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Star Wars

2020-12-15T06:56:16Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:F837:86D5:E198:595D: /* Disney Canon */

[[File:Star-Wars-Logo (1).jpg|center|500px|]]

{{Topquote|A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....|Star Wars opening text}}
'''[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D0ZQPqeJkk/ Star Wars]''' is one of, if not ''the'', most influential media franchises of modern times, let alone its effect on science-fiction and fantasy. Indeed, among [[/tg/|nerddom]], it is challenged by only a few others, like [[Star Trek]] and [[The Lord of the Rings]].

The incredibly ardent fandom is spread worldwide and has a strong presence in popular culture. Many of the characters, like Darth Vader and Yoda, are iconic even to the general public. John Williams' score for the original trilogy is one of the best-known film scores of all time, right up there with greats like Jaws, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, Shrek, Harry Potter and the Avengers. The universe has spawned numerous video games, hundreds of novels, multiple TV shows, one of the largest merchandising franchises ever, and, relevant to /tg/, a whole bunch of board, card, and roleplaying games.

It is also the current leading world source of [[Skub]].

==The Basic Concept==
Star Wars was originally a series of epic science-fantasy "space operas" that roughly followed the mythic cycle that's been around since Homer. They're set "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away," [Note: this makes the entire series a fairy tale] where a mysterious life force called (reasonably enough) the Force permeates everything. This, in turn, can be wielded by certain people, giving them pseudo-magical abilities; thank the Emperor ([[Emperor|no, the other one]]) there were no Commissars in that universe. Those who use it for good become mystical, selfless warrior monks called Jedi, whereas those who use it for evil are ruthless, self-serving bastards called Sith. However, the Force must always be in balance, so any time the Sith arise to cause imbalance, the Jedi have to pull together and take them out to restore the natural order.

The so-called Original Trilogy (made up of films IV through VI, released from 1977 to 1983) followed a young man named Luke Skywalker who becomes a Jedi and re-balances the Force. Meanwhile, the Rebel Alliance is fighting to end the oppressive Galactic Empire, which is secretly led by the Sith. Luke and his Rebel companions eventually defeat the evil Emperor Palpatine, but along the way they discover that his lieutenant, Darth Vader, is actually Luke's father. A financial, critical, popular and cultural H-bomb, these movies are basically the filter through which Generation X perceives the world... for better or worse.

The so-called Prequel Trilogy (made up of films I through III, released from 1999 to 2005) explained how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader and how the Galactic Empire was established. This involves a lot of convoluted politicking in the Republic, which is then torn apart in the Clone Wars, where the Republic (with an army of clones led by the Jedi) fights against the Confederacy (with an army of robots led by [[Necrons|General Grievous]] and secretly controlled by the Sith). It was not as well received as the first trilogy, for reasons we'll talk about below.

There's also a so-called Sequel Trilogy (made up of film VII and presumably films VIII and IX), which started in 2015 and picked up the story some three decades after the Emperor's defeat with a new generation of heroes taking on the remains of the evil Empire, which is a group of extremist former Imperials calling themselves the First Order. However, Episode VII aka ''The Force Awakens'', was directed by J.J. Abrams, who's mostly known for the [[skub|skubtastic]] [[Star Trek]] reboot and was widely criticized for ripping off Episode IV (the whole trilogy apes the original trilogy a lot but none as much as VII) and a [[Mary Sue]] protagonist. Meanwhile Episode VIII was written and directed by Rian Johnson who was a young director known for plot twists and genre experimentation on a handful of movies and television episodes that openly said he wanted to "subvert expectations" and make half of viewers dislike his work, then got pissed when half of them disliked his work. The result managed to fracture the Star Wars fanbase over issues of dull rehashing for VII and a whole laundry list of reasons for VIII (ranging from small ones such as it being too different, to major issues like half the movie being filler), as well as those who still enjoyed them and very little common ground between the three groups. Abrams returned for Episode IX which got a mixed reception from both those who liked VIII and those who didn't.
General issue with the sequels is that there was no plan on what to do in each part of the trilogy and they came up with everything as they went along and it really shows. Thus it really feels like the whole trilogy lacks direction, as it was directed by two guys with conflicting visions, yet almost complete freedom to do what they wanted, including [[derp|undoing stuff done in the other guys movie]].

Finally, there are the so-called Anthology movies, standalone one-shots involving characters and plotlines that aren't a part of the main "Saga" films, except they kind of are. The first, Rogue One (2016), is an immediate prequel to Episode IV that follows those Rebel spies who stole the Death Star plans. The second film follows a young Han Solo and pals Chewie and Lando. A third rumored one follows Boba Fett.

There are also four separate TV series. The first one, ''Clone Wars'', was based on traditional animation, whereas the later one, '''''The''' Clone Wars'', was a weird 3D animation. They're both pretty good. There was also a terrible theatrical release that was basically just an advertisement for ''The Clone Wars'', but, since it's quite bad(hint: babysitting Jabba the Hutt's kid), nobody talks about it much. The third series is Disney's ''"Rebels"'' which is set between Episodes III-IV and it takes itself far less seriously than Clone Wars did, and is more of a homage to the original trilogy since not every character in the series is the owner of a lightsaber nor are they constantly talking about grown-up politics, senators and trade embargoes, which played a large role in the prequel trilogy and found their way to The Clone Wars as well. Finally there is Resistance, which only lasted two seasons (for comparison, Clone Wars lasted 7 and Rebels lasted 4) and wasn't particularly well received by the fans, largely due to general lack of interest in the [[fluff]] of the sequel trilogy.

And so, after voicing a Mandalorian character one time in an episode of Clone Wars, Jon Favreau’s ego boner couldn’t contain itself any longer and gave birth to the first live action Star Wars TV series, The Mandalorian - building on the Disney version of Mandalorians as a sort of [[Eldar Corsairs|weedy, neo space Viking]], which seems feeble when compared to the old EU version of Mandalorians, who were more like space [[Orks|Maoris]]. Still, it ended up being pretty good; good enough for Disney to go ahead with another two live action series (because if there is anyone who loves to rub skub into their pores, they are Star Wars fans). The first is a prequel to the Rogue One film, y’know, to build on the backstories of people you never needed to know about in the first place. The second series will focus on Obi Wan Kenobi’s time in exile after the saddling Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru with a kid they never asked for, nor wanted. This is what passes for entertainment in this day and age.

And then there's the whole Expanded Universe, which covers pretty much everything not covered by the films, like the Old Republic (set thousands of years before the prequel trilogy, when there were a hell of a lot more Sith and Jedi around) and the New Republic (set immediately after the original trilogy, explaining what became of all the characters. It could also reach 40k levels of grimdark with races like the [[Dark Eldar|Yuuzhan]] [[Tyranids|Vong]] characters like [[Vampire|Darth Nihilus]] and beings like [[Old Ones|Abeloth]]...and of course Ewoks.

The EU is no longer considered in the main canon of the films and TV series, due to the new sequel trilogy which does not follow EU, the reason for this being, according to Disney, that following EU would restrict their creative freedom. The reaction to this was, well, [[skub|mixed, for lack of a better word, especially considering how a lot of the so-called creative freedom in the sequels consists of aping the Original Trilogy.]] They've since noted that they'll slot ''some'' of it in on a case-by-case basis, but the canon is in a highly fluid state at the moment. EU is now officially called Star Wars Legends, though most fans still refer to it as EU.

==Why is it so popular?==

Star Wars is as accessible as science fiction gets. It doesn't require extensive knowledge of a fictional world (a la ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'' or ''[[Warhammer 40,000]]'') or cultural background (as ''[[Star Trek]]'' sometimes does) to make sense. Those elements are present for those who want them, but they largely stay in the (very rich and vibrant) background. It has well-shot action and good ''enough'' dialogue to make it interesting for both kids and adults (as well as allowing parents who grew up with it to watch it with their children, thereby hooking the next generation of viewers). It has simple, good-vs.-evil themes that resonate with almost anyone, anywhere, at any time. The science fiction elements are generally handled well if you don't obsess over making science fiction realistic and hard (or at least they WERE handled well until Episode VII). It's a prime gateway drug for sci-fi which still holds up to the experienced eye, [[Isaac Asimov]] saw and rather enjoyed the films. All in Fourteen hours of cinema, plus optional sides for those who want it.

There's a ton of merchandise that is, of course, really cool. Also, given it's crossed over into the mainstream, many people feel comfortable being part of the community without feeling judged as "nerds" (as they might with ''Lord of the Rings'', ''D&D'', ''Star Trek'', ''Warhammer'', etc.).

Again, they roughly follow the mythic cycle that's been around since Homer. If you think about it, 6 of the 9 films can be summarized as: hero begins his journey under the tutelage of a wise (more or less) man, they encounter a threat which has captured/enslaved a princess/girl, who was in one way or another connected to an important secret (usually a superweapon but could be the identity of a political figure or the location of someone); the heroes save the princess/girl but someone dies tragically in a battle against the villain while someone else is blowing up a space station or a spaceship afterwards they are happy, they celebrate and mourn the loss of the poor bloke who died.

Additionally, the first film can be summarized as a samurai and a gunslinger team up to save a princess from Nazis in space. That is multiple cinematic genres at once, following the style of the epic myth.

==Setting==
Due to article bloat, [[Star Wars Setting]] is now its own page.

==Movies==
Also due to article bloat, [[Star Wars Movies]] are also their own page.

==Expanded Universe==

It can be said what makes a franchise into a long term lasting thing is when a wealth of extra story and background is created that expands on the original story far beyond what there was. It could be argued Star Wars leads the race in this, as the sheer amount of extra novels, graphic novels and games based on Star Wars can and does overwhelm the ordinary fan.

===The original EU/Star Wars "Legends"===

[[Image: Choices_of_One_PB_art.jpg|right|200px|thumb|Before Cara, before Rey, before Darth Talon or Padme... there was Mara Jade]]
The background has expanded into the distant past before the founding of the current Jedi and Sith orders and into the (not-quite-so) far future looking at the descendants of Luke Skywalker and other popular characters. Uniquely, especially considering [[Warhammer 40K|other]] [[Star Trek|franchises']] track records, the Star Wars Expanded Universe is <strike>remarkably</strike> <strike>sorta</strike> sometimes internally consistent, both with other sources within the universe and with the films themselves, at least in comparison to other comparable settings. Of course, it's got plenty of its own [[C. S. Goto|problem children]] that slipped through, and the [[skub]] mine of it all isn't much shallower than that of 40K. Good portions of it do hold up well, largely due to the efforts of Lucas' company's continuity department leaning on everyone to hold it together. One thing that greatly helps is continuity books and articles aren't afraid to make small retcons to make even the most obscure and shitty sources (like that terrible PS1 fighting game) seem like part of an organized plot. Particularly well-loved parts include characters like Grand Admiral Thrawn (a rare alien officer in the Empire and popular enough that Disney brought him back to the canon from the EU) and Mara Jade (pictured right, a Force-using former agent of Emperor Palpatine who later turned good, became a Jedi Master, married Luke and had a son with him) - interestingly both were created by the same author [[Timothy Zahn]].

Upon their acquisition, Disney said "fuck it" and threw out everything but the films and the Clone Wars cartoons. Some popular old stuff got mentions or appearances (and Thrawn got to be a major character), but the overall quality is even lower than the old EU. What was set up as a major book contains phrases like "The TIE wibbles and wobbles through the air" and random virtue signalling. As though to top the previous, Disney literally published a book with an entire chapter about mass wedding farts (Yes. Really.). The only good stuff is from established EU authors writing stuff far away from era of the Disney films.

The [[rage]] over the EU's scrapping was major among many fans of it, but for all Disney's shortcomings, they were in a tight spot. Towards the end all that continuity and consistency got thrown out the airlock for increasingly dumb and disjointed narratives and garbled plot threads to the point that the Star Wars logo was just about as much a sign of quality as the Nintendo approval stamp on shitty SNES games.

Another problem was that Disney is mostly family-friendly, and some of the Star Wars EU could get really dark. As in Warhammer 40k levels of grimdark. Examples of this are the invasion of the Yuuzhan Vong - forcenull space-Druchii (no no, not Comorrites though they have the pain and body modification fetishes for it, space-'''Druchii''', riding enslaved tyranid bioships) from another galaxy, Mnggal-Mnggal - mindraping gelatin lost on its way to Star Trek, and Abeloth - an ancient (she predates the Jedi and the Sith) yandere Force entity more like something from the Cthulhu Mythos and is so dangerous the Jedi and the Sith '''joined forces''' to fight her. It's difficult to envision how Disney could have kept the EU when even before all that it was struggling to find a market beyond the most [[neckbeards|dedicated fans]].

===The Books===

'''The Good EU'''
[[Image: Heir-to-the-empire-cover.jpg|right|200px|thumb|Heir to the Empire (1991): The book that started it all]]
* '''The Thrawn Trilogy''': The origination point for the EU, and focuses on the conflict with the Imperial remnants left over after RotJ. Named for the main villain, Grand Admiral Thrawn, who went on to become one of Star Wars most well-loved characters. Basically the story "The Force Awakens" wishes it was. Also introduced Mara Jade, a sexy redhead that's everything Disney wishes Rey was and more.
* '''The Han Solo Adventures''': Star's End was the second spinoff book written and the first good one. Hit store shelves before Empire Strikes Back was even in theaters. Han and Chewie are trying to get some work done on the Falcon and get volun-told to bust out some political prisoners to pay for it. The Z-95 Headhunter fighter comes from this one. Would have made for a better film than ''Solo'' did.
* '''Shadows of the Empire''': Shadows is set between ESB and RotJ and fills in the details of getting the Death Star II's plans, finding out where Han was taken, Luke building his own saber, etc by the introduction of another bounty hunter by the name of Dash Rendar. The Special Edition rerelease of ''A New Hope'' added the Outrider to the background of one scene. Most notable for the fact that it was also adapted into a video game for the N64 and PC.
*'''The Darth Bane Trilogy''': The origin of the Rule of Two for the Sith, along with a compelling protagonist and his apprentice.
* '''Revenge of the Sith''': The novelization is actually considered a serious improvement over the movie itself.
* '''Darth Plagueis''': Shows how Palpatine becomes a Sith Lord under his mentor. Less Star Wars than Star Politics, which is a good thing for this praticular story.

'''The Bad EU'''
* '''Jedi Academy Trilogy''': Luke sets up his academy on Yavin IV and tries to teach [[Rage|Kyp Durron]]. Imperial remnant superweapons hit ludicrous territory with the sun crusher. This was the beginning of Kevin J Anderson hammering out a couple dozen Star Wars books over about four years.
* '''Young Jedi Knights Series''': Set between Jedi Academy and New Jedi Order, mostly follows Han & Leia's kids.
* '''I, Jedi''': A retelling of the Jedi Academy Trilogy (see above) with more of Corran Horn from the first set of X-Wing books. Less derp in general but significantly more [[Mary Sue]]age of Horn.
* '''Legacy of the Force''': The survivors of the Yuuzhan Vong War are trying to rebuild the galaxy, but Jacen Solo turns Sith and becomes the main villain. The book series is infamous for nearly killing the Star Wars EU, threatening the franchise and issues between various writers years before Disney went down the same road (Jacen Solo was also a major influence for Kylo Ren). The biggest complaints were Jacen killing Mara, the heroes becoming idiots whenever they could've stopped the villains, poor dialogue, long-winded writing and the story being overstuffed with allusions to post 9/11 United States.

'''The [[Skub]] EU'''
[[Image: Yuuzhan-vong-eu2_bg.jpg|right|200px|thumb|The Yuuzhan Vong, [[Skub|either badass and interesting or grimderp canon-defiling villains]]]]
* '''New Jedi Order''': The longest-running (19 books long) and most divisive story of the EU. Luke's married to Mara and they're rebuilding the Jedi Order while Han and Leia are trying to reconcile the New Republic and Imperial Remnants. Han and Leia are also raising three kids and Mara's got a terminal illness. Then extragalactic aliens called Yuuzhan Vong - [[Imperium of Man|religious fanatics]] with [[Tyranids|organic technology]], a thing for [[Dark Eldar|pain and body modification]] along with [[Culexus|partial immunity to The Force]] - invade to take over the Star Wars Galaxy a'la the Dominion War from Star Trek. Chewie dies Majora's Mask style, Mara's illness is cured and she gives birth to Ben Skywalker, the Vong take over Coruscant, lots is learned about the Force and the bodycount goes so high it could give Warhammer 40k a run for its money (365 TRILLION; only the War in Heaven or the Fall of the Eldar had anywhere near that many deaths in one event). A real love-it-or-hate-it series, some parts were good, some were bad and some were weird.
* '''Dark Empire''': Palpatine's back to save a dying franchise decades before Disney tried it. He even uses clone bodies to do so (but unlike Disney, Dark Horse didn't flip-flop on the lore), wrecks a fleet of enemy ships using the Force and at some point has his power reflected back at him. Starts off good, falls apart fast. Known for its love-it-or-hate-it artstyle and dialogue. Original version of Episode 9.
* '''Courtship of Princess Leia''': Deals with another Imperial remnant, where a Queen who could be potential ally against the Imperials offers a deal which hinges on Leia marrying her prince son. In response, Han sorta-kinda (totally) kidnaps Leia. Luke teams up with the prince in question (who's a bit of a Jedi fanboy but basically a competent officer) to find them. This one introduced the planet Dathomir and the force witches, which were ultimately adapted to be Maul's homeworld.
* '''X-Wing''': A long running series that passed between several authors that followed Wedge and his squad post RotJ. Initially focused on the liberation of Coruscant and was solid if formulaic, but eventually spiraled off into skub territory.
* '''Fate of the Jedi''': Want some Cthulhu with your Star Wars? People are growing dissatisfied with the Jedi Order following LotF. Luke, his son Ben and the remaining Jedi are trying to keep the Jedi Order in check while several Jedi are wracked with a mysterious psychosis. Meanwhile an ancient Sith Tribe emerges from hiding, Han and Leia are looking after the political side of things and struggle with being grandparents. Things take a turn for cosmic horror when a yandere, Force-using eldritch abomination who could doom the galaxy escapes her prison. During the fight against her, Sith apprentice Vestara Khai rises through the ranks and finds herself in a Catwoman/Batman situation with Ben Skywalker. While being an OoM better than the preceding trilogy, FotJ has a very divided opinion among SW fans.

== Disney Canon ==
[[Image:Star_Wars_Disney_Princesses.jpg|right|400px|thumb|Love it or hate it, they are now official ''Disney Princesses''.]]
It's still [[skub|debatable]] whether or not the new Canon holds up to the old EU, or learns to fix the problems that plagued it. We probably won't see what comes of it for decades to come. Disney Canon, as of 2020, seems to largely be built around the nine main movies though there have been growing rumors of a shakeup that may render the Disney triology non-canon due to severe backlash and financial losses. There's also shows like Rebels and Clone Wars alongside anthology movies fleshing out stories that had been told in comics and books back before the Disney buy-up, but can now be seen on film.

A curious thing that has begun happening: Certain elements of the old EU are slipping into the Disney Canon. Plotlines like the Emperor returning, the Death Star plans heist and Han's path to become the smuggler we know him as all have bits and pieces from EU canon in them. In some cases, whole characters are ported in; the best example is Admiral Thrawn, who appears in Rebels. Other times, popular characters has their traits or stories ported into new ones (Finn and Cassian are both expies of Kyle Katarn, for example). This gives some credence to the argument that Lucasfilms and Disney wanted to wipe the slate with all the stories that had been told in the EU, so they could create their own, fully realized canon Star Wars setting that one could make movies - ''many'' movies - from. Considering the amount of shitty fan-fiction-esque stories the EU had, this may be for the best, but of course, storylines that people have loved for ages are also thrown out with the bathwater.

Detractors of Disney-era Star Wars often talk loads about how the sequel trilogy invalidates the original trilogy. Other complaints raised are how Disney screwed over Luke and how many cool characters are either cannibalized for story elements (like Kyle Katarn) or completely removed from canon (like Mara Jade). These are semi-valid arguments of course, but they ignore some of the biggest issues with the EU originally - it wasn't sponsored by George Lucas and Lucasfilms. They were sponsored fan-fiction in a sense, semi-canon from the outset and not really something that could be considered a part of the Star Wars setting, though George Lucas did work with the writers to a point, such as with the New Jedi Order book series (he gave them permission to kill off Chewbacca in the story). In fact, George never really considered them real stories; more like a parallel universe of his own Star Wars works. He accepted it because they bring in the big bucks when people would beg to have the official Star Wars logo on anything they produced.

That, and the sequel trilogy, underwhelming as it may be, was George's idea in broad strokes. The series was always going to have a sequel trilogy, and while the outcome isn't exactly what he (or we) wanted, quite a lot of it is. Luke being an exile on a far-away planet, who has to be roused to fight by a new, female Jedi? George's idea, not Disney's. A son of Han and Leia struggling with the Dark Side? Also George's idea (though Disney lifted a lot form the original version - Jacen Solo - for Kylo Ren). If anything, much of the direction comes from Lucasfilms; Disney just wants the movie to sell well. It's similar with Marvel nowadays.

So for better or worse, the Disney Canon is the first time the wider setting of Star Wars beyond the series and movies have become irrevocably canon, rather than "kinda-sorta-canon". Much of what we've gotten that is new is based roughly on George's own work as well. Remember this when discussing EU vs Disney in Star Wars - Either setting is cool for their own reasons, but the Mouse got little to do with it - and if you don't like it, bring it up with big man Lucas. Whatever the case, CEO Big Iger briefly resigned in 2019... before being brought back in 2020 following severe financial and PR losses for Disney due to comparatively poor reception of the Disney canon, controversial statements from Disney staff against fans and shutdowns related to the global coronavirus pandemic. There have been large rumblings of change in Disney Star Wars, for better or worse.

It should be noted that the TV shows below are either now part of the Disney canon (such as the 2008 Clone Wars series), or made by Disney. There is also a major Star Wars project in the works called Star Wars: The High Republic. It's an upcoming multimedia project spanning books and comics worked on by various writers including Claudia Gray and Cavan Scott ([[Warhammer Adventures|yes, ''that'' Cavan Scott]]). The stated goal is to tell one cohesive story set in the High Republic Era, two centuries prior to Phantom Menace. It was slated for a 2020 release but was pushed back to 2021, purportedly due to the COVID-19 pandemic (purportedly because they could still work on the story from home in this day and age but have chosen to extend the deadline).

