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P-Mack posted:Is there anything wrong with Turtledove outside of being a terrible writer? I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
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Jan 22, 2015 04:51
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It's a shame Clancy went off the deep end after the Soviet Union fell. His books before then were at least vaguely plausible (Okay, maybe not The Sum of All Fears), but afterwards he kinda went crazy trying to come up with enemies that could even vaguely threaten the US. Japan? Sure, why not. Iran with Eboloa? I mean I guess. Eco-Terrorists with Super-Ebola? 
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Jan 22, 2015 04:51
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P-Mack posted:Is there anything wrong with Turtledove outside of being a terrible writer? Politically? He wrote a book during the Iraq War that, yes it was alternate history, but it pretty clearly said that anti-war people should shut up and let the military do its job of winning. I found that rather disgusting. Because, yes, I read it, like I've read every Turtledove book. Even the obscure ones.
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Jan 22, 2015 04:51
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Hey Hegel, not strictly milhist, but have you seen Borgia: Faith and Fear? One of its central themes is "the Renaissance is terrible, everyone in the Renaissance is terrible", which is similar to one of the central themes of your posts in this thread.
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Jan 22, 2015 05:03
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Xotl posted:I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. Like, insane political views or bizarre sexual fetishes that crop up constantly. Once you start dealing with sci fi/alternate history authors, things frequently get way way worse than just run of the mill bad writing.
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Jan 22, 2015 05:10
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JcDent posted:Speaking of fury, how did the previous assistant driver got killed? The tank doesn't seem to be penetrated, and the way bits are scattered doesn't suggest taht he was sticking his head out. He could have ate some shell shrapnel from a shell bursting in the air. If somebody shot a hole in a tank there's no way it'd just roll back on the line the next day. Previously I'd just been working off wikipedia summaries and short clips of Fury, so I went ahead and watched it. I think it's a shameful waste. The inside-the-tank scenes are not what I expected. There's talk of them being claustrophobic and cramped, but the interior shots are as comfortable as they could possibly be given the setting. There's usually only character in-shot at a time, and if there are others in the background they're deliberately left unfocused. It isolates the characters, which neither captures emphasizes the bonds between them no how they're literally constrained in a box with each other. Compared to something like Das Boot, you barely get the impression that the crew occupies the same vehicle. There are shots in the new Les Mis movie that make me feel more claustrophobic (It's the shots of Anne Hathaway singing with half her face off the screen). The thematic arc of the movie is very muddled and I need to describe the plot to really describe it. We're treated to many shots of Brad Pitt doing horrible things and then walking away to silently vent how frustrated he is about things. The hillbilly loader and Shia Labeouf both express fears over their amorality and how they are bad people because of the war. The end of the movie rolls along, and an American field hospital needs to be defended, but their tank is busted and it would be suicide to stick around for the Germans, right? Of course, they defend it and most of them die. That is the last battle scene of the movie, and it is around 30 minutes long! It's a quarter of the whole movie! There are things to like and dislike about it, but it's effective for the plot that I've described so far. It begins around dusk, but at nightfall the sunlight is quickly replaced by the artificial lights inside the tank and the flames of the burning surroundings. They're all deep red, and there's a cataclysm of violence and death in and around the tank. The descent into hell is almost a cliche, but they really went all-out with it and so it's quite effective. The crew ends up drenched in mud and blood and barely looks human, it's all very demonic and fitting. The last scene is a half-triumphant shot of the battle from above, and the tank is surrounded by at least 50 dead Germans all piled next to each other. I'm not so hot on the idea of redemption through slaughter, but it works. But the old crew spend the whole movie fretting about being becoming killing machines, and in the end just accept that fact and their damnation together. Shia plays a very religious character who's constantly preaching (He's not bad), and there's a great scene early where they ask him if the Germans are going to heaven and he dodges the question. The religious undertones of the movie are too strong to ignore, and ties into the internal morality pretty well. The old crew have long since been damned, just like the Germans, and only the New Guy who gets told flat-out that he's still "a good man" gets to survive the movie. The ending is basically a Christ shot with the tank as Jesus and an intersection as a crucifix, I'd be pissed if it wasn't preceeded by a truly grotesque version of a redemption scene. But I might have read too much into it, especially