter of personal ethics. The short version is that most societies normalise violence in terms of who is allowed to commit it. This results in the condemnation of people who merely react in predictable ways to harm being done to them, and ego-protecting praise for those who kill on the state's behalf. It also means those societies must bend into increasingly deranged shapes to cope with the realities of modern warfare, which over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries has seen the erosion of any boundary between military and civilian targets. The moral self-destruction we've witnessed in real time from our ruling classes - where even the mechanically-given excuses for overlooking any atrocity a strategic ally perpetrates have worn down to an outright abandonment of pretence - seems to me to be an inevitable result of building militaries into engines of wholesale obliteration and enacting policies that favour their use as such.

To the extent they ever existed, grand tactical duels between dedicated professionals on equally matched opposing sides are a thing of the past. That's simply not what modern military technology is for. But most of the military sci-fi I have encountered (which, while not a wide sample, certainly echoes strongly in LotGH:DNT) harkens back to earlier forms of official violence - grand sea battles, courtly aesthetics, the cunning strategies of opposing empires. I don't think LotGH as a whole does so blindly. There's just enough in the philosophical musings for me to hesitate over calling it outright vainglorious bullshit. It is nevertheless contriving a situation where it can have its tactical fun without worrying about a century's worth of 'strategic bombing' and 'destroying the enemy's will to fight'.

I'm not sure I can say that's bad, per se. I've nothing against wargamers, nor do I believe the spectacle of grand-scale violence is inherently toxic to the psyche. Like all fiction, the trick is remembering it isn't real.

The problem is, what is real makes it harder for me to appreciate the spectacle. LotGH is a story about great men of history enacting their grand designs/desperately trying to get out of being great men of history so they can go nap in a corner. It has Big Thoughts about democracy vs autocracy. It is consciously epic. Consequently, this version at least has no real interest in dwelling on the material cost of technologically-advanced warfare. The economics are hand-waved except where it would be plot expedient. The impact on civilians is handled in terms of moral support and belief in one cause or the other (a planet does get nuked at one point, but that exists primarily to be a blot on Alexander the Great Reinhard von Lohengramm's conscience). And the militaries exist merely to clobber each other into submission.

Again, perhaps that's OK. As a younger man, of the kind this is aimed at, I might have been fine with the old dodges, the abstraction, the high drama. I really don't think it's badly done, on its own terms. It nevertheless leaves a bad taste in my mouth, at this point in my life and my awareness of the world around me, witnessing over and over again what the militaries of superpowers actually do.