December 2020 gave us a major announcement of several new films and TV series, as well as further information about already announced things. These include:

* '''Ahsoka''': Live-action series by Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni (the chads responsible for The Mandalorian, the latter also responsible for The Clone Wars, Rebels and the character of Ahsoka (and Resistance but [[heresy|let's not talk about that]])) featuring the titular fan favorite character who made her live-action debut in The Mandalorian Season 2, starring Rosario Dawson and is a spin-off of The Mandalorian and will have cross-overs with it. Though not officially confirmed, is highly likely to feature the live-action debut of [[tactical genius|Thrawn]], who was name-dropped by Ashoka in The Mandalorian as her quarry. Release date unknown.
* '''Rangers of the New Republic''': Live-action series and another spin-off of The Mandalorian, again by Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni and is said to have cross-overs with The Mandalorian and Ahsoka. Not much is known at the moment but the name tells us at that it would focus on the titular galactic government, something we still don't know much about due to the world-building fuck-up of the sequel trilogy. Release date unknown.
* '''The Bad Batch''': Animated series and a spin-off of The Clone Wars. Focuses on the titular clone commando unit that was introduced in the last season of The Clone Wars, seemingly set during Republics transition into the Empire. [[Awesome|Dee Bradley Baker is back playing all the main characters]]. Release in 2021.
* '''Andor''': Live-action series and a spy-thriller focusing on the titular character who was introduced in Rogue One. Release in 2022.
* '''The Acolyte''': Live-action series set during the High Republic-era, a thus-far unexplored era 100-300 years before the original movie during which the Republic was at it's peak. Release date unknown.
* '''Obi-Wan Kenobi''': Live-action series featuring the return of Ewan McGregor as the titular character set 10 years after Revenge of the Sith. Hayden Christensen is also confirmed to be returning, though how it will work is unknown as Anakin was Vader at this time and thus he would be in his armor and have his voiced dubbed over by someone, likely/hopefully James Earl Jones. Release in 2022 and is confirmed to only run for one season.
* '''A Droid Story''': Animated series featuring R2-D2 and C-3PO and a new character, possibly a droid as well. That is all we know for now but will likely be targeted towards kids, just like the animated series Droids from the 80s. Release date unknown.
* '''Lando''': Live-action series focusing on the titular character. Not much known aside from that at the moment, not even will it feature Billy-Dee Williams or Donald Glover. Release date unknown.
* '''Visions''': [[Anime]] anthology-series made by different anime studios across Japan. Will run for 10 episodes, with each episode likely produced by a different studio. It's unknown which studios are involved but considering their track record, Production IG, Sunrise and Trigger are likely involved. Release date unknown.
* '''Rogue Squadron''': Live-action film, the first one after the sequels. Will feature the titular elite starfighter squadron and is directed by Patty Jenkins, the director of Wonder Woman. Will it focus on the Rogue Squadron from EU led by Wedge Antilles or will it be completely different remains to seen. Release in 2023.
* '''Film by Taika Waititi''': Nothing about it is known at the moment except that it is happening, it is live-action and will be directed by Taika Waititi of Thor: Ragnarök-fame who also played IG-11 in The Mandalorian and directed the last episode of the first season. Release likely in either 2024 or 2025.

==Wookieepedia==
One of the largest fan wikis ever created, this bad boy is extensively cited, has enormous variety, and has page upon page of talk. It was if Lexicanum, the 40k fan wiki, and our own glorious site were fused into a terrible beast.

==Impact on 1d4chan and associated games etc==

Star Wars has had subtle and clear impacts on a number of other franchises and genres and it can be ''incredibly'' hard to gauge the extent of it all. Certainly it didn't create the concepts of sci-fi, space battles, sweeping storylines, and a blending of mystical and scientific ideas, but it certainly popularized them during the years of the original trilogy and influenced many people that would go on to have interests in sci-fi, fantasy and epic adventure today.

Hell, look me in the eye and tell me that the lightsaber didn't give us the [[power weapon]]. But then again, magic weapons.
==Sabacc and Pazaak==
A rather unusual entry here but it's well in line, Sabacc is an actual tabletop card game from the Star Wars universe which is basically a hybrid of Poker and Blackjack. A Sabacc Deck has 76 cards, most of which in four suits of 16 cards numbered one to 16, plus sixteen wildcards in two sets with values that were either negative or (in the case of the Idiot) Zero. The goal of the game is to have a set of three cards who's total as close as possible to, but not over, 23 or -23. If you got 23/-23 (Pure Sabacc) which could only be beaten by an Idiot's Array (the Idiot, a Two and a Three, thus 23). In case of a draw, new cards are drawn. The stakes are raised every cycle until the cards go down or one player is left standing who gets the pot.

The notable thing about Sabacc that sets it apart from real world card games is that the Cards can change value every turn. A Pure Sabacc can easily become an instant lose 25 and an absolutely lousy hand can become an Idiot's Array. They can be stabilized to fix their value, but everyone knows when you do so. This feature has so far prevented Sabacc from being released in tabletop form as of yet. ''(Of course, there are ways to deal with this, such as simply re-dealing unfixed cards, but never let it be said that nerds will choose practicality over purity.)''

In universe, Han Solo won the Millenium Falcon off Lando in a game of Sabacc.

Pazaak is an older game from an in-universe perspective, similar to Blackjack but its player versus player rather than player versus dealer and also has some aspects of a collectible card game. Goal of the game is to raise cards from the main deck until their total value is 20 or they can also choose to stand if they get close but don't want to risk it. Best out of five wins.

CCG-aspect of Pazaak comes from the sidedeck: both players collect ten cards for their side deck and then randomly take four cards from their side deck to their hand in the beginning of the game. Hand cards are used to either lower or raise the total value: so if the player raises cards from the main deck to the total value of 25, they can prevent dropping out if they have a -5 card or higher in their hand.
Cards which only either raise or lower the value are the most common of the side cards.
More rarer are cards which can be used to both raise and lower the value.
Then there are flip cards, which change certain main deck cards on the table to negative ones. So if the player plays a 2&4 flip card, all 2:s and 4:s on the table become -2:s and -4:s. Flip cards exist in 2&4:s and 3&6:s.
Then there is the double card, which doubles the value of the last played card. So if the player raises a 5 from the main deck, playing the double card would turn it into a 10.
Finally, the rarest side deck card is the tiebreaker, which grants the player a win if the game would otherwise end in a tie.

==Tabletop games for Star Wars==

=== Role-playing Games ===

[[West End Games]] made a Star Wars [[role-playing game]] called [[Star Wars RPG|Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game]] AKA '''Star Wars D6'''. Like many West End products, it's a good game with the great misfortune of being published by West End Games.

[[Wizards of the Coast]] picked up the license later and made two distinct RPGs based on their [[d20 System]], called [[Star Wars D20]] (imaginatively). Could be fun, but generally broken as hell, much like [[Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition|its parent game]]. It was then utterly revised that into what they called the '''Saga Edition''', which is relatively balanced and pretty good.

[[Fantasy Flight Games]] is presently selling [[Star Wars Roleplaying Game|a whole line of Star Wars-themed RPGs]], each one focusing on a specific style of play. You want to play a bunch of scruffy space outlaws (Edge of the Empire), members of the nascent Rebellion (Age of Rebellion), or exiled Jedi Knights (Force and Destiny), then they got you covered. Unlike their [[Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay]] games, which are all ''juuuuust'' different enough from one another to completely buttfuck any attempts at blending, all three gamelines use identical mechanics and are fully cross-compatible. Uses symbol-counting [[dice pool]]s with ludicrously overpriced custom dice.
Like the other RPGs they decided with the retardedly similar name, and thus this one is sometimes called '''Star Wars FFG''' to avoid confusion.

FFG have kept milking the franchise and in summer 2017, decided to [[Necromancer | reanimate]] the [[Star Wars RPG|Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game]] with a "30th Year Anniversary Edition" print of the original game. It '''''finally''''' shipped in July 2018 after spending a year in limbo.

=== Card Games ===

The big [[card game]] set in the Star Wars universe is the [[Star Wars Customizable Card Game]]. It's no longer produced by Decipher, but there is still a sufficiently large player community to organize annual tournaments, rule on cards, and so on. SWCCG was radically different from the norm of card games, being divided into light and dark side cards with different backings, with light and dark always playing against each other. For tournament play a player would need both a light and dark deck. The gameplay was also radically different from most CCGs; in Magic terms the closest analog would be that every SWCCG deck was fundamentally a mill deck, with some hard to assemble insta-win combos themed to the plots of the movies.

[[Wizards of the Coast]] made the [[Star Wars Trading Card Game]]. It is now dead.

[[Fantasy Flight Games]] made [[Star Wars: Destiny CCG]]. It is also now dead.

Obviously, nobody is capable of creating a Star Wars card game with an interesting name.

Aside from the real, physical, games there was also ''Star Wars Galaxies Trading Card Game''. It was a real, functioning, card game within the MMO that used all virtual cards. Unfortunately no server emulators have implemented it yet.

=== Miniature Games ===

The first Star Wars miniatures game was ''Star Wars Miniature Battles'' released by West End Games in 1989. It and the minis were readily available through the early half of the 1990's, although the line was never particularly diverse. Even accounting for vehicles the whole line was only a couple dozen products and you could get all the rebel heroes in a single box if you just wanted them for the RPG, plus a another box for Vader and a mix of imperials.

Concurrent to this, Galoob managed to get their hands on Star Wars for their Micro Machines toy line, and released an '''enormous''' line of minis which conformed to no consistent scale but were at least cheap, durable, and prepainted. Homebrew adaptations of other systems to use them were a thing in the 90's but vanished as they became scarce.

[[Wizards of the Coast]] did a tabletop battles game imaginatively called Star Wars: Miniatures, based on an extremely dumbed down version of the D&D ruleset. The figures were meant to tie in with the Saga edition RPG, it wasn't terrible on its own, just impossible to collect for competitive play since figures came in random booster packs so you never know what you were getting for what faction. Who could possibly stand for that?

[[Fantasy Flight Games]] is producing the [[X-Wing]] miniatures game based on individual starfighter combat (because, let's be honest, that's what ''Star'' Wars is all about). They have also released [[Star Wars: Armada]] which is a larger scale "fleet" combat simulator, using capital ships and squadrons of starfighters.

'''Star Wars: Imperial Assault'''

The latest [[Fantasy Flight Games]] addition to its Star Wars related games is a mix between a miniature board game and a skirmish wargame. It has two play modes:

One for campaign play where 1-4 players control a team of Rebel heroes and another player has the role of the DM, who controls the Imperial forces. The campaign, as the name suggests, focuses on character personalization, xp gain and the like, which you can find in any light RPG-esque (board)game. The main goal is to get a few friends together and casually play through the missions. Think of it as a Star Wars version of the original [[Hero Quest]].

The other play mode is skirmish play, where two players each get to assemble a team of miniatures plus a command deck (cards that have specific effects when played) and play against each other in an open-play scenario. The play area is still very limited to a few game tiles (as in a campaign mission) but players are free to bring whatever they want (with a few limitations of course). The skirmish part of Imperial assault is as close as you can get to an actual Star Wars skirmish wargame, but it is a missed opportunity from Fantasy Flight to create a true skirmish wargame (ala [[Infinity (wargame)|Infinity]]), not based on tiles and so confined spaces. Who knows what they have plans for though...

'''Star Wars Legion'''

And Fantasy Flight have now given us a fully fledged wargame, complete with AT-ST in the first wave. (They're 32mm scale, which means [[Games Workshop|no reusing your Imperial Assault miniatures]].) Legion has an integrated turn system, and the usual FF custom dice and forest worth of dead trees in cards and tokens that will be familiar to X-Wing and Armada players. The miniatures are PVC, reasonably detailed, easy to assemble pieces. A standard battle is 800 points, which could be anywhere from half a dozen to 16 units on the field, with an average army fielding 8-12 units comprising 30-ish models.

=== Board Games ===

The most famous and arguably best one is [[Star Wars: Rebellion]], an asymmetric two-player game that plays through the Original Trilogy in a wargame/worker placement-esque game. The Empire player must expand their already huge military base over the galaxy to build more ships and huge superweapons while searching for the Rebel Base, while the Rebels do their best to bite them in their heel, obscuring their movements and annoying the Empire until they have enough support to overthrow the Empire. As a [[Fantasy Flight Games|FFG]] boardgame, it's filled with a ludicrous amount of bits and pieces (including sweet models of Star Destroyers, Death Stars and Calamari Cruisers), as well as the trademark filled-with-small-exceptions ruleset. It's pretty sweet and still considered one of the best board games of its kind.

=== Card Miniature Games ===

In the late 00's, WizKids produced a short lived construct-able miniatures Star Wars game based on their styrene card system for Pirates of the Spanish Main. Although the game sold well, when NECA bought WizKids from Topps the rights did not transfer and it went out of print.

==Video Games for Star Wars==

To put it bluntly, every game which could possibly have ''Star Wars'' slapped onto it, exists. Flight simulators. Racers. Rail shooters. Doom clones. MMOs. Age of Empires reskins. Hell, there's even a Kinect variety game. Here's a few standouts...

* '''Knights of the Old Republic''': A pair of single player RPGs depicting a Sith war several thousand years before ''A New Hope''. KotOR is widely regarded as the best Star Wars video game ever, and was the framework for BioWare's ''Mass Effect'' series. Of all the Legends stuff, KotOR appears to still be in good standing with Disney since they continue to borrow from it. The sequel by Obsidian was the original skubtastic take on the franchise TLJ wanted to be but failed miserably. Got an MMO simply called "Old Republic" (since you can play as things other than Jedi and Sith) that is the sequel, which had a very rough start but stabilized enough to still survive to this day somehow). Possibly still canon in the Disney continuity since a lot of things get borrowed or referenced from it. Also the only thing in the EU to still receive new content. Fans often treat these games as canon even if they are technically not, due to being set so long before the films that there aren't many contradictions between canon and legends.

* '''Jedi Knight:''' A series that started of as an early FPS named Dark Forces (so early that it was the time when FPS games were still known as [[Doom]]-clones) but Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight had the protagonist become a Jedi. The Dark Forces name was dropped in favor of Jedi Knight after this. The series combines surprisingly deep lightsaber combat with standard shooting, though the levels can get very mazy at times. Introduced Kyle Katarn, one of the most popular characters from EU. Unfortunately, there has not been a new game since 2003's ''Jedi Academy'' and likely will never be thanks to Disney.

* '''Republic Commando''': An FPS that has the player command a squad of commandos. Its a great shooter but unfortunately, it never received a sequel and to make things worse, ended on a cliffhanger. The second act of the game, set entirely on a drifting Acclamator-class assault ship is particularly memorable and highly atmospheric. If one can look past outdated graphics, its worth trying out for anyone who wants a good FPS experience.

* '''Empire at War''': Made by the original developers of [[Command and Conquer]], it is the most notable strategy game to have come out of Star Wars. Notable for featuring three different modes of play: ground battles, space battles and galactic conquest map. Though ground battles are a bit meh, the space battles are great and the galactic conquest is certainly more interesting than only playing random skirmish matches. Even though its over 10 years old, it has a very active modding community. Republic at War, which changes the games Galactic Civil War setting to Clone Wars and Thrawns Revenge, set much further into the Galactic Civil War than portrayed in the films, are particularly great. There is also a remake mod in the works, aiming to bring the game up to modern standards in terms of visuals, sound and UI and the results do look good. Unfortunately, no great 40k mod.

* '''Star Wars Galaxies''': An early MMO, launched after ''Everquest'' but before ''WoW''. Galaxies is noteworthy for making force powers a prestige achievement requiring enormous in-game effort to unlock. The first expansion pack added a subgame that's a pretty solid flight game in its own right and the game eventually added an original, fully playable, trading card game that sadly has not yet been implemented in any simulator. Then ''World of Warcraft'' hit, Sony panicked and made Jedi a starting class and replaced the skill system with massive level grind, and offered refunds to the raging army of neckbeards. Subscription numbers tanked and never recovered. It would effectively be replaced by ''The Old Republic'', an MMO using the acclaimed KotOR setting. Like most "dead" MMOs that people loved it still lives on through illegal private servers (don't worry, the guys providing it would get busted, not people playing on it).

* '''X-Wing (and TIE Fighter)''': A series of ''Wing Commander'' clones released in the 90's. While badly dated today, they were the best fighter sims of their time, and if you can get past the highly primitive graphics some people still consider them to be the best to this day. Why? The mission scripting and AI are top notch for the genre and absolutely brutal to fight against; on all but the simplest missions you're almost guaranteed to fail the first time and eventually develop a sixth sense about the fighters threatening your objective vs the fighters just there to kill you (ignore those, learn to be hard to hit). Interestingly, TIE Fighter is largely seen as the best of the series while the N64 era Rogue Squadron and Shadows Of The Empire games are seen as being far more visually modern but largely inferior sequels. Did we mention you had to use a flight stick controller basically made for these games to really do well at these?

* '''Star Wars Battlefront II (2005)''': Not to be confused with the one released by EA in 2017. Solid game from the new-defunct Pandemic studio (fuck you, EA) in 2005 told from the perspective of a clone trooper that survived all the way up to the battle of Hoth, with a very down to earth boots on the ground approach. Also, just being thrown into random matches as a soldier because fun. Despite some issues, it remains the high point of the Battlefront series as well as the entire PS2 era, and on PC still has fans via an active modding community to this day. There is of course also the original one but the second one pretty much completely overshadowed it.

* '''Star Wars Battlefront II (2017)''': The one by EA. You've probably heard everything important. An absolute mess at launch due to its lootbox-heavy progression system, so much so that it started discussion even on government level about lootboxes that continues to this day. A comment by EA that became the most downvoted comment in Reddit history. Yet despite all this, two years later, the game is arguably one of the best Star Wars experiences one can have and an Anakin-level redemption story. Like the previous Battlefront II, it completely overshadowed its predecessor.

* '''Jedi: Fallen Order''': It took them years but finally, EA managed to deliver a Star Wars game that is great on launch without cramming it with e-transactions. Its plot focuses on an unfortunate Jedi renegade between ''Revenge'' and ''A New Hope'' who's on the hunt for a hidden database that might document all the Force-sensitive individuals in the galaxy. A game inspired primarily by games such as Dark Souls and Uncharted, its a great action-adventure game in its own right and a must-play for any Star Wars fan. Also notable for making Darth Vader '''''really FUCKING SCARY'''''. As he should be.

* '''Monopoly Star Wars''': Its Star Wars Monopoly. With 90's FMV that plays for every square you land on. On floppy disks. Considered fucking amazing at the time, its too strange and tabletop to not mention. Also one of the last pre-Prequel things released.

* '''Super Star Wars''': A heavily modified retelling of the original trilogy (what, you don't remember how Luke chased down the Sandcrawler and murdered all the Jawas as well as their giant rat god in order to rescue R2-D2?) that was one of the ways to say "hard as fuck" by namedropping a game prior to Dark Souls existing. Amusing for the insanity of the added content in order to make a platformer sidescrolling beat'em'up as well as how neckbeardy you have to be to punish yourself trying to beat it without cheating. Sequels were made for Empire and Jedi, which slightly dialed back the difficulty.

* '''Star Wars: Yoda Stories''': A game geared for kids, released the same year as Monopoly above. Players play as Luke sometime after Empire Strikes Back, although an odd alternate version where Han sometimes is free from carbonite and Boba Fett and sometimes is not. They are assigned a quest by Yoda which requires them to traverse one or more procedurally generated planets doing whatever odd crap Yoda felt was necessary, including sometimes fighting Vader. Recieved middling scores as a PC release, with some individuals HATING the game and using it as a benchmark for how much they hate something when comparing the two, although to be fair that is because distributors tried to sell it like a full game when in reality its supposed to just be freebie software that came with other purchases and was meant to go with Solitaire and space pinball as default games on a computer to waste time with. It has lapsed into obscurity thanks to even those reviewers largely being forgotten on the modern internet. Noteworthy for being played on a grid with simultaneous turn-based movement with all enemies and NPCs on a screen, feeling very much like a desktop game at times, since it uses the Win32 API (like Minesweeper and Solitare) and was almost certainly written in visual basic. A simple puzzle game, where getting blocked in a corner without enough space to pass the time by an idiot NPC is more dangerous than any foe.

*'''Shadows of the Empire''': Made on the Nintendo 64 and Windows PC, you play as Dash Rendar, a scoundrel in a ship like Han Solo working for the Rebellion. Takes place during Episode V as a side story. Despite being much beloved by fans for years and years, it has sadly not aged well at all thanks to the rather peculiar control scheme of the N64 and the graphics having aged like cheap cheese in the sun. Main enemy of the game is a xeno named Xisor who is just a real uppity crime boss (and apparently a prince). The game has an absolute great opening (at least for it's time) where you're flying in a Snowspeeder on Hoth killing Imperials left and right while trying to use the cables to crash the AT-ATs like in the movie. After that the game begins to kinda just carry on with awkward controls.