regarding the ending being a "damnation" ending rather than a "redemption" ending. The movie alternates in its treatment of Germans. Overall, it tends towards treating their murder as a very good thing, despite how the Americans killing them are pretty reprehensible too. If the Americans are supposed to barely be human, look at how grimey and hosed-up all the tankers get, then the Germans are depicted as insects. The SS battalion just circles around the tank and shoots at it with machine guns, and clamber on board one-by-one and get shot. There's a smug SS officer who literally hangs children who gets summarily executed. Again, moral ambiguity isn't really established, so the "descent into hell" aspect of the movie just isn't appropriate. It really isn't the Americans who are the bad guys, and truthfully, it's morally wrong to portray the Germans as just people defending their homeland. The biggest problem with the movie is actually the first half and the awkward romance. The romance could have been dealt with better, but it's there to show the Wardaddy is too far over the precipice, no matter how hard he tries, and that New Guy is still a human being in bad company. Keep it. The first half is like a clip war of snuff videos from Syria, but we know they aren't real so it's silly. The guy burning to death and shooting himself? Silly! The MG nest that gets blown up so hard somebody's torso flies out? Silly! The guy who gets his face crushed by a tank tread? That actually happened in The Interview. These things don't seem to affect anybody on a human level, they just curse and grunt a lot and continue on their lives. New Guy doesn't lose it after the guy burns alive in front of him, but he does have a mental breakdown when the Driver yells at him to shoot some dead bodies. As for historical accuracy, you could maybe question why the US army doesn't seem to have a frontline, and thus forces tanks to patrol on their own in open fields, and charge across them. The final scene is not so bad, the crew set their own tank on fire and put dead bodies on it to make it look as destroyed as possible. They totally a surprise the SS while they're marching in a column, and with 4 machine guns and a tank cannon firing at such close range they really could have caused a lot of destruction. Honestly, I'm surprised they didn't just run away as it got dark. They really, really, hosed up the column in the first 5 minutes, and Brad Pitt was sitting on like 10 smoke grenades.
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Jan 22, 2015 05:11
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HEY GAL posted:Don't confuse that with the one where a fantasy kingdom was Nazis, or the one where aliens fight Nazis, or the one with alternate-history Nazis. What do you think about the one where the American town is time-warped into 30YW Germany and teaches them about democracy and freedom?
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Jan 22, 2015 05:14
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P-Mack posted:Like, insane political views or bizarre sexual fetishes that crop up constantly. Once you start dealing with sci fi/alternate history authors, things frequently get way way worse than just run of the mill bad writing. I'd say he's pretty run of the mill in that regard. The only real controversy he had was with his recent Iraq War-ish analogue on postwar occupied Germany, where there's a Nazi guerilla resistance, and that was honestly pretty tame. He's definitely no S.M. Stirling.
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Jan 22, 2015 05:15
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FAUXTON posted:Turtledove is the cross-eyed adopted sibling to Kojima and Clancy who grew up on a magic mushroom farm. "WHAT IF THE SOUTHERNERS WAS NAZIS?" *writes 5 books on that premise* Which is exactly why I kinda enjoyed his books - they're pretty fun to read actually, as long as you absolutely refuse to take anything seriously.
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Jan 22, 2015 05:19
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E: It became more like a "great men" crossword puzzle, trying to see if I could call any palette swaps before I started getting beat over the head with them.Slim Jim Pickens posted:Shia plays a very religious character who's constantly preaching (He's not bad), and there's a great scene early where they ask him if the Germans are going to heaven and he dodges the question. That's another one of the  parts of the movie where they're talking about how German women would "gently caress for a chocolate bar" and after they get into the religious stuff with Bobble, Wardaddy's like "Y'all think Hitler'd gently caress any of us for a chocolate bar?" in that Aldo Raines voice he reprised for Fury and they initially just giggle and go quiet, then they all start laughing like stoners who had time to envision it.
FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 05:26
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GreyjoyBastard posted:Hey Hegel, not strictly milhist, but have you seen Borgia: Faith and Fear? One of its central themes is "the Renaissance is terrible, everyone in the Renaissance is terrible", which is similar to one of the central themes of your posts in this thread.
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Jan 22, 2015 05:31
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Ultimately, I guess I'm surprised they didn't just have spotter planes circling the movement site and then blast the area with artillery and airstrikes until it looked no longer suspicious. Even if the tank's radio was broken, they should have been keeping an eye on that area regardless.
