Face the wind, though it blow away all your leaves

nothing groundbreaking but it’s fuuuuun

✅ list one or two favorite lines you’ve written and explain why they’re your favorite

🧮 what are you working on? describe it in 20 words or less

🎶 do you write with music? does the music you’re listening to influence your writing?

💕 whats your favorite part of your writing process?

😠 whats your least favorite part of your writing process?

🎀 how do you decide when something is done?

🌅 do you typically known the ending to something before you start writing it?

🔚 have you ever completely changed the direction a piece was going?

🤔 why do you write fic?

⛔️ whats something you try to avoid in your work?

📚 do you ever read similar works while writing, or do you intentionally not read them?

🦉 give yourself a piece of writing advice

😊 say something nice about your writing

😭 what’s something you’re currently struggling with?

(Not talking about hard military sci-fi since I haven’t read enough of it to say one way or the other. I’m talking soft quasi-military sf like Trek)

Like if you think about it narratively they’re incredibly useful because it’s a type of battle where:

1. No matter how spectacularly well the people fighting one do, it’s inherently not gonna successfully take down the big bad. Because the battle that could have done that is already lost. So it’s a time when they can win (achieve their objective of a successful orderly retreat) without winning. Always useful in a story where you need your protagonists to not win until the end.

2. You have an excuse for your Very Clever Plucky Band of Protagonists to be taking on a much much bigger and better armed force without it being just plain stupid to do so. No idiot balls here, just an acknowledgment that we inherently have to be asking a small force to hold off a large one, so the rest of our large force can get clear.

3. Great potential for a heroic sacrifice that doesn’t feel contrived BUT a sacrifice is not required. As mentioned in point 1 your protagonists can also do really well without it screwing up the pacing of the story. This means that your audience will not know for sure which way it is going to go based on the rules of storytelling. So you can get genuine tension/suspense and genuine catharsis.

4. Battle tactics and objectives can be complex and difficult to get across on page or on screen at the best of times, but “cover everyone else’s retreat from a lost battle” is easy to understand, sufficiently high stakes, and emotionally impactful—much more so than any convoluted “get the macguffin” or “take this territory” could ever be.

5. The combo of high stakes, inability to retreat (the whole point is they’re already retreating) and desperation mean it’s a perfect excuse for your protagonists to pull out all the stops. That experimental weapon that has a one in three chance of blowing up? Might as well use it because if we don’t not only are we dead, all our friends retreating behind us are too.

what do they even think a fortification is for???

what do you think a shield is for. what do you think ranged weapons are for????

if your tactics are dumb and reckless but you usually win and it's just you punching people that's one thing. or even if it's you and five guys who've decided they like how you roll!

but if you are put in charge of soldiers. and you throw their lives away because you don't know what you're doing. that's not okay.

it's not always avoidable! one of the basic problems with armies! but when it happens in fiction it needs to be on purpose, to make sure the military elements of the narrative remain thematically congruent.

when you have a bit where Main Character is in command and then makes avoidable bad decisions and people die who didn't have to. either the protagonist has been put in a horrific position by whatever authority figure thrust them into a role they didn't want and weren't competent to handle, without support.

or the protagonist, voluntarily assuming a management job they suck at, has committed a grievous harm against others by not recognizing their own limitations.

even if they win! i don't want to be watching a movie where the main character squanders every tactical advantage and loses 40% of their forces totally unnecessarily for Narrative Tension, but the enemy retreats or gets eaten by a dragon or loses the MacGuffin or whatever, and then there's triumphant music and a party because They Won!!!

For example, in the American Civil War, the tactics used of soldiers, marching into open fueled, and exchanging musket fire was not all that different than the tactics of the American revolution a little under 100 years prior. However, the rifles that infantry men were armed with were significantly more accurate. As a result, casualties, both in terms of lives lost, and soldiers, injured were horrific.

The concept of trench warfare in World War I was not all that different from wars, fought all over the continent in the century prior, and were designed to try and curb advantages of cavalry. But again, of mortars, more accurate, rifles, and chemical warfare meant that charging trenches resulted in truly grotesque numbers of casualties.

There is certainly evidence that World War I era generals were fairly callous when it came to casualty figures. They were more interested in territory gained. And it mattered very little how many lives that cost since soldiers were replaceable.

I agree that there should be some narrative coherence when protagonist squander advantages due to bad tactics, but when you look at actual history, it’s very clear that even if there are “good guys“ and “bad guys“ in war, there’s also just a lot of waste. That doesn’t make for a very sexy narrative, but it’s the nature of the beast. Militaries in particular are conservative institutions slow to change. you do things a certain way because that is the way they are done. That will always get people killed. But that’s also excepted as the way things are done.

At the end of the day, I’m just not sure there is a good way to organize two groups of people trying to kill each other.

thereby creating major ruptures in the narrative logic and characterization for anyone who knows (for example) what the point of a wall is.

this is a writing complaint, about failure to adequately situate motive within character and maintain internal consistency.

i'm not going to ask every piece of fiction that wants to have swords in it to engage in a meditation on the nature of conflict. that sounds boring, and also like it's asking too much of people. i'm aiming way lower here.