==Assorted list of Awesome From Star Wars==
* X-Wing starfighters = spaceborne sex
* Fucking ''[[Lightsaber|Lightsabers!]]''
* The fucking [[Approved music|OST]]
* What is likely the greatest duel in cinematic history, that takes place on a [[Death World|lava planet.]]
* Deathly Stormtroopers, heroic Clonetroopers or sinister First Order troopers; whatever they're called, stormtroopers are awesome! Contrary to popular belief, shot counts have proven they have ridiculously good aim.
* Darth Vader whenever he gets a speaking line or to murder rebel scum - that is to say, all the time.
* Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace, TCW and Rebels.
* Lightsaber Rifles
* The entirety of the Umbara campaign, where <s>Imperial Guardsmen</s> Clone Troopers die in the dozens attempting to win some godforsaken planet, earning them balls of titanium that make the guard look ba- {{BLAM| '''*BLAM*''' Heresy!}}
* 97% of the Creatures.
* 98% of the Starfighter designs.
* Costumes that mix about every possible inspiration, Chinese, Mongolian, Japanese, Ancient Greece and Rome, Elizabethan, Moebius or Pulp Sci-Fi from the 60's, giving the whole series a distinctive style and gives Padme Amidala an excuse to show off with all her dresses.
* Boba and Jango Fett and the rest of the Mandalorians.
* KOTOR (both games) plot making you think this shit is actually logical and has so much philosophical background. One of the creepiest depictions of the Universe. Everything is brutal, with big vibrating knives, blood, those machines for Sith snuff movies, more blood, bastards, badass bastards and so on. Everything while somebody is talking with you about existence.
* Our saviour Lord Revan. He's like if [[Horus|fucking Horus]] just became [[Big Bad Evil Guy|fucking bad]] (but not that [[Erebus|bad]]) to fucking destroy the [[Chaos Gods|Dark Gods]] so he can solve his daddy issues.
**but he's more virile, deadly, powerful, charismatic and cool.
* Double-bladed Lightsabers.
* Lando Calrissian.
* [https://youtu.be/YJEUAe-dcGo Obi-Wan Kenobi.]
* The High Ground.
* TIE fighters. They have the most distinctive scream of any fighter in cinematic history that just yells "I'm evil!". Tell me I'm wrong. I'll wait.
** The fact that they managed to do that using what is essentially a shitty visual pun.
* Most of Episode 3.
* The entirety of Anakin's story, especially when you add the Clone Wars and prequels. While you're at it, watch CinemaWins' perspective on it the series.
* Admiral Ackbar the Memeable!
* Palpatine getting into some Tzeentchian-level scheming and backstabbing in order to overthrow the Jedi and the Republic.
* Battle of Yavin.
* Battle of Hoth.
* Battle of Endor.
* Grand Admiral Thrawn: So awesome that he rose to a high rank in the anthropocentric Empire despite being an alien and was one of the first (and rare few) things to be imported straight from Legends to Disney.
* Imperial Pilots get a mention, seeing as they fly literal garbage fighters against superior rebel fighters. Yes, we are talking about the the same TIE Fighters we mentioned before. By garbage, we mean despite how cool looking and sounding TIE Fighters are, they are actually a ridiculously impractical design and the standard TIE Fighters are mass produced extremely cheaply even if they don't look like it. Even 40k's Imperium has better fighter designs. At least the Imperium's fighters conserve the life of the fucking pilot. Also, clearly super skilled since they have roughly an equal kill-death ratio with the Rebels in the movie battles.
* [https://youtu.be/T9j7kLG7VK8 Obi-Wan Kenobi. Again.]
* The Millennium Falcon has a 3D chess board, secret compartments for smuggling space cocaine and a walk in closet specifically for capes.
* Princess, later Senator Leia Organa; the original badass-yet-hot boss lady in space. Ends up leading two separate, successful underground freedom movements against impossible odds. Did we mention she's a Jedi in both canons?
*The trench run.
* Han Solo, who is so badass that hot Leia falls in love. He has the smuggler's best friend, a Wookie, who is also the worst opponent you can face in a [[Chess|Dejarik match]].
* Just... Star Destroyers. When you see a huge, imposing warship from an evil Empire, this is the granddaddy they all look up to.
* The moon sized space stations that zap other planets to bits? They’re pretty neat.
* Werner Herzog, asking if he can look at your baby and assuring you that he will be quiet.
* Oh, did we mention the lightsabers?

== See Also: ==

* ''[http://www.darthsanddroids.net/ Darths & Droids]'': A webcomic, made using photo-stills of the ''Star Wars'' movies to tell a story about gamers blundering through each of the six movies in sequence... though not quite exactly how you might expect. Think ''DM of the Rings'' in overall visual style, though unlike ''DM of the Rings'', ''Darths & Droids'' features several heavy twists on the actual events of the films, subplots about the players and their lives outside the game alongside the campaign, and a better overall quality of gamer. Whereas ''DM of the Rings'' features a railroading DM and players who are therefore somewhat antagonistic to him, ''Darths & Droids'' has a GM who adjusts his game to his players' actions and players who generally get along with both him and each other. The plot of ''DMotR'' is very similar to that of the movies (but avoids a few plot elements), but the plot (and, indeed, the universe) of ''Darths & Droids'' is only very loosely based on the ''Star Wars'' films. (For a somewhat spoilery example: "Darth" is a courtesy title for retired Jedi, such as Chancellor Palpatine.)

* "[http://www.theforce.net/swtc/holocaust.html/ Endor Holocaust]": An excellent example of the [[skub]] Star Wars can create. Rebuttal: " [http://www.darthsanddroids.net/fanart/endortruth20040810.pdf Endor Rebuttal]"

* [[Timothy Zahn]]

{{Star Wars}}

[[Category: Television]]

[[Category: Star Wars]]

Renaissance

2020-12-15T04:22:56Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:F837:86D5:E198:595D:

[[File:Pike and Shot.jpg|400px|thumb|left|Men in breastplates with swords, spears and muskets. [[Warhammer Fantasy Battle|Hey that sounds kinda familiar...]] ]]
The '''Renaissance''' is a period of time and history which had it's origins in the 1300s in Italy and would gradually spread across Christendom and beyond. The word roughly means "rebirth" in English, more specifically it refers to the revitalization of Civilization after the Medieval Period. Various Italian City States gradually grew in wealth and prominence through maritime trade as well as connections with Byzantium and the Middle East and banking. The merchant princes of Italy would invest that wealth to make more money, but also into grand architecture, the arts, literature, engineering and academics ranging from studies of the [[Classical Period]] to natural philosophy. Things which were seen as noble pursuits in their own right but they were also as signs of wealth and prestige and ways of currying favor with other influential figures ("The Cardinal would be glad to back your bid after your magnificent assistance on the new Cathedral"). Eventually, ideas from Italy would begin to spread out and took root elsewhere in Europe. Cities once again began to grow across Europe.

This was fine and dandy in of itself, but in coincided with other big changes. Kings began to consolidate power for themselves with a mind of keeping the squabbling vassals in line. [[Gun]]s were making an increasing impact on the battlefield. In Spain, the Spanish managed to drive the Muslims out of Iberia in the Reconquista and emerged as a new powerful European state. Not too long after that thanks to improvements in ship design and navigation methods Vaso de Gama sailed around Africa to India and latter an Italian guy named Columbus set out sailing west across the Atlantic to prove <s>to the ignorant masses that world was round</s> that you could get to India by circumnavigation without starving to death first and ended up finding the Caribbean, thus beginning the colonization of the New World began by the Spanish and Portuguese at first, followed by the French, Dutch and English latter. Add to that some religious upheaval which shook the foundations of Christendom in the form of the likes of Hussites and eventually the start of the Protestant Reformation and you got a turbulent period of upheaval, to say the least, ultimately culminating in the Thirty Years War, which was the first time people not directly victimized started realizing that maybe this war thing isn't all that good (it took a thorough ass fucking of the continent and the lesson didn't stick).

The broad strokes of the Renaissance wars were that the Protestants and Catholics hated each other, each side bringing in more and more forces until the entire continent was ablaze. This is also the period where modern day political thought was put in shape with Machiavelli's magnum opus "The Prince", bringing concepts such as pragmatism and balance of power on forefront. An ostensibly religious war would lead to hilarious abominations like Catholic France (de-facto ran by the cardinal at the time, no less) allying with Protestant Swedes (That Exterminatused large portions of Germany) against Catholic Habsburgs as alliances shifted.

Physically and politically at the center of all this, the Holy Roman Empire was a shitstorm for most of this era and had mostly themselves to blame. They kept trying to rule the French but the French had their one really competent king who [[Emprah|refused to die]]. Meanwhile the Pope was having problems with the English, who also had their one really competent king who didn't like the Pope telling him he couldn't have a divorce. The Spanish colonized everything, found a literal mountain made of silver and built the biggest overseas Empire ever seen only to lose it all to dynastic struggle and inflation. The Venetians were making shit tons of money dominating the Mediterranean, the Swiss were killing people for money, and the Italians were killing each other over who was the more Catholic. '''And with few exceptions, almost every one of them be at one point fighting against, and at another point allied with, every other one.''' It was that crazy.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, we've got the final death of Eastern Rome and the meteoric rise of the Ottoman Empire. Undoubtedly the most iconic empire of the period, which established the first modern professional armies with it's elite Janissary corps and thoroughly butt-fucked the Balkans for centuries to come. For a time they were the terror of Europe, a bushy-bearded, turban-wearing Muslim foe against whom Christendom would need to unite in order to survive, while on the high seas, their allies on the Barbary Coast terrorized coastal towns from Italy to Iceland. In that era, their only true rivals were the pesky Habsburgs of the Holy Roman Empire. A major feather in the Ottoman Empire's cap was invading, besieging and taking over the city of Constantinople from the Roman Empire, which was later renamed Istanbul. The Sultans of Turkey ruled luxuriously from the grand palace in Istanbul, surrounded by their [[Slaanesh|massive harems of concubines]] and armies of viziers. However, by the tail end of this period, the Ottomans era of rapid expansion would come to an end as the Ottoman state transitioned into a more sedentary imperial polity.

== Sengoku Jidai ==
In the east, the Renaissance contains the part of [[Japan]]ese history most people care about. the part where they cut each other to pieces with swords (as opposed to the other parts where they cut each other to pieces with older swords and rifles, and the part where they cut others with swords and guns). The late Sengoku was heavily influenced by borrowed European technological advancement. In particular, Oda Nobunaga would turn the gun into the main weapon of the solider, developing tactics that would be used till the invention of the metallic cartridge.

== Protestantism ==
The Christian denomination of Protestantism also emerged during this time. Depending who you ask, Martin Luther was either an [[this guy|enlightened reformer]] or whiny [[rules lawyer]]. He started out as a catholic monk but got fed up with the degree of brazen corruption the Pope was endorsing and the clergy's deviation from the tenets of Christianity. Luthor wasn't the first Catholic to call out the corruption, but he was the most noticeable and proactive. So after nailing a list with 95 criticisms to a cathedral door, Luther decided to start his own practice of Christianity... without blackjack or hookers. This went about as well as you'd expect (he was declared a heretic and hunted as a renegade), but what the Pope and Hapsburgs hadn't counted on was how incredibly unpopular they'd made themselves over the years. You may have heard of the Borgia family and how they got away with some pretty brazen acts while they controlled the papacy, including bribery, incest, and murder; the truth is, the papacy had been in severe trouble for many centuries, including a period when there were three people claimed to be pope at the same time. Lutheranism and its more radical strains like Calvinism ripped through the Dutch, German, and Austrian parts of the Holy Roman Empire, making it essentially ungovernable as a single whole - not that the Holy Roman Empire was ever whole to begin with, even before Spain came into the picture.

This might have been crushed had it not been for one nation. England was ruled by Henry VIII, who was a devout Catholic but [[That guy|wanted his marriage annulled]] (his only living children were daughters and his wife was too old to produce more children) and there was a major roadblock to getting it: he'd gotten the Pope's personal dispensation to marry his sister-in-law after his brother had died and asking for a reversal meant sending a message to the Pope, who was at the time a prisoner of the Holy Roman Emperor, his wife's nephew. It wasn't looking like a good idea to send a "Hey, your uncle wants to divorce your aunt because they have no sons, pass this on to your prisoner" message, so Henry got the Archbishop of Canterbury to step in and give him the annulment, which meant breaking with the Roman Catholic Church and forming his own religion. The average English noble and peasant alike were remarkably on-board with this, as the whole "England vs the continent" mentality was already firmly entrenched from about four centuries of previous wars. However, many protestants felt the church of England was still too much like Catholicism; these Puritans (and the much less violent Quakers) would cause problems for the crown later on. But either way, with England the continental protestants received a potent ally in opposition to Catholicism as the English sided with the Dutch against the Holy Romans, except when they sided with the Holy Romans against the French.

Things came to a head with the Thirty Years War, the first major conflict between the nations of Europe following the widespread adoption of gunpowder. It began with German princes holding more power than the Holy Roman Emperor and Bohemian (Bohemia now being called the Czech Republic) Protestants not wanting to be ruled by an-anti Protestant Emperor and revolted when the incumbent Ferdinand II destroyed a Protestant church and his officials started killing Protestant protestors. While nominally the war was over Protestantism vs Catholicism, politicking played an important role in the ever-shifting alliances of the nations involved. For example, despite being devoutly Catholic themselves, France was more concerned with keeping the Hapsburgs at bay, and supplied aid to the Protestants in the North (while harshly suppressing their own Protestants as a threat to the French Crown). Eventually, the Catholics gave up on retaking their lost territories and agreed to the Peace of Westphalia, which is regarded today as the foundation for National Sovereignty. This also tends to mark the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the "Early Modern" period, or the "Age of Enlightenment."

== Notes ==
* For the average peasant in the Renaissance the changes were as a rule not so great and usually weren't even noticeable. As far as they were concerned beautiful paintings, fine statuary and magnificent architecture were all well and good and they'd admire them if they had the opportunity to see them but for all of that the grain still needed to be harvested and the cows still needed to be milked just like in their grandfather's day and as their grandchildren would do after they passed. They were more likely to be conscripted into a new army if war came, but this was hardly a world-shattering event for most people.
* Infantry returned to prominence during this period. New weapons such as arbalest crossbows, matchlock arquebuses, and pikes played a role in this, as did cheap munitions plate, but more importantly, than that armies became more centralized and systematic than the old feudal systems as the beginnings of standing armies began to take shape. The nobility generally resisted this when they could since it meant that the crown could boss them around more, but the general trend was well underway because these forces were just better at fighting wars. Cannons also played a role in the process, as did navies, though artillery would take some time to come into it's own.
*Cannons destroyed castles (literally and figuratively). Cities stopped extending their walls and started growing around them because there was no point. The sorts of walls needed to stop cannons meant static defenses after this era would be purpose built fortresses guarding invasion choke points.
*This was a golden age for mercenaries. Raising and maintaining a standing army was time consuming and expensive and as such if a King wanted extra soldiers for a war it was usually cheaper for him to hire out one or more companies of battle hardened troops for a campaign for a standing rate, rations and a cut of the plunder for the conflict.
*Production guilds and workshops begin using early mass production techniques not seen since Rome, supporting larger militaries (with larger price tags). The Venetian Arsenal is said to have been able to build new merchant ships in a day using prefabricated parts.
*The Dutch begin their 500 year war to push back the sea using windmills. This inadvertently leads to the invention of modern banking, insurance, and fractional share investing.
*Feudalism began to decline as the idea of the Nation-State started to take root. Nationalism would become more prominent in the early modern period to coincide with the Enlightenment, but for now, modern countries were starting to take shape, as people began to think of their homelands as distinct cultural-geographic regions instead of the property of ever-changing noble families. At the same time though, this was when the infamous Habsburg family would come to power and control a good chunk of Europe, owning Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Austria, and all territories owned by those states.
*While many classical texts had been lost in the West, many had been preserved in the East, with some advances in the sciences provided by scholars under Muslim rule. These texts returned to Europe due to increased trade with the East, which started with the Crusades. If you wanted to be educated, you had to be well versed in Greek, Latin, and even Arabic. With the fall of Constantinople at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, many Byzantine scholars escaped to Italy (including some members of Palaliologoi, the last imperial dynasty) bringing the knowledge preserved in Byzantine Empire to the west, which played a key role in renaissance.
* The printing press made its debut, ensuring that all those rediscovered classics spread very quickly throughout Europe as the first modern universities took shape.

== The appeal of the Renaissance ==
The Renaissance is the closing of the middle ages. A lot of its mechanisms were still in place in various forms, but things were beginning to change. There were knights in Shining Armor and they were still formidable battering rams, but they were facing new competition from pike squares and arquebusiers in a rather distinctive combo. Chivalry was gradually on the wain even as armor plates were forged proofed against shot. All the while there was a lot of shrewd political scheming and intrigues. Why mobilize a thousand levies and a hundred knights to kill someone when a few drops of poison or a well-placed stiletto could accomplish the job cheaper and with far less fuss? The game of dynastic power is still being played, but with a rules update that favors a more subtle style.

At the same time, mechanics and engineers were tinkering and contriving a wide variety of new machinery. If one was to ascribe a heroic ideal to the Renaissance it would be the Renaissance Man, an archetype reflected in the likes of Leonardo DaVinci, a brilliant Engineer, Scientist and Artist all rolled into one. On the battlefield, the men of power were beginning to take notice of these new novelties and so active patronage of inventors was encouraged. At the same time, explorers and conquistadors carve their place in history by finding new lands, settling them and conquering [[Bronze Age]] societies. For those who want to see what Da Vinci could’ve accomplished if he was more of a mad scientist (I.e. if his tanks and other war machines were actually built), [[Clockpunk]] has you covered.

In general, if you like your medieval fantasy to have a dash of the modern in it, the Renaissance is where you look for ideas. Besides, the stuff associated with this period is frankly pretty. This period is listed as an art history thing more than anything and it did provide plenty of classics. William Shakespeare operated at the tail end of this period as well, though since he was a big classics nerd many of his plays dealt with earlier time periods.

== Renaissance-inspired Games, Factions, and Settings ==
* [[The Empire]]
* Virtually any [[Japan]] analog as nobody, not even the Japanese, cares about pre-Sengoku Japan (except maybe the Mongol Invasions) as a setting and nobody makes settings modern enough to have a post-sakoku Japan analog. Seriously, when the Meiji Revolution happened it was like one night you go to sleep and it's Japan as its always been for forever, and the next morning you wake up and there are soldiers in the streets with bolt action rifles harassing people for not building gunpla and buying KFC for Christmas.
* [[Golarion]] edges closer to renaissance than straight middle ages.
fill me
{{Skub}}
{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Renaissance

2020-12-15T04:16:53Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:F837:86D5:E198:595D: /* Protestantism */

[[File:Pike and Shot.jpg|400px|thumb|left|Men in breastplates with swords, spears and muskets. [[Warhammer Fantasy Battle|Hey that sounds kinda familiar...]] ]]
The '''Renaissance''' is a period of time and history which had it's origins in the 1300s in Italy and would gradually spread across Christendom and beyond. The word roughly means "rebirth" in English, more specifically it refers to the revitalization of Civilization after the Medieval Period. Various Italian City States gradually grew in wealth and prominence through maritime trade as well as connections with Byzantium and the Middle East and banking. The merchant princes of Italy would invest that wealth to make more money, but also into grand architecture, the arts, literature, engineering and academics ranging from studies of the [[Classical Period]] to natural philosophy. Things which were seen as noble pursuits in their own right but they were also as signs of wealth and prestige and ways of currying favor with other influential figures ("The Cardinal would be glad to back your bid after your magnificent assistance on the new Cathedral"). Eventually, ideas from Italy would begin to spread out and took root elsewhere in Europe. Cities once again began to grow across Europe.

This was fine and dandy in of itself, but in coincided with other big changes. Kings began to consolidate power for themselves with a mind of keeping the squabbling vassals in line. [[Gun]]s were making an increasing impact on the battlefield. In Spain, the Spanish managed to drive the Muslims out of Iberia in the Reconquista and emerged as a new powerful European state. Not too long after that thanks to improvements in ship design and navigation methods Vaso de Gama sailed around Africa to India and latter an Italian guy named Columbus set out sailing west across the Atlantic to prove <s>to the ignorant masses that world was round</s> that you could get to India by circumnavigation without starving to death first and ended up finding the Caribbean, thus beginning the colonization of the New World began by the Spanish and Portuguese at first, followed by the French, Dutch and English latter. Add to that some religious upheaval which shook the foundations of Christendom in the form of the likes of Hussites and eventually the start of the Protestant Reformation and you got a turbulent period of upheaval, to say the least, ultimately culminating in the Thirty Years War, which was the first time people not directly victimized started realizing that maybe this war thing isn't all that good (it took a thorough ass fucking of the continent and the lesson didn't stick).

The broad strokes of the Renaissance wars were that the Protestants and Catholics hated each other, each side bringing in more and more forces until the entire continent was ablaze. This is also the period where modern day political thought was put in shape with Machiavelli's magnum opus "The Prince", bringing concepts such as pragmatism and balance of power on forefront. An ostensibly religious war would lead to hilarious abominations like Catholic France (de-facto ran by the cardinal at the time, no less) allying with Protestant Swedes (That Exterminatused large portions of Germany) against Catholic Habsburgs as alliances shifted.

Physically and politically at the center of all this, the Holy Roman Empire was a shitstorm for most of this era and had mostly themselves to blame. They kept trying to rule the French but the French had their one really competent king who [[Emprah|refused to die]]. Meanwhile the Pope was having problems with the English, who also had their one really competent king who didn't like the Pope telling him he couldn't have a divorce. The Spanish colonized everything, found a literal mountain made of silver and built the biggest overseas Empire ever seen only to lose it all to dynastic struggle and inflation. The Venetians were making shit tons of money dominating the Mediterranean, the Swiss were killing people for money, and the Italians were killing each other over who was the more Catholic. '''And with few exceptions, almost every one of them be at one point fighting against, and at another point allied with, every other one.''' It was that crazy.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, we've got the final death of Eastern Rome and the meteoric rise of the Ottoman Empire. Undoubtedly the most iconic empire of the period, which established the first modern professional armies with it's elite Janissary corps and thoroughly butt-fucked the Balkans for centuries to come. For a time they were the terror of Europe, a bushy-bearded, turban-wearing Muslim foe against whom Christendom would need to unite in order to survive, while on the high seas, their allies on the Barbary Coast terrorized coastal towns from Italy to Iceland. In that era, their only true rivals were the pesky Habsburgs of the Holy Roman Empire. The Sultans of Turkey ruled luxuriously from the grand palace in Istanbul, surrounded by their [[Slaanesh|massive harems of concubines]] and armies of viziers. However, by the tail end of this period, the Ottomans era of rapid expansion would come to an end as the Ottoman state transitioned into a more sedentary imperial polity.

== Sengoku Jidai ==
In the east, the Renaissance contains the part of [[Japan]]ese history most people care about. the part where they cut each other to pieces with swords (as opposed to the other parts where they cut each other to pieces with older swords and rifles, and the part where they cut others with swords and guns). The late Sengoku was heavily influenced by borrowed European technological advancement. In particular, Oda Nobunaga would turn the gun into the main weapon of the solider, developing tactics that would be used till the invention of the metallic cartridge.

== Protestantism ==
The Christian denomination of Protestantism also emerged during this time. Depending who you ask, Martin Luther was either an [[this guy|enlightened reformer]] or whiny [[rules lawyer]]. He started out as a catholic monk but got fed up with the degree of brazen corruption the Pope was endorsing and his deviation from the tenets of Christianity. Luthor wasn't the first Catholic to call out the corruption, but he was the most noticeable and proactive. So after nailing a list with 95 criticisms to a cathedral door, Luther decided to start his own practice of Christianity... without blackjack or hookers. This went about as well as you'd expect (he was declared a heretic and hunted as a renegade), but what the Pope and Hapsburgs hadn't counted on was how incredibly unpopular they'd made themselves over the years. You may have heard of the Borgia family and how they got away with some pretty brazen acts while they controlled the papacy, including bribery, incest, and murder; the truth is, the papacy had been in severe trouble for many centuries, including a period when there were three people claimed to be pope at the same time. Lutheranism and its more radical strains like Calvinism ripped through the Dutch, German, and Austrian parts of the Holy Roman Empire, making it essentially ungovernable as a single whole - not that the Holy Roman Empire was ever whole to begin with, even before Spain came into the picture.