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Jan 22, 2015 05:31
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:What do you think about the one where the American town is time-warped into 30YW Germany and teaches them about democracy and freedom? Edit: Also that isn't Turtledove. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 05:35
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I think Fury could have been improved in a few ways. Gonna be unamarked spoilers below this line so I don't end up redacting the whole thing. --------------------------------- 1. After the first big battle when Wardaddy makes Norman execute the unarmed prisoner, he keeps the picture of the soldier's family instead of discarding it. When with the German women later on, he suddenly has a moment of realization and pulls out the photo. Whoops, that's part of his family. He's sitting in the apartment of a man that he just forced the new guy to execute in cold blood and being nice to his family. It would explain why he doesn't intervene when his crew starts acting like assholes: he's still internally dealing with his conflict about what he did earlier and contemplating the hell he's going to have put these innocent women through when they found out that he was one of the casualties. It would force Wardaddy to confront his dehumanization of the German military. 2. During the setup for the final epic battle, the film makes it so that everyone sticks with Fury because it's "their home" and they want to defend it. But in reality, no tank crew would have stuck with a tank for as long as they did; Shermans were mass produced and disposable vehicles and no crew would ever expect to stay with one vehicle from North Africa all the way to rolling across the German border. A better opportunity would have been to use the chance to show Wardaddy's flawed character and PTSD further by having him stay with Fury because he's turned the war with Germany into a personal vendetta. He's willing to stay behind and take on a whole battalion by himself because he has a personal desire to kill his way all the way to Berlin after so many of his comrades have been killed. The crew stays with him not because Fury is their "home", but because they can't bear to see the man who's kept them alive with his commanding commit suicide. Basically, my general idea for improving the film would have been to stick with how they started and make the film more about Wardaddy's PTSD and growing brutality and his personal struggle to justify his actions as they get challenged on the road to his inevitable demise. Make it so that a credible argument could be made that the true protagonist of the story was Wardaddy and Norman merely acted as an audience surrogate. Or if you increase how many times Wardaddy commits war(daddy) crimes and brutalizes people who are trying to defend their homeland from invaders, a credible argument that Wardaddy could be seen as an antagonist figure. Really, anything more than just rehashing the same tired tropes. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 05:44
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JcDent posted:I liked Rainbow Six, but maybe not kgb kills the Pope book. Forsythe stretches plausibility in the literary sense (protagonist always thinks of every tiny impossible-to-foresee detail and everything goes perfectly like clockwork) but he isn't gay black hitler unrealistic, I don't think. It helps that most of the plots to his novels are relatively small scale type stuff. He is a little rose tinted when it comes to the flawless moral character of the western characters but, again, that's more of a criticism of his writing style and plot decisions than anything else.
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Jan 22, 2015 06:16
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Good Alternate History Books: The Man in the High Castle Pavane TV: Fatherland Movies:
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Jan 22, 2015 06:29
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chitoryu12 posted:2. During the setup for the final epic battle, the film makes it so that everyone sticks with Fury because it's "their home" and they want to defend it. But in reality, no tank crew would have stuck with a tank for as long as they did; Shermans were mass produced and disposable vehicles and no crew would ever expect to stay with one vehicle from North Africa all the way to rolling across the German border. A better opportunity would have been to use the chance to show Wardaddy's flawed character and PTSD further by having him stay with Fury because he's turned the war with Germany into a personal vendetta. He's willing to stay behind and take on a whole battalion by himself because he has a personal desire to kill his way all the way to Berlin after so many of his comrades have been killed. The crew stays with him not because Fury is their "home", but because they can't bear to see the man who's kept them alive with his commanding commit suicide. Wait, really, it's supposed to be the same tank they've been using since Africa? There weren't any M4A3E8s in Africa or any 76 mm armed Shermans at all.
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Jan 22, 2015 06:37
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Ensign Expendable posted:Wait, really, it's supposed to be the same tank they've been using since Africa? There weren't any M4A3E8s in Africa or any 76 mm armed Shermans at all. That's what my friend and I remember. The reason they trusted Wardaddy and loved Fury so much is because they had all been together since North Africa. My friend John (we've both discussed the film to death) thinks that the script was initially written for the older Sherman models with the short-barreled gun, and some of the anachronisms and their performance against the Tiger make more sense if using the less powerful tank in its place.