1. The Battle of Winterfell in GoT. The whole thing is a mess, let's be honest, but the two details that frustrate me the most in that battle are:

a. the defenders putting the artillery outside of the fortified walls, instead of on top where, you know, the artillery is protected from the oncoming horde and doesn't immediately fall into the enemy hands the minute they advance, and

b. The completely pointless Dothraki charge at the white walkers which does a sum total of nothing at all. We don't have time to get into how cavalry works, let alone mounted nomadic steppe warriors that the Dothraki are meant to be based off (spoiler alert, its mostly racist stereotypes), but suffice it to say that one massive clump of horses does not an effective cavalry charge make. If the front horses go down to the wights, which they will because the wights won't do what humans would do and recoil/run from the shock and terror of the charge, then every single horse behind that front horse will trip and fall over the downed horse in front, and all those very useful valuable Dothraki riders will die, and die pointlessly.

2. The Siege of Eregion, RoP S2. I won't go into the whole thing (how can you fire a catapult what looks like miles to hit a mountain and make it collapse to dam a stream, and then how can you march an army across a stream bed that would be mud and silt and very very difficult terrain?) but Elrond's cavalry charge should have worked. He was taking a cavalry group into the rear of an besieging infantry force that looked to be unprotected, and that in pretty much any scenario is an absolute disaster for the besieging force. That's why besieging forces protected their rear, because it was otherwise incredibly vulnerable! Instead, it seems to amount to basically nothing, because actions have no consequences in that series.

3. The Loot Train Battle, GoT. Jaime Lannister is meant to be an excellent commander, so he does the stupidest thing you could do against a cavalry charge (again, not a good or accurate one) and creates what is essentially a single line of troops in defence? Which is incredibly vulnerable to being penetrated? Even if the soldiers kill the first Dothraki to crash their half ton horse through the line (also not really how horses work, but we'll give them this one for the sake of the argument) there's still a gap the following riders can force, and then once they're behind the Lannister line it's game over. This is a supremely bad plan and makes Jaime Lannister look incompetent.

What he should have done is used the wagons as the first line of defence to break up the Dothraki charge and stop all their momentum, and formed his infantry up into squares. The Dothraki would stall at the wagons, probably try and push through but in far fewer numbers at any one time, and then the Lannister soldiers could use their longer reach weapons (pikes or lances, I can't remember and don't want to look it up) to pick them off at a range.

Of course, it wouldn't ultimately matter because of the dragon ex machina, but it would have at least made sense.

Good hair

Being dramatic

Fits of craft-related madness

A love of jewelry

Choosing violence

Impressively good hair, even by elvish standards

The willingness to fight a Vala

Stubbornness

Heroic deaths

Being infuriatingly good at things

Hair that is suspiciously perfect even after crossing the Helcaraxe, hanging from Thangorodrim for thirty years, thousands of years of being a beach hermit, etc.

Unexplained, vaguely mystical powers

Back in the time before, in the time of the Trees and their youth and their blissful innocence, Finrod’s mother had kept a three-legged snow-cat.

Snow-cats, of course, were not domestic animals and further, were not suited to confinement like the peafowl and kingly swans of Finarfin's aviary or even the placid camelids that Lalwen kept in landscaped paddocks behind her estate. But Eärwen had found this one with a paw trapped in the door of a hen coop - it had, of course, been in hot pursuit of Finarfin’s Warble Silkies - and the limb was so mangled and broken the beast had been unable to flee even once freed. And the paw had gone rancid and rotten and so Eärwen had given it poppy milk to drink and then done the amputation with the family’s best feast-day sword and sewn up the wound with golden thread and a silver needle (the house of Finarfin did nothing, not even mending, without flair.)

The cat took long to heal and when it did it was unsuitable to return to the wild, especially as it had grown prone to following around tall elf ladies in hopes they would give it chicken, and so she had consulted Lalwen and built a paddock of her own. The cat, not being a camelid, soon grew restless in the green enclosure and it would pace and yowl and try to chew its own leg or worse, when they came to look at it, on Eärwen’s children. 

So Eärwen consulted with her seamstresses and her sisters-in-law and at least one of Aulë’s artificers and she made woven ladders of hemp and hung vegetable marrows on the ends of string and created a sort of steeplechase of bridges and hammocks and blinds up trees. She also briefly introduced an automaton, commissioned from the very pleased artificer of Aulë, that looked like a sheep, made a noise like a furious duck, and moved like a drunken and very fast crab, but this overexcited the cat and caused it to chew its own whiskers off so she eventually removed it and left only the bridges and the ladders and the root vegetables.

And the cat made happy noises and chased shadows up ladders and lived to be 67 when it died in its sleep of dreaming too hard.

-

“Yes,” said Orodreth. “I remember.” And, “Finrod, I don’t understand why you’re telling me this.”

“You asked me - ”

Orodreth held up the piece of paper Edrahil had brought them, with the list of names and dates and a lot of gleeful punctuation. “I asked you why you were indulging them. Why you continued to let them plot clear insurrection and try to turn our people against us. Why you engage in those ridiculous sessions of doubletalk with the one and let the other bait you and pretend you don’t see he’s doing so. They are playing games with your kingdom, and you are sitting back and letting them do it!”