This might have been crushed had it not been for one nation. England was ruled by Henry VIII, who was a devout Catholic but [[That guy|wanted his marriage annulled]] (his only living children were daughters and his wife was too old to produce more children) and there was a major roadblock to getting it: he'd gotten the Pope's personal dispensation to marry his sister-in-law after his brother had died and asking for a reversal meant sending a message to the Pope, who was at the time a prisoner of the Holy Roman Emperor, his wife's nephew. It wasn't looking like a good idea to send a "Hey, your uncle wants to divorce your aunt because they have no sons, pass this on to your prisoner" message, so Henry got the Archbishop of Canterbury to step in and give him the annulment, which meant breaking with the Roman Catholic Church and forming his own religion. The average English noble and peasant alike were remarkably on-board with this, as the whole "England vs the continent" mentality was already firmly entrenched from about four centuries of previous wars. However, many protestants felt the church of England was still too much like Catholicism; these Puritans (and the much less violent Quakers) would cause problems for the crown later on. But either way, with England the continental protestants received a potent ally in opposition to Catholicism as the English sided with the Dutch against the Holy Romans, except when they sided with the Holy Romans against the French.

Things came to a head with the Thirty Years War, the first major conflict between the nations of Europe following the widespread adoption of gunpowder. It began with German princes holding more power than the Holy Roman Emperor and Bohemian (Bohemia now being called the Czech Republic) Protestants not wanting to be ruled by an-anti Protestant Emperor and revolted when the incumbent Ferdinand II destroyed a Protestant church and his officials started killing Protestant protestors. While nominally the war was over Protestantism vs Catholicism, politicking played an important role in the ever-shifting alliances of the nations involved. For example, despite being devoutly Catholic themselves, France was more concerned with keeping the Hapsburgs at bay, and supplied aid to the Protestants in the North (while harshly suppressing their own Protestants as a threat to the French Crown). Eventually, the Catholics gave up on retaking their lost territories and agreed to the Peace of Westphalia, which is regarded today as the foundation for National Sovereignty. This also tends to mark the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the "Early Modern" period, or the "Age of Enlightenment."

== Notes ==
* For the average peasant in the Renaissance the changes were as a rule not so great and usually weren't even noticeable. As far as they were concerned beautiful paintings, fine statuary and magnificent architecture were all well and good and they'd admire them if they had the opportunity to see them but for all of that the grain still needed to be harvested and the cows still needed to be milked just like in their grandfather's day and as their grandchildren would do after they passed. They were more likely to be conscripted into a new army if war came, but this was hardly a world-shattering event for most people.
* Infantry returned to prominence during this period. New weapons such as arbalest crossbows, matchlock arquebuses, and pikes played a role in this, as did cheap munitions plate, but more importantly, than that armies became more centralized and systematic than the old feudal systems as the beginnings of standing armies began to take shape. The nobility generally resisted this when they could since it meant that the crown could boss them around more, but the general trend was well underway because these forces were just better at fighting wars. Cannons also played a role in the process, as did navies, though artillery would take some time to come into it's own.
*Cannons destroyed castles (literally and figuratively). Cities stopped extending their walls and started growing around them because there was no point. The sorts of walls needed to stop cannons meant static defenses after this era would be purpose built fortresses guarding invasion choke points.
*This was a golden age for mercenaries. Raising and maintaining a standing army was time consuming and expensive and as such if a King wanted extra soldiers for a war it was usually cheaper for him to hire out one or more companies of battle hardened troops for a campaign for a standing rate, rations and a cut of the plunder for the conflict.
*Production guilds and workshops begin using early mass production techniques not seen since Rome, supporting larger militaries (with larger price tags). The Venetian Arsenal is said to have been able to build new merchant ships in a day using prefabricated parts.
*The Dutch begin their 500 year war to push back the sea using windmills. This inadvertently leads to the invention of modern banking, insurance, and fractional share investing.
*Feudalism began to decline as the idea of the Nation-State started to take root. Nationalism would become more prominent in the early modern period to coincide with the Enlightenment, but for now, modern countries were starting to take shape, as people began to think of their homelands as distinct cultural-geographic regions instead of the property of ever-changing noble families. At the same time though, this was when the infamous Habsburg family would come to power and control a good chunk of Europe, owning Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Austria, and all territories owned by those states.
*While many classical texts had been lost in the West, many had been preserved in the East, with some advances in the sciences provided by scholars under Muslim rule. These texts returned to Europe due to increased trade with the East, which started with the Crusades. If you wanted to be educated, you had to be well versed in Greek, Latin, and even Arabic. With the fall of Constantinople, many Byzantine scholars escaped to Italy (including some members of Palaliologoi, the last imperial dynasty) bringing the knowledge preserved in Byzantine Empire to the west, which played a key role in renaissance.
* The printing press made its debut, ensuring that all those rediscovered classics spread very quickly throughout Europe as the first modern universities took shape.

== The appeal of the Renaissance ==
The Renaissance is the closing of the middle ages. A lot of its mechanisms were still in place in various forms, but things were beginning to change. There were knights in Shining Armor and they were still formidable battering rams, but they were facing new competition from pike squares and arquebusiers in a rather distinctive combo. Chivalry was gradually on the wain even as armor plates were forged proofed against shot. All the while there was a lot of shrewd political scheming and intrigues. Why mobilize a thousand levies and a hundred knights to kill someone when a few drops of poison or a well-placed stiletto could accomplish the job cheaper and with far less fuss? The game of dynastic power is still being played, but with a rules update that favors a more subtle style.

At the same time, mechanics and engineers were tinkering and contriving a wide variety of new machinery. If one was to ascribe a heroic ideal to the Renaissance it would be the Renaissance Man, an archetype reflected in the likes of Leonardo DaVinci, a brilliant Engineer, Scientist and Artist all rolled into one. On the battlefield, the men of power were beginning to take notice of these new novelties and so active patronage of inventors was encouraged. At the same time, explorers and conquistadors carve their place in history by finding new lands, settling them and conquering [[Bronze Age]] societies. For those who want to see what Da Vinci could’ve accomplished if he was more of a mad scientist (I.e. if his tanks and other war machines were actually built), [[Clockpunk]] has you covered.

In general, if you like your medieval fantasy to have a dash of the modern in it, the Renaissance is where you look for ideas. Besides, the stuff associated with this period is frankly pretty. This period is listed as an art history thing more than anything and it did provide plenty of classics. William Shakespeare operated at the tail end of this period as well, though since he was a big classics nerd many of his plays dealt with earlier time periods.

== Renaissance-inspired Games, Factions, and Settings ==
* [[The Empire]]
* Virtually any [[Japan]] analog as nobody, not even the Japanese, cares about pre-Sengoku Japan (except maybe the Mongol Invasions) as a setting and nobody makes settings modern enough to have a post-sakoku Japan analog. Seriously, when the Meiji Revolution happened it was like one night you go to sleep and it's Japan as its always been for forever, and the next morning you wake up and there are soldiers in the streets with bolt action rifles harassing people for not building gunpla and buying KFC for Christmas.
* [[Golarion]] edges closer to renaissance than straight middle ages.
fill me
{{Skub}}
{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

High Middle Ages

2020-12-15T04:00:03Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:F837:86D5:E198:595D: /* Islamic Golden Age */

[[File:Salisbury cathedral.jpg|300px|thumb|left|Salisbury Cathedral built in the 1200s with a 100 meter tall spire, not the work of illiterate dung farmers]]
Around the year 1000 the people in Western Europe began to get their shit together and moved out of the [[Dark Age]]s. The economy steadily improve and cities began to grow again. Though no single state had risen to unify Europe since the Carolingian Empire, individual kingdoms had risen to replace the old tribal confederations (though feudalism was still the rule of the day), allowing for a degree of political stability, and with it, trade networks grew. Skills were honed, new technologies were acquired. Some of these were brought in from the east such as gunpowder, giant hamster wheel powered cranes and paper but others were developed locally such as stained glass and an increasingly wide use of water power. Gothic architecture emerged as Cathedrals reached to the sky. While Slavery had been abandoned in much of Europe, trade in the Mediterranean became more and more profitable, especially to the benefit of the Arab Slave Trade. The Byzantine–Seljuq wars also happened at this time, which influenced a much more famous later event, The Crusades.

Unfortunately the good times did not last as the 14th century was a bit of a doozy. First there was famine, which is never a nice thing. Then in 1346 there was the Black Death which wiped out about a third of the people in Europe with some areas getting hit worse than others. Ironically improvements in trade and the growth of cities with little consideration to public heath made such a die off possible. Small isolated villages hit by plague might be wiped out before it can spread, leaving a ghost town and spooked but healthy neighbors. Cities with tens of thousands of people full of filth (human waste, animal waste, food scraps, blood from slaughtered animals, dead stray dogs, dead rats which feed on this stuff and other such grodiness) in which carts, barges and ships are always coming and going can go on for some time propagating the plague like a [[Nurgle]] Machine. However, the tradeoff was that peasants, being in lower supply, were now more valuable and could now earn wages to lift themselves out of serfdom and earn some (very basic) rights. Medicine also advanced as healers were forced to change their means and methods and had plenty of sick people to practice and try new things on and primitive superstition on that count slowly began to give way out of simple necessity.

In Japan the Heian era ended in 1185 with the rise of the Kamakura shogunate. Except for the short lived (3 years) [[Wikipedia:Kenmu Restoration|Kenmu Restoration]], the Emperor would be a powerless figurehead for almost 700 years until the Meiji revolution of 1868. This is also the era the [[Samurai]] class emerged. The [[Katana]] would only appear at the very end of this period with the true form only emerging around 1400. Samurai wore the longer ''tachi'' instead.

==High Middle Age around Europe==
The toll from the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the later fall of the Carolingian Empire, plus the raiding campaigns of Vikings, Magyars, and Muslims, left the continent in a weakened state. However, by the time the 11th century started, the feudal economic system was in full effect, and the "relative" (keyword being "relative") moment of peace allowed the cities and kingdoms to begin a process of recovery. Trade and commerce began picking up steam once again, making cities important finantial and political points of interests. Likewise, the different monarchies and ruling nobles began a very slow process of recovering their power. The idea of the ''primus inter pares'' (first among equals) was fine and good, but it meant that the kings had little more power (and on many occasions, less effective power) than the nobles they supposedly ruled over. This consolidation of power in the hands of national monarchies was a long, loooong process that only started coming into fruition at the very end of the period. In the meantime, though, there were many processes of cultural renovation with the birth of the romanesque and gothic styles, and even more deep changes with the gregorian reformation, the start of the mendicant orders and the spread of the first universities.

Different areas of Europe evolved in different ways, thoug. In the Iberian Peninsula, this period included most of the second half of the wars of the ''Reconquista''. The fall of the Caliphate of Cordoba in favour of the Taifas system (basically a fragmentation of power in little independent muslim kingdoms) was the signal for the christian kingdoms of the north to kick the reconquest of the south into overdrive. This doesn't mean this was an unified campaign, though. As was usual for medieval kingdoms, backstabbings and general infighting on both sides was abound, but the weakened muslim kingdoms slowly but surely lost ground, despite briefly unifying themselves under the Almoravids and Almohads. The last muslim kingdom, the Kingdom of Granada, was conquered in 1492 by the Catholic Kings. Meanwhile, the christian kingdoms started their unification process, which would culminate in the marriage of Elisabeth of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, setting up the basis for the unification of Spain. Meanwhile, Portugal started a campaign of exploration through the Atlantic, which would later be followed by Castile, birthing a competition for the exploration and discovery for route trades to India (and later the Americas) between the two.

In the region that was once the Carolingian Empire, the Kingdom of France slowly but surely started gaining territories against the other two members of the Treaty of Verdun, and its ruling dinasties managed to slowly build up the power that had been lost centuries ago. Of particular importance was the normand conquest of England by the Duke of Normandy. William the Bastard (which became the Conqueror after his victory) managed to pull off a succesful invasion of England by taking advantage of a dynastic dispute. This generated quite a dilemma for the time: though William was still the Duke of Normandy and nominally a vassal of the French king, in practice he had as much (if not more) power and influence than his lord, which put both of them on a very tense position. The French kings tried to reduce the English monarchs' influence in France by limiting the boundaries of their continental posessions, which kept increasing the tensions between the two kingdoms. This situation finally came to a close with the death of the last Capetian without a clear heir to the throne. With no clear ruler and with the English kings having no little dynastic claims to the french throne, he declared war to reclaim the crown against the House of Valois, the other noble family fighting for the french throne. And thus began the Hundred Years War, which, as it name implies, was [[Long War|fucking long]]. This clusterfuck of a war (both a massive international conflict, a civil war and a bloody family feud) eventually involved pretty much all active players in Western Europe at one point or another, and, alongside [[Nurgle|the Black Death and the massive famines]] that coincided with it, caused a lot of death and destruction. The war kept going on and on until the eventual french victory, managing to drive the english to the other side of the channel and starting a rivalry between the two nations that would last for centuries. After this defeat, England immediately became embroiled in another civil war, the War of the Roses.

And speaking of England, they went through a lot of upheval while bickering with France. The new Norman rule had to deal with the nearby kingdoms and a lot of political unstability, and then the last heir of the House of Normandy died, which started a civil war which ended with the Plantagenet as the kings of England. During the rule of the famous Richard the Lionheart, that unstability continues, especially when the king goes to the Crusades instead of actually taking care of home affairs. His brother John took control of the country after Richard was kidnapped, a move which not only pissed many people off (John was seen as an usurper already, though many historians nowadays see this bad image as the result of his political enemies' propaganda), it gave his rivals the perfect excuse to the disgruntled nobles to rebel against him. John was forced to sign the ''Magna Carta'', a legal document which guaranteed a lot of rights and freedoms to nobility at the expense of the crown. This document is often considered as one of the most important political reforms in History, since it paved the way to modern parlamentarism (even though the original document was never put into practise, only a heavily modified version was eventually applied after many political shennannigans).

On the Italian Peninsula, the fragmentation caused by the fall of the Roman Empire and the infighting between the different factions was the catalyst for the birth of most of the Italian city-states. With the normand conquest of the Catepanate of Italy (basically a province of the Byzantine Empire in Southern Italy), the biggest political power on Italy became the Papacy by far, since the young city-states simply couldn't compete with the Catholic Church in political, spiritual and financial power at the time. The Church's power was not uncontested, though. On the one hand, pushing for the Crusades had given the Pope quite a lot of authority and prestige all over Christianity, but on the other hand, the concentration of power in the hands of nobility and the national monarchies meant that their earthly powers were questioned by secular authorities. In particular, the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire clashed frequently in this matters, since both papal and imperial powers claimed to represent the will of God in some form, though the dispute centers around their influence on the "''dominium mundi''", and more specifically, the temporal powers. The Investiture Controversy was but the first of the many clashes between this two authorities which would continue all throughout the rest of the Middle Ages.

And speaking of the [[The Empire (Warhammer Fantasy)|Holy Roman Empire]] ([[meme|which was neither holy, nor Roman, nor technically an empire]]), it was the technical successor of the imperial authority. Also, it was '''''big''''', the biggest christian kingdom by far during the High Middle Ages (the Byzantine Empire had lost quite a lot of ground, and would continue to do so during the period). However, despite its size, population and political influence all around it, it was mostly a confederation of German kingdoms and principates, all with their own rules and customs. The only real cohesive element was the figure of the Emperor, and the struggles to get that power were frequent. Thus, it was unable to consolidate its power into a centralized monarchy like France, England or Spain, though it was still the great christian power of this period, and would continue to be a powerhouse in the following centuries.

In the northern parts of Europe, the Scandinavian kingdoms undertook a heavy process of Christianization. After raiding the southern lands for a couple of centuries, many realized that the feudal organization was actually more beneficial than just straight piracy in the long run (although viking raids took a long while to disappear altogether), so they adopted Christianity. This process was accompanied by the adoption of modern political systems and customs, which would pave the way for the viking and german chieftains to actually create proper medieval kingdoms. In particular, the new kingdoms focused on sea trade, since they already had a lot of naval know-how, and agriculture in Scandinavia was a difficult proposition anyway. In particular, they clashed with the Hanseatic League, a group of principates and other minor states allied in a merchant confederation which tried to monopolize the regional trade. To counter this, the kingdoms of Sweden, Norway and Denmark created the Kalmar Union, with the queen Margaret I of Denmark ruling over all three kingdoms at once. However, this union didn't translate into the creation of an unified state, dissolving at the beginning of the Early Modern Ages.

In the other side of Christendom, the Eastern Roman Empire (or the Byzantine Empire for short) was not in the best shape. It had received a massive mauling during the previous centuries due to the wars against the Persians first and later the sudden apparition of Islam, which took away most of its territories in Northern Africa and the Middle East. It was the fast advance of the Seljuk Turks over Anatolia which forced the Roman Emperor to ask for help to anyone that he could find (and considering they had broken with the Roman Church very recently, it was interpreted as a massive sign of weakness everywhere), which led directly to the crusades. While the Crusades helped the Byzantines stabilize their eastern borders by funding the Crusader kingdoms, Byzantine territories like Bulgaria managed to gain independence. And then the Fourth Crusade happened, [[fail|which instead of going to the Holy Land to fight the infidels, it ended up besieging and raiding Constantinople itself to pay off some Venetian loan sharks]]. By the time the Byzantine emperors could retake the capital, they'd lost most of their territories elsewhere, which left the Eastern Roman Empire as a vestigial state whose only advantage was its geographically advantageous position. Still, by 1453 the Ottomans managed to finally capture the remains of the empire (which was basically just Constantinople by this point), signaling the end of whatever was left of the Roman Empire of old.

In Central and Eastern Europe, the last big processes of christianization took place, from Bohemia to Lithuania to the Rus Kingdoms. This allowed a lot of expansion and modernization of this new kingdoms. And then the [[Mongols]] arrived. The arrival of the mongols to Eastern and Central Europe signals a massive power shift in the area, since the Mongols managed to defeat and conquer many of the European kingdoms. The European tactics that favoured heavy cavalry were catastrophic outmaneuvered against the light archer cavalry of the mongols, especially in the great open plains of central and eastern Europe. Bohemia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Lithuania were badly hit by this assault, and the Rus Kingdoms were outright conquered and annexed to the Mongolian sphere of influence. The death of the Mongol leaders stopped the invasions from going further. Mongolian influence was only shaken off from this area after a long process of fighting by the early Russian tzars. After the Mongol khanates were pretty much defeated, the main concern of the kingdoms from Eastern Europe became the Ottoman Empire, since the Turks had managed to advance upon the territories from the former Byzantine Empire, which would mark the history of the region with constant clashes during the Early Modern Age. Also, during all of this, this area was squarely hit by the Black Plague in the 14th Century, just as the rest of Europe was. But unlike the western kingdoms, where peasants manage to wrestle some limited concessions to the nobles due to the fact there were becoming pretty scarce, the exact opposite happened here. Many nobles manage to reinforce their authority over their peasant population, in which some historians know as the "second serfdom", which would strengthen the nobility's grasp over the peasants.

==Islamic Golden Age==
The Islamic Golden age is a period that occurred during the Abbasid Caliphate between 750 and 1258. As you can expect the Muslim world was doing very well during this period, the Abbassid Caliphate during the reign of Harun-Al-Rashid was the largest and most powerful polity in the world. Meanwhile, in the realm of the sciences, the Muslims were making use of a lot of the classical knowledge they had seized and expanded on it. During this time the Islamic World saw major advancing in terms of science (Primitive Chemistry from Alchemical traditions in particular), medicine, mathematics <s>(there's a reason why they call them Arabic Numerals)</s> (the reason is that they were introduced to Europe through Arabs, though the numbers themselves originate from India), technology (optics, ceramics, architecture, windmills), art (a lot of Islamic Art relies on geometric patterns given the religion's taboo about images due to fear of idolatry, so having trigonometry was a big boon here) and trade. At the heart of it was Baghdad being a center of learning and a large thriving urban center. Yet not far behind were cities like Samarkand, Damascus, and Cordoba. Unfortunately, the Crusades and the [[Genghis motherfucking Khan|Mongols]] put a stop to it and trashed up a lot of the Middle East. However, the spirit of this era, of scientific advancement and glorious conquest, would live on past the fall of Baghdad, in places like Mughal India, and the Emirate/Caliphate of Cordoba in Spain.

==Khmer Golden Age==
While Europe wallowed in the grimdark middle ages, half a world away in what is now Cambodia the city of Angkor was busily becoming a (short lived) paradise on Earth. The Khmer were Hindu at the time and Angkor was constructed as a massive temple and urban area encompassing over a thousand square kilometers, complete with canals and two hand-dug reservoirs that are [https://www.google.com/maps/@13.434607,103.8607491,31561m/data=!3m1!1e3 easily visible from space] and capable of holding a hundred million cubic meters of water. The entire complex is larger than New York City and at its height may have had over a million residents. The good times ended when they went Buddhist.

== Notes ==

* This is the high points of chivalry, when an Armored Knight on Horseback had been refined into a truly devastating force. Battles were generally won or lost by the strength of the Heavy Cavalry that one side could bring to bear.
* This is the golden age of castles. Any lord of any significance would put together a stone castle to consolidate his position and the design of castles advanced from simple mottes and Bailies to what most people would think of when they heard the word castle.
* [[Cannon]]s and [[Firearm]]s begin to show up in Europe around the late 13th century, though both were crude affairs largely of marginal use compared with more traditional muscle powered weaponry.
* While hardly a unique feature to this period or Europe people at this point thought in terms of ''Knowing Their Place''. In medieval society what role you had was largely determined by birth. Some people did the telling and the rest did what they were told. Medieval peasants by in large did not care much about government policy unless it directly and overtly effected them. It was not their business, there were other people out there which knew better than them which should know what to do and that their judgement had god's backing. This is not an absolute mentality and they did have an idea that there were obligations that nobles needed to fulfill to their subjects, but it is a major distinction that people should consider when trying to get into the mind of a medieval peasant or lord.
* The portrayal of this time period as having dour, muted colors is completely inaccurate. Dying was a rich industry and while natural dyes had a relatively limited color range (red, blue, yellow, brown, indigo, green, pink, and orange were all common) it was abundant and middle class or higher non-clothing items were generally decorated (clothes were restricted to, at most, simple patterns as the methods of washing clothes weren't delicates friendly). A large portion of this perception comes from period art, where colors have faded and centuries of grime (which can't be removed without harming the work) has accumulated. This actually applies to many periods of history, but the middle ages are most the frequently victimized of it.