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Jan 22, 2015 06:44
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Ensign Expendable posted:Wait, really, it's supposed to be the same tank they've been using since Africa? There weren't any M4A3E8s in Africa or any 76 mm armed Shermans at all. It might have been a deal like Creighton Abram's "Thunderbolt." He kept getting new (and better) Shermans but kept giving them the same name and nose art. Different tanks, but spiritually the same. So "Fury 1" could have been a M4A1, the one they used in North Africa. It got knocked out, worn out, whatever and was replaced. The Easy 8 from the movie is just the last iteration of "Fury." e: on a related note on naming, US tank companies usually named their vehicles after their company's letter. So B Company would have tanks named "Bulldozer" and "Brooklyn." So I guess Fury was part of F Company?
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Jan 22, 2015 06:59
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cheerfullydrab posted:Good Alternate History How are we talking about good AH without mentioning The Yiddish Policemen's Union? The Plot Against America was also a really good book, although I guess speaking strictly in terms of alternate history everything kind of snaps back to actual history in a distracting way towards the end. Oddly, all good AH seems to be from people who aren't known as ~*~*~alternate history authors~*~*~.
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Jan 22, 2015 07:00
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chitoryu12 posted:That's what my friend and I remember. The reason they trusted Wardaddy and loved Fury so much is because they had all been together since North Africa. Might have even started with M3s! Or did those not make an appearance in NA?
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Jan 22, 2015 07:11
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JcDent posted:Might have even started with M3s! Or did those not make an appearance in NA? M3s were used by both American and British forces in North Africa. M3s were present at Kasserine Pass, for example
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Jan 22, 2015 07:16
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cheerfullydrab posted:Good Alternate History Good news! You can also add The Man in the High Castle to the TV category.
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Jan 22, 2015 07:18
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I guess, now that I think about it, that Gladiator could be considered an alternate history movie.
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Jan 22, 2015 07:30
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Bacarruda posted:It might have been a deal like Creighton Abram's "Thunderbolt." He kept getting new (and better) Shermans but kept giving them the same name and nose art. Different tanks, but spiritually the same. Funny you'd mention "B" names.
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Jan 22, 2015 07:38
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wiki article posted:After fighting in the Hochwald Forest in Germany, White led a reconnaissance to the banks of the Rhine River. The Fusiliers improvised amphibious capacity by sealing all openings on the tanks and wrapping them with compressed air hoses to achieve buoyancy. German units on the others side of the Rhine were taken by surprise when the tanks suddenly appeared behind them. 
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Jan 22, 2015 07:45
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It's okay, they apologized for startling them.
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Jan 22, 2015 07:50
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Bacarruda posted:It might have been a deal like Creighton Abram's "Thunderbolt." He kept getting new (and better) Shermans but kept giving them the same name and nose art. Different tanks, but spiritually the same. One of the other tanks was named "Murder Inc." (A Dr. Dre Song), so no, they didn't really think about it. I think the tank is called Fury because it's a synonym for wrath. It sure fits in with the religious part of things. chitoryu12 posted:That's what my friend and I remember. The reason they trusted Wardaddy and loved Fury so much is because they had all been together since North Africa. They pretty clearly have a 76mm gun because of the muzzle brake. The tank is their spiritual home, but it's mostly just Wardaddy that makes it a point of attachment. Alternatively, the tank that is named after one of the seven sins is where they belong because they have been damned by the horrific counter-factual WWII that is depicted by the movie. I'm not being sarcastic here, although I'm not sure if the movie was really made to invite that sort of thought. chitoryu12 posted:Basically, my general idea for improving the film would have been to stick with how they started and make the film more about Wardaddy's PTSD and growing brutality and his personal struggle to justify his actions as they get challenged on the road to his inevitable demise. Make it so that a credible argument could be made that the true protagonist of the story was Wardaddy and Norman merely acted as an audience surrogate. Or if you increase how many times Wardaddy commits war(daddy) crimes and brutalizes people who are trying to defend their homeland from invaders, a credible argument that Wardaddy could be seen as an antagonist figure. I don't think the movie was a cliche as it could have been. I have pretty significant issues about how you're trying to characterise the German soldiers, the 1945 war is much, much, more than just "defending the homeland", and among the last fighters there was a lot of contempt and dismissal of the civilian population, or soldiers who had already surrendered. The children getting hanged, for example, is something that really happened.