== The appeal of the High Middle Ages ==
How do you like your medieval fantasy? Do you like it more refined and heroic? With beautiful Gothic cathedrals with stained glass windows and mighty castles of stone with fluttering banners full of fat friars and proud knights. Or scholarly Sultans and zealous Hashashin more your type of deal? Well this period is for you. Not that it was all lolipops and sunshine. The nobles were still playing their Games of Thrones in dynastic squabbles plus there were the Crusades, Islamic marauders, and endless Feudal wars. The fact that its the point where gunpowder just barely coming also helps it as the standard point of development where [[Medieval Stasis]] work takes place. Being a serf or a jew in the path of these armies at this time sucked. The mix of [[Bretonnia|Medieval Splendor and Brutality]] makes for a nice contrast.

This period also gave us some heroes such as Robin Hood. And though King Arthur has his roots in the Dark Age when the native British were fighting against the invading Saxons, his popularity massively took off thanks to Norman literature and adapted by countless countries across Europe.

== High Middle Age inspired Games, Factions and Settings ==
*[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]

{{Skub}}
{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

High Middle Ages

2020-12-15T03:55:45Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:F837:86D5:E198:595D:

[[File:Salisbury cathedral.jpg|300px|thumb|left|Salisbury Cathedral built in the 1200s with a 100 meter tall spire, not the work of illiterate dung farmers]]
Around the year 1000 the people in Western Europe began to get their shit together and moved out of the [[Dark Age]]s. The economy steadily improve and cities began to grow again. Though no single state had risen to unify Europe since the Carolingian Empire, individual kingdoms had risen to replace the old tribal confederations (though feudalism was still the rule of the day), allowing for a degree of political stability, and with it, trade networks grew. Skills were honed, new technologies were acquired. Some of these were brought in from the east such as gunpowder, giant hamster wheel powered cranes and paper but others were developed locally such as stained glass and an increasingly wide use of water power. Gothic architecture emerged as Cathedrals reached to the sky. While Slavery had been abandoned in much of Europe, trade in the Mediterranean became more and more profitable, especially to the benefit of the Arab Slave Trade. The Byzantine–Seljuq wars also happened at this time, which influenced a much more famous later event, The Crusades.

Unfortunately the good times did not last as the 14th century was a bit of a doozy. First there was famine, which is never a nice thing. Then in 1346 there was the Black Death which wiped out about a third of the people in Europe with some areas getting hit worse than others. Ironically improvements in trade and the growth of cities with little consideration to public heath made such a die off possible. Small isolated villages hit by plague might be wiped out before it can spread, leaving a ghost town and spooked but healthy neighbors. Cities with tens of thousands of people full of filth (human waste, animal waste, food scraps, blood from slaughtered animals, dead stray dogs, dead rats which feed on this stuff and other such grodiness) in which carts, barges and ships are always coming and going can go on for some time propagating the plague like a [[Nurgle]] Machine. However, the tradeoff was that peasants, being in lower supply, were now more valuable and could now earn wages to lift themselves out of serfdom and earn some (very basic) rights. Medicine also advanced as healers were forced to change their means and methods and had plenty of sick people to practice and try new things on and primitive superstition on that count slowly began to give way out of simple necessity.

In Japan the Heian era ended in 1185 with the rise of the Kamakura shogunate. Except for the short lived (3 years) [[Wikipedia:Kenmu Restoration|Kenmu Restoration]], the Emperor would be a powerless figurehead for almost 700 years until the Meiji revolution of 1868. This is also the era the [[Samurai]] class emerged. The [[Katana]] would only appear at the very end of this period with the true form only emerging around 1400. Samurai wore the longer ''tachi'' instead.

==High Middle Age around Europe==
The toll from the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the later fall of the Carolingian Empire, plus the raiding campaigns of Vikings, Magyars, and Muslims, left the continent in a weakened state. However, by the time the 11th century started, the feudal economic system was in full effect, and the "relative" (keyword being "relative") moment of peace allowed the cities and kingdoms to begin a process of recovery. Trade and commerce began picking up steam once again, making cities important finantial and political points of interests. Likewise, the different monarchies and ruling nobles began a very slow process of recovering their power. The idea of the ''primus inter pares'' (first among equals) was fine and good, but it meant that the kings had little more power (and on many occasions, less effective power) than the nobles they supposedly ruled over. This consolidation of power in the hands of national monarchies was a long, loooong process that only started coming into fruition at the very end of the period. In the meantime, though, there were many processes of cultural renovation with the birth of the romanesque and gothic styles, and even more deep changes with the gregorian reformation, the start of the mendicant orders and the spread of the first universities.

Different areas of Europe evolved in different ways, thoug. In the Iberian Peninsula, this period included most of the second half of the wars of the ''Reconquista''. The fall of the Caliphate of Cordoba in favour of the Taifas system (basically a fragmentation of power in little independent muslim kingdoms) was the signal for the christian kingdoms of the north to kick the reconquest of the south into overdrive. This doesn't mean this was an unified campaign, though. As was usual for medieval kingdoms, backstabbings and general infighting on both sides was abound, but the weakened muslim kingdoms slowly but surely lost ground, despite briefly unifying themselves under the Almoravids and Almohads. The last muslim kingdom, the Kingdom of Granada, was conquered in 1492 by the Catholic Kings. Meanwhile, the christian kingdoms started their unification process, which would culminate in the marriage of Elisabeth of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, setting up the basis for the unification of Spain. Meanwhile, Portugal started a campaign of exploration through the Atlantic, which would later be followed by Castile, birthing a competition for the exploration and discovery for route trades to India (and later the Americas) between the two.

In the region that was once the Carolingian Empire, the Kingdom of France slowly but surely started gaining territories against the other two members of the Treaty of Verdun, and its ruling dinasties managed to slowly build up the power that had been lost centuries ago. Of particular importance was the normand conquest of England by the Duke of Normandy. William the Bastard (which became the Conqueror after his victory) managed to pull off a succesful invasion of England by taking advantage of a dynastic dispute. This generated quite a dilemma for the time: though William was still the Duke of Normandy and nominally a vassal of the French king, in practice he had as much (if not more) power and influence than his lord, which put both of them on a very tense position. The French kings tried to reduce the English monarchs' influence in France by limiting the boundaries of their continental posessions, which kept increasing the tensions between the two kingdoms. This situation finally came to a close with the death of the last Capetian without a clear heir to the throne. With no clear ruler and with the English kings having no little dynastic claims to the french throne, he declared war to reclaim the crown against the House of Valois, the other noble family fighting for the french throne. And thus began the Hundred Years War, which, as it name implies, was [[Long War|fucking long]]. This clusterfuck of a war (both a massive international conflict, a civil war and a bloody family feud) eventually involved pretty much all active players in Western Europe at one point or another, and, alongside [[Nurgle|the Black Death and the massive famines]] that coincided with it, caused a lot of death and destruction. The war kept going on and on until the eventual french victory, managing to drive the english to the other side of the channel and starting a rivalry between the two nations that would last for centuries. After this defeat, England immediately became embroiled in another civil war, the War of the Roses.

And speaking of England, they went through a lot of upheval while bickering with France. The new Norman rule had to deal with the nearby kingdoms and a lot of political unstability, and then the last heir of the House of Normandy died, which started a civil war which ended with the Plantagenet as the kings of England. During the rule of the famous Richard the Lionheart, that unstability continues, especially when the king goes to the Crusades instead of actually taking care of home affairs. His brother John took control of the country after Richard was kidnapped, a move which not only pissed many people off (John was seen as an usurper already, though many historians nowadays see this bad image as the result of his political enemies' propaganda), it gave his rivals the perfect excuse to the disgruntled nobles to rebel against him. John was forced to sign the ''Magna Carta'', a legal document which guaranteed a lot of rights and freedoms to nobility at the expense of the crown. This document is often considered as one of the most important political reforms in History, since it paved the way to modern parlamentarism (even though the original document was never put into practise, only a heavily modified version was eventually applied after many political shennannigans).

On the Italian Peninsula, the fragmentation caused by the fall of the Roman Empire and the infighting between the different factions was the catalyst for the birth of most of the Italian city-states. With the normand conquest of the Catepanate of Italy (basically a province of the Byzantine Empire in Southern Italy), the biggest political power on Italy became the Papacy by far, since the young city-states simply couldn't compete with the Catholic Church in political, spiritual and financial power at the time. The Church's power was not uncontested, though. On the one hand, pushing for the Crusades had given the Pope quite a lot of authority and prestige all over Christianity, but on the other hand, the concentration of power in the hands of nobility and the national monarchies meant that their earthly powers were questioned by secular authorities. In particular, the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire clashed frequently in this matters, since both papal and imperial powers claimed to represent the will of God in some form, though the dispute centers around their influence on the "''dominium mundi''", and more specifically, the temporal powers. The Investiture Controversy was but the first of the many clashes between this two authorities which would continue all throughout the rest of the Middle Ages.

And speaking of the [[The Empire (Warhammer Fantasy)|Holy Roman Empire]] ([[meme|which was neither holy, nor Roman, nor technically an empire]]), it was the technical successor of the imperial authority. Also, it was '''''big''''', the biggest christian kingdom by far during the High Middle Ages (the Byzantine Empire had lost quite a lot of ground, and would continue to do so during the period). However, despite its size, population and political influence all around it, it was mostly a confederation of German kingdoms and principates, all with their own rules and customs. The only real cohesive element was the figure of the Emperor, and the struggles to get that power were frequent. Thus, it was unable to consolidate its power into a centralized monarchy like France, England or Spain, though it was still the great christian power of this period, and would continue to be a powerhouse in the following centuries.

In the northern parts of Europe, the Scandinavian kingdoms undertook a heavy process of Christianization. After raiding the southern lands for a couple of centuries, many realized that the feudal organization was actually more beneficial than just straight piracy in the long run (although viking raids took a long while to disappear altogether), so they adopted Christianity. This process was accompanied by the adoption of modern political systems and customs, which would pave the way for the viking and german chieftains to actually create proper medieval kingdoms. In particular, the new kingdoms focused on sea trade, since they already had a lot of naval know-how, and agriculture in Scandinavia was a difficult proposition anyway. In particular, they clashed with the Hanseatic League, a group of principates and other minor states allied in a merchant confederation which tried to monopolize the regional trade. To counter this, the kingdoms of Sweden, Norway and Denmark created the Kalmar Union, with the queen Margaret I of Denmark ruling over all three kingdoms at once. However, this union didn't translate into the creation of an unified state, dissolving at the beginning of the Early Modern Ages.

In the other side of Christendom, the Eastern Roman Empire (or the Byzantine Empire for short) was not in the best shape. It had received a massive mauling during the previous centuries due to the wars against the Persians first and later the sudden apparition of Islam, which took away most of its territories in Northern Africa and the Middle East. It was the fast advance of the Seljuk Turks over Anatolia which forced the Roman Emperor to ask for help to anyone that he could find (and considering they had broken with the Roman Church very recently, it was interpreted as a massive sign of weakness everywhere), which led directly to the crusades. While the Crusades helped the Byzantines stabilize their eastern borders by funding the Crusader kingdoms, Byzantine territories like Bulgaria managed to gain independence. And then the Fourth Crusade happened, [[fail|which instead of going to the Holy Land to fight the infidels, it ended up besieging and raiding Constantinople itself to pay off some Venetian loan sharks]]. By the time the Byzantine emperors could retake the capital, they'd lost most of their territories elsewhere, which left the Eastern Roman Empire as a vestigial state whose only advantage was its geographically advantageous position. Still, by 1453 the Ottomans managed to finally capture the remains of the empire (which was basically just Constantinople by this point), signaling the end of whatever was left of the Roman Empire of old.

In Central and Eastern Europe, the last big processes of christianization took place, from Bohemia to Lithuania to the Rus Kingdoms. This allowed a lot of expansion and modernization of this new kingdoms. And then the [[Mongols]] arrived. The arrival of the mongols to Eastern and Central Europe signals a massive power shift in the area, since the Mongols managed to defeat and conquer many of the European kingdoms. The European tactics that favoured heavy cavalry were catastrophic outmaneuvered against the light archer cavalry of the mongols, especially in the great open plains of central and eastern Europe. Bohemia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Lithuania were badly hit by this assault, and the Rus Kingdoms were outright conquered and annexed to the Mongolian sphere of influence. The death of the Mongol leaders stopped the invasions from going further. Mongolian influence was only shaken off from this area after a long process of fighting by the early Russian tzars. After the Mongol khanates were pretty much defeated, the main concern of the kingdoms from Eastern Europe became the Ottoman Empire, since the Turks had managed to advance upon the territories from the former Byzantine Empire, which would mark the history of the region with constant clashes during the Early Modern Age. Also, during all of this, this area was squarely hit by the Black Plague in the 14th Century, just as the rest of Europe was. But unlike the western kingdoms, where peasants manage to wrestle some limited concessions to the nobles due to the fact there were becoming pretty scarce, the exact opposite happened here. Many nobles manage to reinforce their authority over their peasant population, in which some historians know as the "second serfdom", which would strengthen the nobility's grasp over the peasants.

==Islamic Golden Age==
The Islamic Golden age is a period that occurred during the Abbasid Caliphate between 750 and 1258. As you can expect the Muslim world was doing very well during this period, the Abbassid Caliphate during the reign of Harun-Al-Rashid was the largest and most powerful polity in the world. Meanwhile, in the realm of the sciences, the Muslims were making use of a lot of the classical knowledge they had seized and expanded on it. During this time the Islamic World saw major advancing in terms of science (Primitive Chemistry from Alchemical traditions in particular), medicine, mathematics <s>(there's a reason why they call them Arabic Numerals)</s> (the reason is that they were introduced to Europe through Arabs, though the numbers themselves originate from India), technology (optics, ceramics, architecture, windmills), art (a lot of Islamic Art relies on geometric patterns, having trigonometry was a big boon here) and trade. At the heart of it was Baghdad being a center of learning and a large thriving urban center. Yet not far behind were cities like Samarkand, Damascus, and Cordoba. Unfortunately, the Crusades and the [[Genghis motherfucking Khan|Mongols]] put a stop to it and trashed up a lot of the Middle East. However, the spirit of this era, of scientific advancement and glorious conquest, would live on past the fall of Baghdad, in places like Mughal India, and the Emirate/Caliphate of Cordoba in Spain.

==Khmer Golden Age==
While Europe wallowed in the grimdark middle ages, half a world away in what is now Cambodia the city of Angkor was busily becoming a (short lived) paradise on Earth. The Khmer were Hindu at the time and Angkor was constructed as a massive temple and urban area encompassing over a thousand square kilometers, complete with canals and two hand-dug reservoirs that are [https://www.google.com/maps/@13.434607,103.8607491,31561m/data=!3m1!1e3 easily visible from space] and capable of holding a hundred million cubic meters of water. The entire complex is larger than New York City and at its height may have had over a million residents. The good times ended when they went Buddhist.

== Notes ==

* This is the high points of chivalry, when an Armored Knight on Horseback had been refined into a truly devastating force. Battles were generally won or lost by the strength of the Heavy Cavalry that one side could bring to bear.
* This is the golden age of castles. Any lord of any significance would put together a stone castle to consolidate his position and the design of castles advanced from simple mottes and Bailies to what most people would think of when they heard the word castle.
* [[Cannon]]s and [[Firearm]]s begin to show up in Europe around the late 13th century, though both were crude affairs largely of marginal use compared with more traditional muscle powered weaponry.
* While hardly a unique feature to this period or Europe people at this point thought in terms of ''Knowing Their Place''. In medieval society what role you had was largely determined by birth. Some people did the telling and the rest did what they were told. Medieval peasants by in large did not care much about government policy unless it directly and overtly effected them. It was not their business, there were other people out there which knew better than them which should know what to do and that their judgement had god's backing. This is not an absolute mentality and they did have an idea that there were obligations that nobles needed to fulfill to their subjects, but it is a major distinction that people should consider when trying to get into the mind of a medieval peasant or lord.
* The portrayal of this time period as having dour, muted colors is completely inaccurate. Dying was a rich industry and while natural dyes had a relatively limited color range (red, blue, yellow, brown, indigo, green, pink, and orange were all common) it was abundant and middle class or higher non-clothing items were generally decorated (clothes were restricted to, at most, simple patterns as the methods of washing clothes weren't delicates friendly). A large portion of this perception comes from period art, where colors have faded and centuries of grime (which can't be removed without harming the work) has accumulated. This actually applies to many periods of history, but the middle ages are most the frequently victimized of it.

== The appeal of the High Middle Ages ==
How do you like your medieval fantasy? Do you like it more refined and heroic? With beautiful Gothic cathedrals with stained glass windows and mighty castles of stone with fluttering banners full of fat friars and proud knights. Or scholarly Sultans and zealous Hashashin more your type of deal? Well this period is for you. Not that it was all lolipops and sunshine. The nobles were still playing their Games of Thrones in dynastic squabbles plus there were the Crusades, Islamic marauders, and endless Feudal wars. The fact that its the point where gunpowder just barely coming also helps it as the standard point of development where [[Medieval Stasis]] work takes place. Being a serf or a jew in the path of these armies at this time sucked. The mix of [[Bretonnia|Medieval Splendor and Brutality]] makes for a nice contrast.

This period also gave us some heroes such as Robin Hood. And though King Arthur has his roots in the Dark Age when the native British were fighting against the invading Saxons, his popularity massively took off thanks to Norman literature and adapted by countless countries across Europe.

== High Middle Age inspired Games, Factions and Settings ==
*[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]

{{Skub}}
{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Dark Age

2020-12-15T03:51:22Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:F837:86D5:E198:595D:

[[File:Dark age port.jpg|200px|thumb|left|Brick and Concrete have given way to Waddle and Daub]]
The Western [[Roman Empire]] is generally said to have fallen in 476 CE, which was in of itself part of a long gradual decline as the Empire fell for a wide variety of internal and external reasons which are beyond the scope of this article and indeed are still extensively debated by historians. The central Government broke down, barbarians tribes such as the Huns, the Vandals, and the Goths invaded and took over and many urban centers that grew under Roman rule withered on the vine as their people fled to the countryside and a fair bit of higher learning was lost in Western Europe. For the sake of curating this marked the end of the [[Classical Period]] period which lasted until about 1000 or so called '''The Dark Ages'''.

During this time warlords carved out new kingdoms, handing conquered lands out to their favored warriors as they went who'd tax peasants and used that money to buy [[Mail]] and [[helmet]]s and [[Horse]]s, gradually morphing into the first [[Knight]]s. They also made alliances with the Catholic Church, which arose from the ashes of Rome offering it's services in placating the peasants, rebuilding society and doing things that required book learning in exchange for their aide in spreading the faith, a say in the way things were run and various privileges.

==Invasions==
Starting around the early 700s, the relatively Umayyad Caliphate had begun conquering Europe, seizing nearly all of Spain. While the other Mediterranean European countries were under the protection of the Byzantine Empire, the South of France was vulnerable and became the site of significant clashes between the local Frankish tribes and the invading Muslims. During this time period, Frankish statesman Charles Martel was able to rally the Franks at the battle of Tours and beat back the invasion; his grandson Charlemagne would succeed in uniting the remainder of Western Europe under the Carolingian Empire, the closest the West had ever been to a unified state since Rome. While the Empire didn't last, it laid the groundwork for the two future states of France and the Holy Roman Empire.

Around 793 the [[Viking]]s began to show up and would remain an active element for centuries to come. While most of these attacks were short yet violent raids for the sake of pillaging and taking slaves, eventually the Vikings conquered a sizable chunk of England and established the "Danelaw," ensuring a long-term presence that would last even after the English petty kingdoms ousted the Norse warlords. France faired somewhat better, as the French monarch was able to convince the invading vikings to settle down and own the province of Normandy in exchange for their fealty. This would have long-term consequences as said Normans ended up claiming the English crown for themselves, leading William the Conqueror to invade England in 1066 and claim it for himself; this typically marks the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of the High Middle Ages, as the various European powers were finally starting to stabilize and more formal governance was being made. It's also the point where the iconic heavily cavalry in full armor became a thing, as stirrup made cavalry considerably more practical, while mail armor began to encompass more of the body than the mere "chain shirt" that had existed since Roman times.

==Notes==
* This is a western European thing. Byzantium, [[China]], India, Persia and eventually the Islamic Caliphates were, on the whole, doing quite well at this time. After all, this was the era that played host to the meteoric rise of Islam as both a world religion and temporal superpower. In Europe, Byzantine Empire had it quite well under Justininan that strove to restore the old Empire, financing and patronising religious, cultural and scientific advancement of the state. It is under his rule that famous Hagia Sophia was constructed. However, most influential and lasting legacy of his was the unified and complex Codex of Laws, known as Corpus Iuris Civilis, that combined both older Roman Laws and Justinian's own innovations. While it would be lost and abandoned by the West after the Great Schism, it was revisited by Napoleon, who used it as the basis for the Napoleonic code of which modern day Laws are delivered from. China would emerge from a period of political instability (and China had a lot of that) be reunified by the Sui Dynasty and thrive under the Tang Dynasty, notably developing the Imperial Bureaucracy based on competitive examination. Meanwhile, Japan was coming into its own as a well-developed civilization with the Nara and Heian Periods following China's model.
* Long story short term "Dark Age" has become rather contentious in recent decades among historians and at the very least it has been judged that people from the Renaissance onward overestimated in how severe the fall was. Many prefer the far less loaded '''Early Medieval Period''' to describe this period of history.
* The real reason we call this period the “Dark Age” is due to the relative lack of European writings we have in comparison to the ages coming before and after. Between the high political instability and drop in literacy, the only people making books at this time were monks. That’s not to say Europe was a total intellectual vacuum; the University was invented in this time period, and would build a network of schools that would really come into prominence once the Renaissance hits.
* There are other periods of time labeled "Dark Ages" such as the Greek Dark Ages between the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the [[Classical Period]]. Basically whenever an advanced civilization regresses a decent bit due to general decline or some catastrophe. And like the previous point, we know almost nothing about what happened during these periods, especially so for the Bronze Age.

==The appeal of the Dark Age==
How do you like your medieval fantasy? Do you like it to be harsher, grittier and on the cruder side? Then the Dark Ages are a good place to mine for ideas. People in shattered isolated settlements where buildings are rough while a king theoretically reigns but the power lies in the hands of local nobles and knights. Viking raiders on longships searching for gold and thralls raiding who do battle with scruffy knights in dirty scale and mail who are at best but marginally more civilized than the pagan "barbarians" with whom they do battle. Both of which are more likely to preserve their deeds in song than with words written down in books. A few monks copying down a few ancient texts that they can not read for future generations. You can even work in a bit of a post apocalyptic vibe with a Dark Age setting, where people build crude wooden fortresses and barn like halls exist alongside the remains of more impressive structures of stone from a now fallen empire. Civilization once stood here and it might do so again, but now is an age of turmoil and the sword.

Not to say that these guys did not have a creative side, this period is tied in with celtic spiral patterns and tapistries. In general the aesthetics of the time are more abstract than the classical era before it or the high middle ages and renaissance ahead of it.

==Dark inspired Games, Factions and Settings==
This is one of the most used settings in all fantasy. While usually taking a fair degree of artistic liberties, most fantasy authors use the aesthetics of feudalism in one way or another: poor peasants, luxurious (for the time) and corrupt nobility courts stabbing each other in the back, dirty and decrepit cities, barbarians pillaging the remnants of the old empires, a nebulous fight in the frontiers (usually based of the muslim or mongol invasions during the Middle Ages)... The Kingdom of Bretonnia in Warhammer FB is clearly inspired in a late version of the Middle Ages' Kingdom of France and/or England, whereas the Empire is closer to Early Modern Age's Holy Roman Empire. The human kingdoms in The Lord of The Rings also follow a similar aesthetic, although much less grounded in reality and more in fantasy.

{{Skub}}
{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

The Cold War

2020-12-15T03:41:34Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:F837:86D5:E198:595D:

{{topquote|After the end of World War II, the world was split into two -- East and West. This marked the beginning of the era called the Cold War|''[[Metal Gear]] Solid 3: Snake Eater''}}

The European theater of World War II ended with a race by the western allies (mostly the United States because the others were bankrupt after the war) and the Soviet Union to reach central Germany and take over. A result of this was that while the Soviets took the capital and most Germany captures to the east, the west actually held the western half of Germany. During this the United States developed nuclear weapons. While too late to drop on Germany (as originally planned) they wound up using two of them to destroy the [[Japan]]ese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Poor security on nuclear development led to the Soviet Union learning of these before the vice president did. Using their spies they promptly stole knowledge of how to make these weapons themselves.

This wouldn't be much of an issue, as the Soviet Union was an unstable entity trusted by no one (their refusal to honor Russian debts and contracts meant nobody would trade with them, and like the Nazis the Soviet government was also guilty of numerous human rights abuses) on the brink of financial ruin that wasn't even considered a legitimate government internationally. Unfortunately allied World War II strategy was propping them up with money, arms and tech so they could to throw bodies at the Germans. A similiar strategy was followed in China (with the added bonus of the communists using these assets to murder their rivals as well) to throw bodies at the Japanese, which created another large and (eventually, after realizing sparrows ate locust far more than grain and that peasants aren't good steelmakers) powerful communist nation. Now communists controlled a large chunk of the globe and Americans were scared of Communist which frankly was ridicilous as Russian communists didn't care for USA or Western Europe since the death of Lenin and the deposing of Trotsky.

To counter this massive, nuclear armed force the nations of the '''''N'''orth'' '''''A'''tlantic'' signed a '''''T'''reaty'' to create the '''''O'''rganization'' known as NATO in 1949. This military alliance held that any attack against one of them would be an attack against all of them and lead to '''STAN'''dardization '''''AG'''reements'' to ensure compatibility standards all members would meet. These included various steps to ensure compatibility of items like ammo and gas mask filters, but also communications and general conduct like how prisoners are treated. In practice this was mostly a threat of "you attack us, the US nukes you". Due to the whole "North Atlantic" thing Australia, New Zealand and Japan weren't included, though they followed many of the STANAGs and were on the list of places the US would respond with nukes if attacked. The United Kingdom and France would develop nukes of their own within a few year, but most of the threat was still from the American nuclear stockpile.

The two sides realized that any attack would result in Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) due to how many nukes they both had and avoided doing that directly. Instead conflict was conducted through spies and proxy conflicts where, using their newfound power, the communists would prop up other communist revolts across the globe. In response the United States would prop up their opposition, [[Wikipedia:Anastasio Somoza García|regardless of how blatantly evil they were]]. At least twice this went as far as outright military action by both sides during the Korean War and Vietnam War. In response to these proxy wars and people simply leaving their shithole by the millions, the Soviets built a large wall across their western border known as the Berlin Wall. They also had a falling out with the Chinese, which split the two.

MAD would take a new level with the development of '''''I'''nter'''C'''ontinental'' '''''B'''allistic'' '''''M'''issiles''. Developed from the V-2 rocket of Nazi Germany these rockets and their nuclear armed warheads could strike almost anywhere in the globe and ensured even perfect anti-air defense wouldn't stop MAD. Development was facilitated by a "space race" between the Soviet Union and United States. Allegedly a peaceful contest to reach space and put man on the moon first, it was an open secret this was mostly an excuse to develop better rocketry and rocketry guidance while the main point of getting to space was to put spy satellites and weapons there. This interest in space and the demonstration of the awesome power of technology by nuclear bombs would fuel the creation of modern science fiction.

==End of the Cold War==

Eventually this era ended from the Soviet Union imploding than anything else. Already a command economy that is more concerned with building military hardware than economy boosting utilities and consumer goods, its fortunes were often dependent on natural gas and oil exports seeing no one takes its currency seriously. Things first began to fall apart when Russia decided they wanted to have their own Vietnam and invaded Afghanistan, leading the US to support local tribes who eventually [[FAIL|turned Jihadist and would plague the world for the years to come]]. Soviet Union also failed to modernize its bureaucracy into digital systems, ideologically opposed to cybernetics, so importing IBM's and trying to produce replacement parts locally failed, so there's that too. Then a nuclear reactor in the Ukraine exploded so hard [[3.6 Roentgen|you could get your tan on walking fully clothed at night]], and that took about a thousand regiments of the [[Death Korps of Krieg]] to clean up. This was followed by a series of revolutions in Soviet states would lead to East Germany giving up, opening the border and reunifying with West Germany within a year. This caused further turmoil in Russia by a failed coup that lead to the end of the Communist Party and fall of the Soviet Union. With generations that expected the cold war to end in some world sundering conflict, many westerners found "your enemy implodes politically without much direct provocation by you" to be an extremely underwhelming ending, with a CIA official complaining that "instead of a dragon, now we have a jungle of snakes to keep track of". Those on the east of the wall are often a bit annoyed that decades of communism has left their economies severely stunted compared to the west (to this day, decades latter, eastern Germany is still far behind the west economically), and within Russia proper there is nostalgia for the Soviet Union (communism itself less so).

==Legacy of the Cold War==
{{topquote|When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people. That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.|Boris Yeltsin, after vising a Randalls grocery store in Texas}}
Techwise, the main advances of this era for civilians were plastics, aluminum, computers, air flight, satellite (which played a huge role in navigation and communications), and eventually the cellphone. Most of these spawned off military development from the Cold War and/or proceeding World War II.

Plastics existed since the [[Industrial Revolution]], and by [[The World Wars]] had uses in clothing (Nylon) and small, non-moving, components had serious use, but now they had matured enough they were considered a major construction material. Being lightweight, cheap, relatively sturdy for its weight, non-conductive, immune to rust (as well as most other forms of corrosion), able to be made into a wide variety of shapes, and having minimal waste of material during construction with easy recyling of the little that was wasted made plastics were a wonder material.

Similiarly aluminum had continued its falling prices due to increased demand for military applications in and after World War II (it's great for making aircraft out of), and the falling cost of electricity. While aluminum is really common on Earth, without the [[Wikipedia:Hall–Héroult process|Hall–Héroult process]] (and the high amounts of electricity required) and [[Wikipedia:Bayer process|Bayer process]] for refining it, it's near impossible to get pure and previously more precious than gold (hence why the Washington Monument is topped with it), and still energy intense enough it's often cheaper to ship ore to a different country to refine with cheaper electricity and ship it back. By the 1960s people were making disposable cans out of it. In 1956 Eugune Stoner of Armalite invented the AR10, which used plastics and aluminum for large portions of its components and allowed it to be a full pound lighter than other contemporary rifles. Despite early success, military hardware that made extensive use of plastics was derided as "toys" (with persistent and baseless rumors the components really were made by the toy company Mattel) and plastics would not see widespread acceptance for serious applications till after the 1960s. This was not helped by a series of bureaucrats screwing the M16 (a scaled down AR10) over repeatedly, giving it ammo that wad deliberately made wrong, a sub-standard barrel, telling people it didn't need to be cleaned and to reuse the disposable magazines, resulting in a faulty, unreliable weapon cursed by an entire generation.

Titanium similarly fell in price, but its use was limited by requiring magnesium (which actually ''is'' rare) until the 2000s (and that was under patent protection till the late 2010s) and by the largest deposits being on the eastern side of the iron curtain.

The advancements of computers is obvious: You're reading this on one (or were a smart ass and printed it out with one). While early computers were used in World War II to break encryption, their use would become standard during this era. Computers made large scale data computation simple and fast while allowing vast amounts of information to be stored with tiny physical space. Linking together computers in a network for data sharing led to the internet you obtained this text from. By the end of the Cold War and beyond, computers had become so important to life that the late Cold War and beyond are often dubbed the "Information Age" where, like [[Stone Age|stone]] and [[Bronze Age|bronze]] before it, information was the big deal of the day.

==The appeal of the Cold War==
The appeal of the Cold War in fiction comes mostly from the spy game. Since the end of the Cold War, the role of espionage has greatly fallen. If you want to do a work of fiction about spies and don't have a specific setting, it will generally involve the Cold War or at least former Cold War spies.

More generally there's a bit of nostalgia for the west having a clear enemy to stand against and one that, if you weren't a spy, you'd generally see coming. The CIA director after the end of the Cold War told Congress "We have slain a large dragon. But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of." Now the main enemy is one half of politicians and most entrainment production try to ''prevent'' being demonized (regardless of what it does) or being fought seriously. This enemy can kill thousands of civilians in a night and, not being a state, you can't send an army after them in response. You might not even know who did it, even after lengthy and costly investigations, if they don't take credit for it.

There's also appeal in the general military conflict of the era, but this is mostly appeal of the Vietnam War as a setting and appeal of "what if all those cool toys NATO and the Soviets made actually saw use?".

== Cold War inspired Games, Factions and Settings ==
* Anything set in the modern world that was made after 1945 and before 1991.
** [[Call of Cthulhu]]
** [[Ghostbusters RPG]]

== Cold War Gone Hot ==
{{Topquote|Critics might quibble with this depiction of the climatic battle of the Cold War because, while awesome, in real life there was no climatic battle, there was no battle with or without Velociraptors. The Cold War was won without firing a shot.|''Senator Mike Lee''}}
* A nuclear and devastating "World War 3" is in the background of most post-apocalyptic works and [[Star Trek|and a few sci-fi ones]].
* [[Team Yankee]]

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

The World Wars

2020-12-15T03:34:38Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:F837:86D5:E198:595D: /* The War in the East */

{{topquote|War will become rare, but more terrible. [...] That's my horoscope|Arthur Conan Doyle, 1883}}
During the [[Industrial Revolution]], Europe was comparatively peaceful for the most part. The 19th century started with the Napoleonic Wars when Industrialization was building up steam in England and afterwards there were a series of colonial conflicts and small to middling wars between the various industrial powers*. The Civil War was on the upper end of conflicts in this era but was limited to the comparatively sparsely populated US, was still fought with muskets and saw about 600-750,000 people dead. The Franco Prussian war was won in six months (GOTT MIT UNS!), but in a chilling prelude to things to come killed some 180,000 combatants. Things changed in 1914 when Arch Duke Ferdinand was assassinated, starting the Great War, also known as the ''First World War''. This would be followed up by the ''Second World War'' in 1939-45, which largely stemmed from the consequences of the Great War. '''The World Wars''' would spread across the world and saw conflict and destruction beyond anything that was ever seen before or since.

There are two important factors in the World Wars: Technology and Nationalism. Technology is the easier of the two to understand, in the Napoleonic War the average soldier had a flintlock musket that could shoot 2-6 bullets a minute with an effective range of 100 meters, was supported by muzzle loading cannons that could shoot accurately to about 1km and was supplied by ox carts while steam engines were just beginning to propel boats and move loads of coal around mines in England. In 1914 the average soldier had a rifle that could shoot 15-30 bullets a minute (which could go through three men and still be deadly) at ranges of over a kilometer and was backed up by cannons that could fire shells six kilometers or more on ballistic courses which exploded in the air raining a spray of balls over a wide area and machine guns which could shoot 450 bullets a minute and airplanes. By the end of the Great War tanks, Sub Machine Guns and Poison Gas had been added to the arsenal. Tactics devised based on 19th century ideas of fighting were useless on this new battlefield and the book needed to be re-written from page one. Other technologies such as mass production, mechanized farming, railways and automobiles, mass education, telecommunications and modern bureaucracies meant that an Industrial Nation could turn more of it's population into soldiers than any medieval nation could ever hope to do (Rome was hard pressed to keep up a standing army of about 1% of it's population, Germany mobilized nearly 20% during the Great War). Through bloody experience generals gradually put together some idea of how to operate in this new battlefield near the end of the Great War and between the wars they'd continue to build on it with experience in small scale wars. Even so people were still making it up as they went in WWII.

Nationalism is more abstract but just as important. In the Middle Ages, people generally identified themselves as being "a Christian Journeyman Blacksmith from London who's dad is English" or "a Jewish Master Cobbler from Munich who's mom is Sephardic" and so forth (their job, class, religion and hometown, things which they dealt with face to face day to day). If a civil war happened, they and their family were not majorly harmed and they ended up with a new noble house in charge, they would not care too much as long as the new lord upheld his feudal duties. There was a king and he ruled a bunch of land and tried to keep the peace, which was all good but the specifics of this was not a fact which defined them. This began to change with the Protestant Reformation and had a bit of build up through the Age of Enlightenment as propaganda for the masses took form, leading to the birth of nationalism with the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. People began to see their country as more than just where they lived and the guy in a funny hat who ruled them, but rather as a community of people united by common ideas, languages, beliefs, customs, ideals, and (often) ancestry, people who need to band together and set aside their differences to defend what's theirs against those stinking foreigners with their differences. Public education caught on during the Industrial Revolution, which made it possible to give these ideals to everyone from the richest businessman to the lowliest beggar. When you have two nations which have nationalistic populations and governments and other groups fond of egging nationalism on together it does not take much to get them at each others throats and keep them there.

Footnote * The Taiping Rebellion (Not to beconfused with the Boxer rebellion.) in China killed some 20-30 million people, but neither side in it was industrialized beyond buying some foreign weapons to equip some of their troops.

== The First World War ==
Also known as the Great War and the [[derp|War to End All Wars]] (SPOILER ALERT, It wasn't)
.

To understand the beginning of the major, globe-shaking clusterfuck known as the First World War, we must first look at several key issues that preceded it.

The first and probably one of the biggest contributing factors was the race for Empire. During the preceding centuries, imperialism and expansionism became extremely popular among the industrializing and booming nations of western Europe. Entire swathes of Africa and Asia were carved out by global powerhouses such as Great Britain and France, in order to fuel their industry and economy back home, often at the expense of the natives (the treatment of which varied on which European power dominated that particular region, with those under Belgium's sway being the worst off). For a while, the competition was 'merely' a case of rivalry, as each generally avoided the other's territories in order not to repeat disasters like the Seven Years' War or the Napoleonic Wars. Everything was going more or less splendidly (barring some wars of independence in the Balkans against the increasingly corrupt and stagnating Ottoman Empire), until one key event forever shattered the balance of power so carefully put into place by the Congress of Vienna: the unification of Germany by Otto von Bismark (a political genius so astute that he coined the modern term 'realpolitik').

With Germany now unified, it presented a major threat to the established powers of Europe. Not helping matters was the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, looking at Britain with barely restrained jealousy (and a huge trove of mommy and daddy issues further complicated by a deformed arm being shorter than the other due to a difficult birth causing nerve damage) and thus deciding that Germany deserved its own overseas empire and place as top dog. Complicating matters further is the fact that the royalty and nobility of Europe were all largely related to one another. In some ways, this made the coming shitstorm seem more like the biggest family feud in centuries. The race for who controlled the biggest slice of the planet was kicked into overdrive, with factories pumping out new, relatively untested weapons such as the machine gun, the repeating rifle, and the howitzer, while shipyards around Europe churned out awe-inspiring steel battleships and cruisers, complete with the largest cannons mankind had ever seen up to that point.

To counterbalance each other, the great powers formed increasingly complex and entangling military alliances, which coalesced into two pacts- the Triple Entente (France, Britain (Kind Of), and Russia) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Italy, and Austria)

Meanwhile, various nationalist and liberal revolutionary movements were sweeping the continent like a new disease from the Plaguefather. Some of their demands were met, particularly in Britain where the House of Commons gained more power. Other revolutions were violently crushed or flat-out ignored, while still others were successful in their goals through sheer force of arms (Like true comrades). The hardest hit, however, were not the more liberalized and industrious Western nations. Instead, the hardest hit by these successive waves of revolution was none other than the two oldest empires in Europe at that time- Austria and the Ottomans, both of whom were weary, tired states in dire need of reform. While some in both powers saw granting people increasing amounts of autonomy as the way to keep their state from collapsing (such as the formation of the dual monarchy and the recognition of Hungary as an equal partner, transforming the Austrian Empire into Austria-Hungary), others insisted on a more hardline approach, trying to keep the state afloat by using terror. All of this bred resentment, particularly in the Balkans, which increasingly became a powder keg that was waiting for the right spark.

That spark came in the form of the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, at the hands of Gavrilo Princip, who was a member of the infamous Yugoslav nationalist organization, the Black Hand. Austria-Hungary gave an ultimatum to Serbia(Biggest Yugoslav country), which included some frankly ridiculous and cruel terms. When the Serbs rejected a few of these terms, the Austrians took it as a casus belli and declared war on Serbia. In response, Russia declared war on Austria, to which Germany declared war on Russia, to which France declared war on Germany. Germany would then invade the neutral Belgium in an attempt to avoid French fortifications on the border, bringing the British into the conflict.

Thus began a conflict that would last for four bloody long years, see eleven million deaths as the result of horrific industrial warfare in the trenches and bombed-out fields, diseases such as the flu, and the breakup of several empires to form new nations. Truly, an entire generation of Europe's men was destroyed as a result (and is commonly known as the [[Grimdark|Lost Generation]] today) and gave rise to later extremist philosophies, the proponents of whom were all too eager to amass power for themselves by blaming their nation's misfortunes on the subversive "other." And while the civilian losses were nowhere near that of the Second World War, they were significant on both fronts, especially in Belgium where the Imperial German Army exercised collective punishment against villages suspected of harboring partisans.

While the average citizen didn't give much of a damn about the alliance system and the bickering of a bunch of politicians over some dispute halfway across the continent, the government of each country knew they had to sell the "necessity" of the war to their citizens. Propaganda from both sides painted the enemy nations as barbaric, inhuman war criminals who had to be stopped to prevent the devastation that would follow if they were allowed to go unopposed. They also reassured the public that, with their obvious technological superiority, the war would be quick and soldiers would return home by Christmas. While this illusion could be maintained with the civilians population, the soldiers sent to the front lines were quickly disillusioned by the horrors that they saw. Morale was so bad that the Russians overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and eventually came to be led by the [[Communism|Bolsheviks]] under Vladimir Lenin, and the French nearly did the same as mass mutinies broke out in the French army. Had the Americans not joined on the Allies' side to swing the war in their favor, it's likely that even more revolutions could have taken place.

Terrifying new weapons of war earned their fearsome reputation in this conflict. Machine guns and air-burst artillery shells rendered the old tactics of Napoleonic warfare suicidal, while mustard gas and the like created a new age of massive destruction. Tanks made their first debut in this war, slowly rumbling forth like invincible metal monsters, shrugging off most resistance and dealing punishing firepower themselves, only to breakdown in the middle of the battle due to being rudimentary designs. The airplane, as well, saw use in a combat role, and it would swiftly become an invaluable strategic and tactical tool, for he who dominated the skies dominated the flow of battle.

The bloodiest war in human history up to that point ended with Germany's surrender at 11:00 A.M, on November 11th, 1918, after being exhausted, starving, and dangerously close to collapse in the face of a communist uprising. The irony is that despite the announced end of the conflict, soldiers continued to fight tooth and nail to the last minute, desperately hoping that whatever few yards they could seize would somehow bring the negotiations in their countries' favor, as in the fighting continued until literally seconds before 11 AM where an American soldier who was demoted made a suicide charge on a machine gun and a Canadian guy got sniped.

=== The Punitive Expedition ===
While the United States of America sat the early part of the war out, it was not without armed conflict of its own. In 1916 failed Mexican revolutionary Francisco "Pancho" Villa launched an unprovoked attack on US settlement of Columbus, New Mexico that killed 26 Americans. The actual reasons are unclear, but seizing supplies, and/or a ploy to get the US Government to involve themselves in the revolution and wreck everything are common guesses. In response, the US sent troops into Mexico to retaliate against Villa. While the conflict was small scale, it ensured the US didn't enter the Great War totally blind to modern warfare as everyone else had. In fact, it was in this conflict that future superstar General Patton got a taste of the new vehicle-based warfare that he would become famous for.

== The Interwar ==
{{topquote|This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.|Ferdinand Foch, 1919}}
Knowing that the world could not endure another such war, US president Woodrow Wilson made it his mission to set the groundwork for long-term peace (between whites at least); he set fourth what he called the Fourteen Points, a set of foreign policy doctrines that would address many of the underlying issues behind WWI and promote better diplomacy and cooperation between nations, with its biggest selling point being the League of Nations. The Germans thought that this was actually a pretty neat idea, and were hoping to agree to these terms during the upcoming peace conference. Fortunately, none of Wilson's allies bought into his vague ideas, and slowly he was forced to compromise on all his policies just so he could get the League of Nations established (Even shittier proto-United Nations). Ironically, Wilson failed to convince the US to join the League of Nations, partly due to alienating his Republican opponents in congress, as they weren't convinced that this League wasn't completely useless, or worse, just another military alliance that would suck them into another European War. Without the US to back it, and with little power to enforce peace resolutions, the League pretty quickly collapsed in the lead-up to WWII, as the pissed off Germans had been assigned full blame for the war and wanted revenge.