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Jan 22, 2015 08:03
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Do-it-yourself DD Shermans, eh? Slim Jim Pickens posted:One of the other tanks was named "Murder Inc." (A Dr. Dre Song), so no, they didn't really think about it. And a 1930s-era criminal organization!
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Jan 22, 2015 08:08
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Bacarruda posted:Do-it-yourself DD Shermans, eh? Hahahaha I was just goofin', but that's actually a pretty clever reference.
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Jan 22, 2015 08:23
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P-Mack posted:Is there anything wrong with Turtledove outside of being a terrible writer? Dunno. I heard somewhere that he is/was a history professor at UCLA specializing in Byzantine history. Has anyone here read his stuff or taken his classes? The time I met him he seemed normal-ish. E: but that conversation didn't include much but 'hey sign this' and 'ok'. Grand Prize Winner fucked around with this message at 09:00 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 08:55
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Dunno. I heard somewhere that he is/was a history professor at UCLA specializing in Byzantine history. Has anyone here read his stuff or taken his classes? The time I met him he seemed normal-ish. It's Byzantine in the sense that it's 16 weeks gaming out Caesar not getting stabbed.
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Jan 22, 2015 09:15
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Azran posted:
A wizard did it. Well actually a stage magician. He ended up in Egypt in WW2 and did all sorts of things to hide and misdirect the Germans. In this case, they converted several 100 tanks to trucks and drove them behind German lines in Operation Crusader. It sort of failed because the Desert Air Force was shooing down any Afrika Corps spotter planes anyway (so no one got the joke), and once they reached their objective, Rommal had no idea there was an armoured division sitting on his supply lines. 7th Armoured Division was blandly ignored for a day, so had to go and start attack the Germans to get a response...which was an inversion of the original plan to get the Germans to attack into ATG's for once.
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Jan 22, 2015 09:21
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Acebuckeye13 posted:It's a shame Clancy went off the deep end after the Soviet Union fell. His books before then were at least vaguely plausible (Okay, maybe not The Sum of All Fears), but afterwards he kinda went crazy trying to come up with enemies that could even vaguely threaten the US. Japan? Sure, why not. Iran with Eboloa? I mean I guess. Eco-Terrorists with Super-Ebola?
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Jan 22, 2015 11:17
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Go red Red October, it's a good yarn. For a decent WWIII fix I'd rather recommend Red Army or Chieftains over Red Storm Rising though.
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Jan 22, 2015 12:22
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FAUXTON posted:Tracers are fairly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhGIFLWadEU FOLLOW MY TRACERS
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Jan 22, 2015 14:32
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and have been for pretty much ever. They started throwing in coloring metals pretty quick because you didn't want to inadvertently guide your fire according to enemy tracers (unless you were firing at the source of those tracers 
) so you have stuff like red and green and purple and orange these days for various uses.
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cheerfullydrab posted:Good Alternate History  
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Jan 22, 2015 15:43
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That's clearly from the movie, though.
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Jan 22, 2015 15:49
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Rincewinds posted:The only Clancy book I have read is The Bear and the Dragon 10 years ago, and it turned me off Clancy as a writer. I enjoy most of the movies that are inspired by him, and I may just had bad luck in what book I started with but I could not take him serious after reading an entire book about how american technology can beat anything and yet China lose badly against old russian tanks converted to fortified positions. It was like reading an american 80s war movie converted to book form. That book was aggressively racist virtually every other page. And somehow assumes the force reorganizations and reforms taken by the PLA never happened despite the same analogous causes happening in universe to justify them. Clancy seems to be that particular brand of Cold War Warrior that has their weird fascination with the Soviet Union as Worthy Opponents but have nothing but sneering contempt for the Chinese. P-Mack posted:Is there anything wrong with Turtledove outside of being a terrible writer? He's not terrible, lets be objective here, he's a flawed writer that until the most recent books his characters essentially serve as walking camera's for his alternate timeline; which to be fair is essentially the reason for reading alternate history in the first place. We had a What If we wanted to read about, and he delivers. The problem is that they lack narrative. There's no development arc, no lessons learned, no internal struggle to overcome, each character ends the book (or dies) the same character as they started except "they saw stuff happen". But that could almost be argued as an interesting literary device in of itself as delivering an experience that's "You watching alternate history happen." The only thing I'd agree with as actually being bad about the writing is how drat repetitive he is for every book that has a sequel for every character. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 16:02 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 15:52
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cheerfullydrab posted:Good Alternate History Danger 5 
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