Near the end of the first World War, the world was thrown into yet another cataclysm. The Spanish Flu, named such because neutral Spain was the only place that paid much attention to it over the ongoing war, spread rapidly and killed many thanks to the conditions caused by the war (overcrowding, especially in transport ships for returning soldiers, malnourishment, etc.). The death toll was horrendous, with the minimum estimate of 50 million being over double the entire war's death toll. After this, Europe needed decades to recover from the horrible destruction the war and flu had caused. Various post war conflicts continued in the regional level, most famously the Anatolian conflict between Greece, Armenia, French Colonial Forces and the nationalist wings of the Ottoman military that revolted under Mustafa Kemal's regime. The latter won after deals with Armenia (which was not ratified as the Soviets nommed them, the new regime made another treaty which was officially ratified and guaranteed by the Soviets) and France, while Greece was rather soundly defeated. After another peace treaty with the Allies at Lausanne and the nationalist regime reforming into a Republic and abolishing the monarch and caliphate, the local wars pretty much ended barring minor border disputes and posturing. The rest of the world wasn't so lucky.

America, however, was having its best years ever. The Washington Naval Treaty had Britain officially cede the position of Earth’s mightiest navy, which the Royal Navy held for centuries, by recognizing the US Navy’s power as at least equal to it. The so called "Roaring Twenties" saw a rapid increase in the standard of living. President Harding managed to do the impossible and eliminate the deficit, though some of his appointees trying to sell [[Wikipedia:Teapot Rock|some government owned rock in the middle of nowhere]] marred his legacy (looking back historians realize there's a lack of evidence suggesting he had any knowledge or involvement though that isn't really a compliment, you do need to pay attention when you are damn head of state). The American economy of the time was doing well; unlike the other powers of Europe, it had not been strained extensively by being in a war economy for four years that strained productivity, had prime farmland turned into no man's land like France, its economy pushed to the breaking point like Germany, broken up into squabbling states like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or had all of that and was taken over by communists after a civil war (with some like Turkey as aforementioned getting lucky and successfully reforming), while having basically everyone in Europe owe American bankers to pay for the war.

After Harding's death during the scandal, his Vice-President, Calvin Coolidge, took over. This was rather sudden and Coolidge was sworn in during the middle of the night by his father on the family Bible, with his first act was to pray to God to bless the American people and give him the strength to lead them. Unlike Harding, Coolidge proved wildly popular despite (or because of) his quiet nature. His economic policies really kicked off the Roaring Twenties and he was popular enough he was elected by a landslide in an election ''he didn't campaign for'' (this was common in American politics at the time, it was considered undignified to campaign for yourself). Coolidge continued Harding's deficit free budgets to the point the US was able to repay most of the national debt. Despite his wild popularity, Coolidge shocked the world with his announcement that [[Wikipedia:I do not choose to run|"I do not choose to run"]] for reelection and, true to his nature, did not really explain why (he would later elaborate in his autobiography that he did not wish to break the (then unofficial) rule set by Washington of a max of two terms among other issues). He would be followed by Herbert Hoover, who largely rode on his success (justifiably though; Hoover had been Commerce Secretary for 8 years). This would change in October of 1929 when the stock market crashed and ushered in the Great Depression.

There had been a series of stock market crashes through the the 19th century in the US every decade or so, each with increasing severity and effects in the US as more people moved into cities and were more dependent on wages. The 1920s saw a rise in consumer culture, payment plans, investment by common people, loans for buying stock with, and a lot of scams which culminated in the biggest crash yet. Moreover, since the US was now linked to a bunch of other countries thanks to improved communications, trade, transportation, and so forth, the crash not only tanked the US economy, but that of basically every other developed country save for the USSR under Stalin (which had its own Stalin-related problems, and boy were they big problems), which further hindered recovery. It also didn't help that large swaths of Europe were still battle scarred wastelands useless for agriculture, an entire generation of young working men had been killed or crippled, and that the formerly super-productive Germany was now teetering with an ineffectual government and crippling reparations to pay. Throw in a crushing multi-year drought in the United States that ruined harvests across wholes states and the stage is set for chaos.

The old ways of dealing with things did not work and people turned to new ideas. In the US, this was various public works projects and assistance programs, collectively called the New Deal, to get people back working and build confidence in the economy and financial regulations. Similar ideas were tried in England, Australia and the UK. It should be noted that afterwards there was no major economic setbacks until 2008 after New Deal era financial regulations were pulled. In Germany, the response was more severe and was seen as a failure of democracy, which contributed to the rise of socialist parties like the KPD and SPD which in turn led to the Nazi (National Socialists German Workers Party) party to counter them (possibly with help from western powers seeking a wall against communism) with a newfound hate of the Allies thanks to the colossal reparations to the rest of Europe that Germany had been forced to pay in the Treaty of Versailles. Responding to the collapse gave the Nazis the political currency to get into power, stimulate the economy by gearing it up to war and made the UK less willing to intervene to stop them while they were rising due to nobody wanting to be the one to start another war. And ideals of peace and disarmamemt certainly somewhat popular in the UK and France.

To their credit, in the mid 30's the Nazis did appear to be doing good things, even if there was a clear air of racial supremacy about the whole affair. Europe was collectively terrified of Marxism, and a nation that was forcefully rebuilding and modernizing itself without resorting to collectivization was tolerated by the French and British out of fear of the alternative. Between constructing the autobahn, hosting the olympics, and achieving a number of engineering feats such as the first practical helicopter, Germany appeared to be getting shit done. So nobody was too disturbed when Germany started making noises about reunifying some Germanic peoples in border regions they'd ceded in the Treaty...

== The Second World War ==

=== The War in the West ===
See also [[Nazi]]s

With Poland unwilling to roll over before the Nazis, the Nazis securing a ceasefire with Soviet Russia and with Britain and France finally stirred to the defense of Poland, it was clear that war was inevitable and so, on September 1st 1939, after creating a false-flag incident to offer the thinnest fig leaf of legality (and also dispose of a few dissenting Germans on the Nazis' hitlist) Germany struck at Poland. Two days later on September 3rd Britain and France declared war on Germany. Contrary to the popular imagination, Poland did not simply crumble before the German onslaught, and the myth of Polish cavalry trying to charge German tanks was yet another piece of propaganda. But after a month of hard fighting, with the Soviets entering the war on the German side and striking Poland in the rear, Poland finally gave in to the inevitable.

=== The War in the East ===
Since at least 1853, when Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Harbor, the Japanese feared the day when the powers of Europe would stomp all over them like they did China. In response they began building up their industrial base, importing guns, ships, factory machinery, engineers, textbooks, and professors. Some Japanese people came to the idea that the best way to fend off imperialism was to become imperialists themselves, and they began gobbling up their neighbors from the late 19th century onward (at first, in the name of liberating them and creating a "Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere", but with more brutality and for more obviously selfish reasons as time went on). They kept this going into the 20th century (when this sort of behavior was finally falling out of fashion among the Western powers, especially after WWI), by which time the military had become central to Japanese politics. In 1931, they invaded Manchuria, and invaded China in 1937, killing millions as they went(four times the death toll of the Holocaust to be precise, something that is largely ignored in light of Holocaust itself and Japan's contemporary PR effort). The rest of the world was outraged and cut Japan off from trade, which caused them to dig their heels in and keep it up, lest they be perceived as paper tigers. Tensions built until eventually the US threatened to cut off the oil Japan needed to keep their massive fleet running, and the overconfident Army managed to push the Imperial Japanese Navy into launching an attack on the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor (timed to hit approximately 30 minutes after delivering the declaration of war, thus [[Rules lawyer|effectively being a surprise attack without technically being a surprise attack]]).

The idea was that if everything went right, the fickle American public would be dismayed by the prospect of a hard fight over distant lands (especially while contemplating joining the war in Europe), the IJN could seize control of the Pacific while the crippled US fleet was out of action, and the US would be left with no choice but negotiation. However, while the Pearl Harbor attack did work pretty well and they did overrun a lot of Allied holdings around Asia, they missed all but one of the US carriers which only suffered minor damaged, enraged an American public that was previously tepid on war (especially since mistakes delayed even the planned token warning), and the fact was that the US had more than 10 times the Industry that Japan did as well as plenty of fuel. They also aligned themselves with the Nazis, based on shared enemies and ultra-Imperialist/Nationalist ideologies, but thus reinforcing the narrative of them being a part of the barbaric Forces of Evil who needed to be completely defeated for the sake of the civilized world.

As time went on, and with some shaky starts, the Allies quickly learned how to rely on carriers instead of traditional battleship tactics, a lucky and devastating win at the Battle of Midway put the IJN on the back foot, now finding themselves as the proverbial one legged man in an ass kicking contest with the cream of Japanese carrier aviation at the bottom of the Pacific. Ferocious naval engagements gave way as the star of the show to even more brutal amphibious warfare as the Marines began their island hopping campaign across the Pacific, painfully prying each strategically important Japanese occupied island from their well dug in defenders. The jungle, cave and amphibious warfare of this stage of the campaign was especially horrific even by World War 2 standards, not helped by racism against the Japanese on the part of Americans and the racism against everyone crossed with the suicidal fanaticism of the Japanese further exacerbating this. The IJN also set up various military units for holding prisoners and scientific experiments - best exemplified by Unit 731 - which gave Auschwitz a run for their money on crimes against humanity, the only difference being the lack of a genocidal goal.

One major note from a wargaming perspective in this theater is Operation Ten Go, the last sortie of the IJN against the US military forces invading Okinawa. The largest battleship made by human hands, the Yamato, and her support fleet, sortied... and were promptly destroyed by massed American air power. Thus proving the change in the IRL meta of naval warfare to carrier dominance, which has endured to this day.

=== The Manhattan Project ===
At the tail end of the 19th century, scientists began to work out some odd properties of matter, which eventually got them to realize that splitting atomic nuclei after processing Uranium in a cyclotron releases millions of times more energy than an equivalent mass of a chemical reaction. Naturally, instead of using it as cheap energy first, people thought "How can we weaponize this?" Such a weapon would be a game changer for warfare (less for the raw destruction it would cause, since firebombing cities was already horrifyingly effective, but because it would only take one bomber getting through air defenses to do the job instead of dozens or hundreds), and the Nazis getting it first would be an intolerable state of affairs. As such the Brits and the Americans pooled their scientific and industrial resources at Los Alamos to work out how to build a bomb. 20000 '''tons''' of silver wiring were built to enrich the Uranium into something that will recreate a small sun for a brief moment.

They were not ready in time to use it against the Nazis, but the first two were dropped on Japan to convince them that they wouldn't be able to fight to the stalemate they were now aiming for, thus ending the war quickly at the cost of a few hundred thousand Japanese civilians, rather than a long and costly slog that would potentially result in millions dead if the fanatical Japanese military forced it through to completion (including both the Japanese civilians who would be mobilized into militias and untold American service members). Some accounts also say it was intended to intimidate the Soviet Union, but since the Russians ended up nicking the research data (supposedly, Stalin knew that the Manhattan Project succeeded before Truman), this just paved the way for the nuclear stalemate known as [[the Cold War]].

== The appeal of the World Wars ==
These are the biggest armed conflicts of world history, rolling across continents using modern weapons, from tanks to planes to automatic weapons. Modern War was born in the trenches of the Somme, in the skies above London and over the fields of Poland during the Blitzkrieg, the flanking in France, the naval bombardment and air bombing in the Pacific, the hell in the Eastern front cities, in the bombing of Europe from the air, in the atomic fire of Hiroshima and Japan. We entered the century and went 14 years thinking everything was right and as great as it could be. Thirty years, a war, a pandemic, an economic crash, another war and several genocides later the man who was born into the first large scale factories witnessed the power of the atom burn the hopes and dreams of two cities.

Of the two wars, World War One gets relatively little media attention and what little it does get is somber. Part of that is because it's hard to craft a heroic action-packed adventure out of the hopeless horror of trench warfare, the other part is that the morality of the war is very, very grey. There was no clear right side, with both the Central and Allied powers equally chomping at the bit for a fight (at least to start with), and ready to start shooting for ''any'' convenient reason. When some angry Illyrians in the Balkans finally set everything off, the ''only'' motivation the common people had (besides being drafted and having no choice anyway) to go fight was the extensive propaganda campaigns telling them how totally awful for realsies the enemy was, and anyone asking questions or doubting was shut down ''hard''. When it was all over the country blamed and punished for the whole mess wasn't even the one that started it (in fact, the country that actually started it made bank off the entire thing. Germany was still the one to go to war with Belgium and get the British involved so they could certainly take some blame.) All told, the First World War is largely seen as a great tragedy, and is widely considered a wasteful war as winnings were slim on the Allied side. If Russia didn't get involved or if the Axis didn't go for Belgium or if Italy either started under the allies or stayed in the axis or if Italy was the cause of WW1 as it likely would have been depending on how things would have continued in AH if the either the Duke dying didn't result in a war or if the Duke was never assassinated a war with one side getting a much greater victory could have transpired.

Probably one of the only noble (and almost certainly the cleanest) aspects of WW1 was the war in the air, where fighter pilots were effectively chivalric knights of the sky. One famous example was Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron), easily the most famous Ace fighter of the war, with 80 victories to his name in his distinctive red tri-plane (which only accounted for his last 17). He was so well respected among his adversaries that when he was finally shot down, the Allied officers who recovered his body buried him with full honors, including an honor guard and gun salute. This didn't stop the ruthless pragmatism, a few pilots even publicly boasted of shooting down parachuting airmen to prevent them from returning to the fight.

Another event stands out known as the Christmas Truce; early on in the war, troops on the Western Front pretty quickly realized that the guys they were shooting at didn’t want to be there any more than they did, and agreed to a ceasefire to celebrate Christmas. When the truce looked like it was going to last, commanders put a kibosh on the whole thing and told them to start fighting again and even cracked down on small mutinies arising. Another such truce would never happen as the fighting became more destructive, as poison gas attacks and tank assaults made each side far more wary of the other.

The Second World War is a much more palatable conflict of more or less Good vs Evil, with both the Nazis and Imperial Japan going out to conquer their respective hemispheres of the world and exterminating millions as key objectives and Italy playing the incompetent sidekick/comic relief which isn't too far off the truth in a series of spectacular displays of military incompetence on the part of Mussolini and his generals. The Axis Powers provided a clear and easy villain for the rest of the world to rally against (as well as providing easy media villains for the rest of the century and into the next millennium). The far more mobile and urban warfare of WW2 also allowed for more personal initiative and heroism, and stories of the extraordinary accomplishments of individual squads, or even individual soldiers, are far more commonplace here than they were back in WW1, when individual men or units had no real hope of making a difference, no matter what they did (mind, it was still industrial weight and technology that won the war, but it is far easier to remember Simo Hayha than say, Alvin York).

As a result, a solid majority of [[Alternate History]] fiction is set in WWII one way or another. Even if WWI (or any of the many, many 19th Century to 1913 events and trends that lead to it) is the point of divergence, the story is likely to be in the late interwar to WWII periods.

== World War inspired Games, Factions and Settings ==
* A lot of stuff from the [[Imperium of Man]], especially the Death Korps of Krieg.
* [[Dieselpunk]] is the WWII equivalent of Steampunk. If you like the general aesthetics and mood of the time period but don’t want to be limited by the period’s technology, or perhaps want to see what would happen if the Nazi “Wunderwaffen” had been fully realized, this is the setting for you.
* [[Bolt Action]], [[Flames of War]], and other similar military tabletop games are set in WWII.
* [[Star Wars]] takes a great deal of inspiration from this time period, and in regards to the prequels, it especially takes a lot of inspiration from the transformation of the democratic-but-ineffectual Weimar Republic into the nightmarishly totalitarian Third Reich (though it was also influenced by the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire).
* Indiana Jones. Do we need to explain this?
* The 1920+ universe, inspired by the art of Jakub Rozalski, envisions an alternate Europe where Nikola Tesla’s super science lead to the development of Mechs as the dominant war machine. Best known for the RTS game “Iron Harvest” that pits Imperial Germany, Imperial Russia, and Poland in a version of WWI with WWII elements mixed in. Even Rasputin makes an appearance as the leader of a shadowy cabal looking to seize power by fomenting revolution in all three factions and take over Tesla’s super-advanced city-state.

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[[Category: History]]

The World Wars

2020-12-15T03:33:25Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:F837:86D5:E198:595D: /* The War in the East */

{{topquote|War will become rare, but more terrible. [...] That's my horoscope|Arthur Conan Doyle, 1883}}
During the [[Industrial Revolution]], Europe was comparatively peaceful for the most part. The 19th century started with the Napoleonic Wars when Industrialization was building up steam in England and afterwards there were a series of colonial conflicts and small to middling wars between the various industrial powers*. The Civil War was on the upper end of conflicts in this era but was limited to the comparatively sparsely populated US, was still fought with muskets and saw about 600-750,000 people dead. The Franco Prussian war was won in six months (GOTT MIT UNS!), but in a chilling prelude to things to come killed some 180,000 combatants. Things changed in 1914 when Arch Duke Ferdinand was assassinated, starting the Great War, also known as the ''First World War''. This would be followed up by the ''Second World War'' in 1939-45, which largely stemmed from the consequences of the Great War. '''The World Wars''' would spread across the world and saw conflict and destruction beyond anything that was ever seen before or since.

There are two important factors in the World Wars: Technology and Nationalism. Technology is the easier of the two to understand, in the Napoleonic War the average soldier had a flintlock musket that could shoot 2-6 bullets a minute with an effective range of 100 meters, was supported by muzzle loading cannons that could shoot accurately to about 1km and was supplied by ox carts while steam engines were just beginning to propel boats and move loads of coal around mines in England. In 1914 the average soldier had a rifle that could shoot 15-30 bullets a minute (which could go through three men and still be deadly) at ranges of over a kilometer and was backed up by cannons that could fire shells six kilometers or more on ballistic courses which exploded in the air raining a spray of balls over a wide area and machine guns which could shoot 450 bullets a minute and airplanes. By the end of the Great War tanks, Sub Machine Guns and Poison Gas had been added to the arsenal. Tactics devised based on 19th century ideas of fighting were useless on this new battlefield and the book needed to be re-written from page one. Other technologies such as mass production, mechanized farming, railways and automobiles, mass education, telecommunications and modern bureaucracies meant that an Industrial Nation could turn more of it's population into soldiers than any medieval nation could ever hope to do (Rome was hard pressed to keep up a standing army of about 1% of it's population, Germany mobilized nearly 20% during the Great War). Through bloody experience generals gradually put together some idea of how to operate in this new battlefield near the end of the Great War and between the wars they'd continue to build on it with experience in small scale wars. Even so people were still making it up as they went in WWII.

Nationalism is more abstract but just as important. In the Middle Ages, people generally identified themselves as being "a Christian Journeyman Blacksmith from London who's dad is English" or "a Jewish Master Cobbler from Munich who's mom is Sephardic" and so forth (their job, class, religion and hometown, things which they dealt with face to face day to day). If a civil war happened, they and their family were not majorly harmed and they ended up with a new noble house in charge, they would not care too much as long as the new lord upheld his feudal duties. There was a king and he ruled a bunch of land and tried to keep the peace, which was all good but the specifics of this was not a fact which defined them. This began to change with the Protestant Reformation and had a bit of build up through the Age of Enlightenment as propaganda for the masses took form, leading to the birth of nationalism with the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. People began to see their country as more than just where they lived and the guy in a funny hat who ruled them, but rather as a community of people united by common ideas, languages, beliefs, customs, ideals, and (often) ancestry, people who need to band together and set aside their differences to defend what's theirs against those stinking foreigners with their differences. Public education caught on during the Industrial Revolution, which made it possible to give these ideals to everyone from the richest businessman to the lowliest beggar. When you have two nations which have nationalistic populations and governments and other groups fond of egging nationalism on together it does not take much to get them at each others throats and keep them there.

Footnote * The Taiping Rebellion (Not to beconfused with the Boxer rebellion.) in China killed some 20-30 million people, but neither side in it was industrialized beyond buying some foreign weapons to equip some of their troops.

== The First World War ==
Also known as the Great War and the [[derp|War to End All Wars]] (SPOILER ALERT, It wasn't)
.

To understand the beginning of the major, globe-shaking clusterfuck known as the First World War, we must first look at several key issues that preceded it.

The first and probably one of the biggest contributing factors was the race for Empire. During the preceding centuries, imperialism and expansionism became extremely popular among the industrializing and booming nations of western Europe. Entire swathes of Africa and Asia were carved out by global powerhouses such as Great Britain and France, in order to fuel their industry and economy back home, often at the expense of the natives (the treatment of which varied on which European power dominated that particular region, with those under Belgium's sway being the worst off). For a while, the competition was 'merely' a case of rivalry, as each generally avoided the other's territories in order not to repeat disasters like the Seven Years' War or the Napoleonic Wars. Everything was going more or less splendidly (barring some wars of independence in the Balkans against the increasingly corrupt and stagnating Ottoman Empire), until one key event forever shattered the balance of power so carefully put into place by the Congress of Vienna: the unification of Germany by Otto von Bismark (a political genius so astute that he coined the modern term 'realpolitik').

With Germany now unified, it presented a major threat to the established powers of Europe. Not helping matters was the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, looking at Britain with barely restrained jealousy (and a huge trove of mommy and daddy issues further complicated by a deformed arm being shorter than the other due to a difficult birth causing nerve damage) and thus deciding that Germany deserved its own overseas empire and place as top dog. Complicating matters further is the fact that the royalty and nobility of Europe were all largely related to one another. In some ways, this made the coming shitstorm seem more like the biggest family feud in centuries. The race for who controlled the biggest slice of the planet was kicked into overdrive, with factories pumping out new, relatively untested weapons such as the machine gun, the repeating rifle, and the howitzer, while shipyards around Europe churned out awe-inspiring steel battleships and cruisers, complete with the largest cannons mankind had ever seen up to that point.

To counterbalance each other, the great powers formed increasingly complex and entangling military alliances, which coalesced into two pacts- the Triple Entente (France, Britain (Kind Of), and Russia) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Italy, and Austria)

Meanwhile, various nationalist and liberal revolutionary movements were sweeping the continent like a new disease from the Plaguefather. Some of their demands were met, particularly in Britain where the House of Commons gained more power. Other revolutions were violently crushed or flat-out ignored, while still others were successful in their goals through sheer force of arms (Like true comrades). The hardest hit, however, were not the more liberalized and industrious Western nations. Instead, the hardest hit by these successive waves of revolution was none other than the two oldest empires in Europe at that time- Austria and the Ottomans, both of whom were weary, tired states in dire need of reform. While some in both powers saw granting people increasing amounts of autonomy as the way to keep their state from collapsing (such as the formation of the dual monarchy and the recognition of Hungary as an equal partner, transforming the Austrian Empire into Austria-Hungary), others insisted on a more hardline approach, trying to keep the state afloat by using terror. All of this bred resentment, particularly in the Balkans, which increasingly became a powder keg that was waiting for the right spark.

That spark came in the form of the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, at the hands of Gavrilo Princip, who was a member of the infamous Yugoslav nationalist organization, the Black Hand. Austria-Hungary gave an ultimatum to Serbia(Biggest Yugoslav country), which included some frankly ridiculous and cruel terms. When the Serbs rejected a few of these terms, the Austrians took it as a casus belli and declared war on Serbia. In response, Russia declared war on Austria, to which Germany declared war on Russia, to which France declared war on Germany. Germany would then invade the neutral Belgium in an attempt to avoid French fortifications on the border, bringing the British into the conflict.

Thus began a conflict that would last for four bloody long years, see eleven million deaths as the result of horrific industrial warfare in the trenches and bombed-out fields, diseases such as the flu, and the breakup of several empires to form new nations. Truly, an entire generation of Europe's men was destroyed as a result (and is commonly known as the [[Grimdark|Lost Generation]] today) and gave rise to later extremist philosophies, the proponents of whom were all too eager to amass power for themselves by blaming their nation's misfortunes on the subversive "other." And while the civilian losses were nowhere near that of the Second World War, they were significant on both fronts, especially in Belgium where the Imperial German Army exercised collective punishment against villages suspected of harboring partisans.

While the average citizen didn't give much of a damn about the alliance system and the bickering of a bunch of politicians over some dispute halfway across the continent, the government of each country knew they had to sell the "necessity" of the war to their citizens. Propaganda from both sides painted the enemy nations as barbaric, inhuman war criminals who had to be stopped to prevent the devastation that would follow if they were allowed to go unopposed. They also reassured the public that, with their obvious technological superiority, the war would be quick and soldiers would return home by Christmas. While this illusion could be maintained with the civilians population, the soldiers sent to the front lines were quickly disillusioned by the horrors that they saw. Morale was so bad that the Russians overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and eventually came to be led by the [[Communism|Bolsheviks]] under Vladimir Lenin, and the French nearly did the same as mass mutinies broke out in the French army. Had the Americans not joined on the Allies' side to swing the war in their favor, it's likely that even more revolutions could have taken place.

Terrifying new weapons of war earned their fearsome reputation in this conflict. Machine guns and air-burst artillery shells rendered the old tactics of Napoleonic warfare suicidal, while mustard gas and the like created a new age of massive destruction. Tanks made their first debut in this war, slowly rumbling forth like invincible metal monsters, shrugging off most resistance and dealing punishing firepower themselves, only to breakdown in the middle of the battle due to being rudimentary designs. The airplane, as well, saw use in a combat role, and it would swiftly become an invaluable strategic and tactical tool, for he who dominated the skies dominated the flow of battle.

The bloodiest war in human history up to that point ended with Germany's surrender at 11:00 A.M, on November 11th, 1918, after being exhausted, starving, and dangerously close to collapse in the face of a communist uprising. The irony is that despite the announced end of the conflict, soldiers continued to fight tooth and nail to the last minute, desperately hoping that whatever few yards they could seize would somehow bring the negotiations in their countries' favor, as in the fighting continued until literally seconds before 11 AM where an American soldier who was demoted made a suicide charge on a machine gun and a Canadian guy got sniped.

=== The Punitive Expedition ===
While the United States of America sat the early part of the war out, it was not without armed conflict of its own. In 1916 failed Mexican revolutionary Francisco "Pancho" Villa launched an unprovoked attack on US settlement of Columbus, New Mexico that killed 26 Americans. The actual reasons are unclear, but seizing supplies, and/or a ploy to get the US Government to involve themselves in the revolution and wreck everything are common guesses. In response, the US sent troops into Mexico to retaliate against Villa. While the conflict was small scale, it ensured the US didn't enter the Great War totally blind to modern warfare as everyone else had. In fact, it was in this conflict that future superstar General Patton got a taste of the new vehicle-based warfare that he would become famous for.

== The Interwar ==
{{topquote|This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.|Ferdinand Foch, 1919}}
Knowing that the world could not endure another such war, US president Woodrow Wilson made it his mission to set the groundwork for long-term peace (between whites at least); he set fourth what he called the Fourteen Points, a set of foreign policy doctrines that would address many of the underlying issues behind WWI and promote better diplomacy and cooperation between nations, with its biggest selling point being the League of Nations. The Germans thought that this was actually a pretty neat idea, and were hoping to agree to these terms during the upcoming peace conference. Fortunately, none of Wilson's allies bought into his vague ideas, and slowly he was forced to compromise on all his policies just so he could get the League of Nations established (Even shittier proto-United Nations). Ironically, Wilson failed to convince the US to join the League of Nations, partly due to alienating his Republican opponents in congress, as they weren't convinced that this League wasn't completely useless, or worse, just another military alliance that would suck them into another European War. Without the US to back it, and with little power to enforce peace resolutions, the League pretty quickly collapsed in the lead-up to WWII, as the pissed off Germans had been assigned full blame for the war and wanted revenge.

Near the end of the first World War, the world was thrown into yet another cataclysm. The Spanish Flu, named such because neutral Spain was the only place that paid much attention to it over the ongoing war, spread rapidly and killed many thanks to the conditions caused by the war (overcrowding, especially in transport ships for returning soldiers, malnourishment, etc.). The death toll was horrendous, with the minimum estimate of 50 million being over double the entire war's death toll. After this, Europe needed decades to recover from the horrible destruction the war and flu had caused. Various post war conflicts continued in the regional level, most famously the Anatolian conflict between Greece, Armenia, French Colonial Forces and the nationalist wings of the Ottoman military that revolted under Mustafa Kemal's regime. The latter won after deals with Armenia (which was not ratified as the Soviets nommed them, the new regime made another treaty which was officially ratified and guaranteed by the Soviets) and France, while Greece was rather soundly defeated. After another peace treaty with the Allies at Lausanne and the nationalist regime reforming into a Republic and abolishing the monarch and caliphate, the local wars pretty much ended barring minor border disputes and posturing. The rest of the world wasn't so lucky.

America, however, was having its best years ever. The Washington Naval Treaty had Britain officially cede the position of Earth’s mightiest navy, which the Royal Navy held for centuries, by recognizing the US Navy’s power as at least equal to it. The so called "Roaring Twenties" saw a rapid increase in the standard of living. President Harding managed to do the impossible and eliminate the deficit, though some of his appointees trying to sell [[Wikipedia:Teapot Rock|some government owned rock in the middle of nowhere]] marred his legacy (looking back historians realize there's a lack of evidence suggesting he had any knowledge or involvement though that isn't really a compliment, you do need to pay attention when you are damn head of state). The American economy of the time was doing well; unlike the other powers of Europe, it had not been strained extensively by being in a war economy for four years that strained productivity, had prime farmland turned into no man's land like France, its economy pushed to the breaking point like Germany, broken up into squabbling states like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or had all of that and was taken over by communists after a civil war (with some like Turkey as aforementioned getting lucky and successfully reforming), while having basically everyone in Europe owe American bankers to pay for the war.

After Harding's death during the scandal, his Vice-President, Calvin Coolidge, took over. This was rather sudden and Coolidge was sworn in during the middle of the night by his father on the family Bible, with his first act was to pray to God to bless the American people and give him the strength to lead them. Unlike Harding, Coolidge proved wildly popular despite (or because of) his quiet nature. His economic policies really kicked off the Roaring Twenties and he was popular enough he was elected by a landslide in an election ''he didn't campaign for'' (this was common in American politics at the time, it was considered undignified to campaign for yourself). Coolidge continued Harding's deficit free budgets to the point the US was able to repay most of the national debt. Despite his wild popularity, Coolidge shocked the world with his announcement that [[Wikipedia:I do not choose to run|"I do not choose to run"]] for reelection and, true to his nature, did not really explain why (he would later elaborate in his autobiography that he did not wish to break the (then unofficial) rule set by Washington of a max of two terms among other issues). He would be followed by Herbert Hoover, who largely rode on his success (justifiably though; Hoover had been Commerce Secretary for 8 years). This would change in October of 1929 when the stock market crashed and ushered in the Great Depression.

There had been a series of stock market crashes through the the 19th century in the US every decade or so, each with increasing severity and effects in the US as more people moved into cities and were more dependent on wages. The 1920s saw a rise in consumer culture, payment plans, investment by common people, loans for buying stock with, and a lot of scams which culminated in the biggest crash yet. Moreover, since the US was now linked to a bunch of other countries thanks to improved communications, trade, transportation, and so forth, the crash not only tanked the US economy, but that of basically every other developed country save for the USSR under Stalin (which had its own Stalin-related problems, and boy were they big problems), which further hindered recovery. It also didn't help that large swaths of Europe were still battle scarred wastelands useless for agriculture, an entire generation of young working men had been killed or crippled, and that the formerly super-productive Germany was now teetering with an ineffectual government and crippling reparations to pay. Throw in a crushing multi-year drought in the United States that ruined harvests across wholes states and the stage is set for chaos.

The old ways of dealing with things did not work and people turned to new ideas. In the US, this was various public works projects and assistance programs, collectively called the New Deal, to get people back working and build confidence in the economy and financial regulations. Similar ideas were tried in England, Australia and the UK. It should be noted that afterwards there was no major economic setbacks until 2008 after New Deal era financial regulations were pulled. In Germany, the response was more severe and was seen as a failure of democracy, which contributed to the rise of socialist parties like the KPD and SPD which in turn led to the Nazi (National Socialists German Workers Party) party to counter them (possibly with help from western powers seeking a wall against communism) with a newfound hate of the Allies thanks to the colossal reparations to the rest of Europe that Germany had been forced to pay in the Treaty of Versailles. Responding to the collapse gave the Nazis the political currency to get into power, stimulate the economy by gearing it up to war and made the UK less willing to intervene to stop them while they were rising due to nobody wanting to be the one to start another war. And ideals of peace and disarmamemt certainly somewhat popular in the UK and France.

To their credit, in the mid 30's the Nazis did appear to be doing good things, even if there was a clear air of racial supremacy about the whole affair. Europe was collectively terrified of Marxism, and a nation that was forcefully rebuilding and modernizing itself without resorting to collectivization was tolerated by the French and British out of fear of the alternative. Between constructing the autobahn, hosting the olympics, and achieving a number of engineering feats such as the first practical helicopter, Germany appeared to be getting shit done. So nobody was too disturbed when Germany started making noises about reunifying some Germanic peoples in border regions they'd ceded in the Treaty...

== The Second World War ==

=== The War in the West ===
See also [[Nazi]]s

With Poland unwilling to roll over before the Nazis, the Nazis securing a ceasefire with Soviet Russia and with Britain and France finally stirred to the defense of Poland, it was clear that war was inevitable and so, on September 1st 1939, after creating a false-flag incident to offer the thinnest fig leaf of legality (and also dispose of a few dissenting Germans on the Nazis' hitlist) Germany struck at Poland. Two days later on September 3rd Britain and France declared war on Germany. Contrary to the popular imagination, Poland did not simply crumble before the German onslaught, and the myth of Polish cavalry trying to charge German tanks was yet another piece of propaganda. But after a month of hard fighting, with the Soviets entering the war on the German side and striking Poland in the rear, Poland finally gave in to the inevitable.

=== The War in the East ===
Since at least 1853, when Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Harbor, the Japanese feared the day when the powers of Europe would stomp all over them like they did China. In response they began building up their industrial base, importing guns, ships, factory machinery, engineers, textbooks, and professors. Some Japanese people came to the idea that the best way to fend off imperialism was to become imperialists themselves, and they began gobbling up their neighbors from the late 19th century onward (at first, in the name of liberating them and creating a "Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere", but with more brutality and for more obviously selfish reasons as time went on). They kept this going into the 20th century (when this sort of behavior was finally falling out of fashion among the Western powers, especially after WWI), by which time the military had become central to Japanese politics. In 1931, they invaded Manchuria, and invaded China in 1937, killing millions as they went(four times the death toll of the Holocaust to be precise, something that is largely ignored in light of Holocaust itself and Japan's contemporary PR effort). The rest of the world was outraged and cut Japan off from trade, which caused them to dig their heels in and keep it up, lest they be perceived as paper tigers. Tensions built until eventually the US threatened to cut off the oil Japan needed to keep their massive fleet running, and the overconfident Army managed to push the Imperial Japanese Navy into launching an attack on the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor (timed to hit approximately 30 minutes after delivering the declaration of war, thus [[Rules lawyer|effectively being a surprise attack without technically being a surprise attack]]).

The idea was that if everything went right, the fickle American public would be dismayed by the prospect of a hard fight over distant lands (especially while contemplating joining the war in Europe), the IJN could seize control of the Pacific while the crippled US fleet was out of action, and the US would be left with no choice but negotiation. However, while the Pearl Harbor attack did work pretty well and they did overrun a lot of Allied holdings around Asia, they missed all but one of the US carriers which only suffered minor damaged, enraged an American public that was previously tepid on war (especially since mistakes delayed even the planned token warning), and the fact was that the US had more than 10 times the Industry that Japan did as well as plenty of fuel. They also aligned themselves with the Nazis, based on shared enemies and ultra-Imperialist/Nationalist ideologies, but thus reinforcing the narrative of them being a part of the barbaric Forces of Evil who needed to be completely defeated for the sake of the civilized world.

As time went on, and with some shaky starts, the Allies quickly learned how to rely on carriers instead of traditional battleship tactics, a lucky and devastating win at the Battle of Midway put the IJN on the back foot, now finding themselves as the proverbial one legged man in an ass kicking contest with the cream of Japanese carrier aviation at the bottom of the Pacific. Ferocious naval engagements gave way as the star of the show to even more brutal amphibious warfare as the Marines began their island hopping campaign across the Pacific, painfully prying each strategically important Japanese occupied island from their well dug in defenders. The jungle, cave and amphibious warfare of this stage of the campaign was especially horrific even by World War 2 standards, not helped by racism against the Japanese on the part of Americans and the racism against everyone crossed with the suicidal fanaticism of the Japanese further exacerbating this.

One major note from a wargaming perspective in this theater is Operation Ten Go, the last sortie of the IJN against the US military forces invading Okinawa. The largest battleship made by human hands, the Yamato, and her support fleet, sortied... and were promptly destroyed by massed American air power. Thus proving the change in the IRL meta of naval warfare to carrier dominance, which has endured to this day. They also set up various military units for holding prisoners and scientific experiments - best exemplified by Unit 731 - which gave Auschwitz a run for its money on crimes against humanity, the only difference being the lack of a genocidal goal.

=== The Manhattan Project ===
At the tail end of the 19th century, scientists began to work out some odd properties of matter, which eventually got them to realize that splitting atomic nuclei after processing Uranium in a cyclotron releases millions of times more energy than an equivalent mass of a chemical reaction. Naturally, instead of using it as cheap energy first, people thought "How can we weaponize this?" Such a weapon would be a game changer for warfare (less for the raw destruction it would cause, since firebombing cities was already horrifyingly effective, but because it would only take one bomber getting through air defenses to do the job instead of dozens or hundreds), and the Nazis getting it first would be an intolerable state of affairs. As such the Brits and the Americans pooled their scientific and industrial resources at Los Alamos to work out how to build a bomb. 20000 '''tons''' of silver wiring were built to enrich the Uranium into something that will recreate a small sun for a brief moment.

They were not ready in time to use it against the Nazis, but the first two were dropped on Japan to convince them that they wouldn't be able to fight to the stalemate they were now aiming for, thus ending the war quickly at the cost of a few hundred thousand Japanese civilians, rather than a long and costly slog that would potentially result in millions dead if the fanatical Japanese military forced it through to completion (including both the Japanese civilians who would be mobilized into militias and untold American service members). Some accounts also say it was intended to intimidate the Soviet Union, but since the Russians ended up nicking the research data (supposedly, Stalin knew that the Manhattan Project succeeded before Truman), this just paved the way for the nuclear stalemate known as [[the Cold War]].

== The appeal of the World Wars ==
These are the biggest armed conflicts of world history, rolling across continents using modern weapons, from tanks to planes to automatic weapons. Modern War was born in the trenches of the Somme, in the skies above London and over the fields of Poland during the Blitzkrieg, the flanking in France, the naval bombardment and air bombing in the Pacific, the hell in the Eastern front cities, in the bombing of Europe from the air, in the atomic fire of Hiroshima and Japan. We entered the century and went 14 years thinking everything was right and as great as it could be. Thirty years, a war, a pandemic, an economic crash, another war and several genocides later the man who was born into the first large scale factories witnessed the power of the atom burn the hopes and dreams of two cities.

Of the two wars, World War One gets relatively little media attention and what little it does get is somber. Part of that is because it's hard to craft a heroic action-packed adventure out of the hopeless horror of trench warfare, the other part is that the morality of the war is very, very grey. There was no clear right side, with both the Central and Allied powers equally chomping at the bit for a fight (at least to start with), and ready to start shooting for ''any'' convenient reason. When some angry Illyrians in the Balkans finally set everything off, the ''only'' motivation the common people had (besides being drafted and having no choice anyway) to go fight was the extensive propaganda campaigns telling them how totally awful for realsies the enemy was, and anyone asking questions or doubting was shut down ''hard''. When it was all over the country blamed and punished for the whole mess wasn't even the one that started it (in fact, the country that actually started it made bank off the entire thing. Germany was still the one to go to war with Belgium and get the British involved so they could certainly take some blame.) All told, the First World War is largely seen as a great tragedy, and is widely considered a wasteful war as winnings were slim on the Allied side. If Russia didn't get involved or if the Axis didn't go for Belgium or if Italy either started under the allies or stayed in the axis or if Italy was the cause of WW1 as it likely would have been depending on how things would have continued in AH if the either the Duke dying didn't result in a war or if the Duke was never assassinated a war with one side getting a much greater victory could have transpired.

Probably one of the only noble (and almost certainly the cleanest) aspects of WW1 was the war in the air, where fighter pilots were effectively chivalric knights of the sky. One famous example was Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron), easily the most famous Ace fighter of the war, with 80 victories to his name in his distinctive red tri-plane (which only accounted for his last 17). He was so well respected among his adversaries that when he was finally shot down, the Allied officers who recovered his body buried him with full honors, including an honor guard and gun salute. This didn't stop the ruthless pragmatism, a few pilots even publicly boasted of shooting down parachuting airmen to prevent them from returning to the fight.

Another event stands out known as the Christmas Truce; early on in the war, troops on the Western Front pretty quickly realized that the guys they were shooting at didn’t want to be there any more than they did, and agreed to a ceasefire to celebrate Christmas. When the truce looked like it was going to last, commanders put a kibosh on the whole thing and told them to start fighting again and even cracked down on small mutinies arising. Another such truce would never happen as the fighting became more destructive, as poison gas attacks and tank assaults made each side far more wary of the other.

The Second World War is a much more palatable conflict of more or less Good vs Evil, with both the Nazis and Imperial Japan going out to conquer their respective hemispheres of the world and exterminating millions as key objectives and Italy playing the incompetent sidekick/comic relief which isn't too far off the truth in a series of spectacular displays of military incompetence on the part of Mussolini and his generals. The Axis Powers provided a clear and easy villain for the rest of the world to rally against (as well as providing easy media villains for the rest of the century and into the next millennium). The far more mobile and urban warfare of WW2 also allowed for more personal initiative and heroism, and stories of the extraordinary accomplishments of individual squads, or even individual soldiers, are far more commonplace here than they were back in WW1, when individual men or units had no real hope of making a difference, no matter what they did (mind, it was still industrial weight and technology that won the war, but it is far easier to remember Simo Hayha than say, Alvin York).

As a result, a solid majority of [[Alternate History]] fiction is set in WWII one way or another. Even if WWI (or any of the many, many 19th Century to 1913 events and trends that lead to it) is the point of divergence, the story is likely to be in the late interwar to WWII periods.

== World War inspired Games, Factions and Settings ==
* A lot of stuff from the [[Imperium of Man]], especially the Death Korps of Krieg.
* [[Dieselpunk]] is the WWII equivalent of Steampunk. If you like the general aesthetics and mood of the time period but don’t want to be limited by the period’s technology, or perhaps want to see what would happen if the Nazi “Wunderwaffen” had been fully realized, this is the setting for you.
* [[Bolt Action]], [[Flames of War]], and other similar military tabletop games are set in WWII.
* [[Star Wars]] takes a great deal of inspiration from this time period, and in regards to the prequels, it especially takes a lot of inspiration from the transformation of the democratic-but-ineffectual Weimar Republic into the nightmarishly totalitarian Third Reich (though it was also influenced by the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire).
* Indiana Jones. Do we need to explain this?
* The 1920+ universe, inspired by the art of Jakub Rozalski, envisions an alternate Europe where Nikola Tesla’s super science lead to the development of Mechs as the dominant war machine. Best known for the RTS game “Iron Harvest” that pits Imperial Germany, Imperial Russia, and Poland in a version of WWI with WWII elements mixed in. Even Rasputin makes an appearance as the leader of a shadowy cabal looking to seize power by fomenting revolution in all three factions and take over Tesla’s super-advanced city-state.

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[[Category: History]]

The World Wars

2020-12-15T03:33:01Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:F837:86D5:E198:595D: /* The War in the East */

{{topquote|War will become rare, but more terrible. [...] That's my horoscope|Arthur Conan Doyle, 1883}}
During the [[Industrial Revolution]], Europe was comparatively peaceful for the most part. The 19th century started with the Napoleonic Wars when Industrialization was building up steam in England and afterwards there were a series of colonial conflicts and small to middling wars between the various industrial powers*. The Civil War was on the upper end of conflicts in this era but was limited to the comparatively sparsely populated US, was still fought with muskets and saw about 600-750,000 people dead. The Franco Prussian war was won in six months (GOTT MIT UNS!), but in a chilling prelude to things to come killed some 180,000 combatants. Things changed in 1914 when Arch Duke Ferdinand was assassinated, starting the Great War, also known as the ''First World War''. This would be followed up by the ''Second World War'' in 1939-45, which largely stemmed from the consequences of the Great War. '''The World Wars''' would spread across the world and saw conflict and destruction beyond anything that was ever seen before or since.

There are two important factors in the World Wars: Technology and Nationalism. Technology is the easier of the two to understand, in the Napoleonic War the average soldier had a flintlock musket that could shoot 2-6 bullets a minute with an effective range of 100 meters, was supported by muzzle loading cannons that could shoot accurately to about 1km and was supplied by ox carts while steam engines were just beginning to propel boats and move loads of coal around mines in England. In 1914 the average soldier had a rifle that could shoot 15-30 bullets a minute (which could go through three men and still be deadly) at ranges of over a kilometer and was backed up by cannons that could fire shells six kilometers or more on ballistic courses which exploded in the air raining a spray of balls over a wide area and machine guns which could shoot 450 bullets a minute and airplanes. By the end of the Great War tanks, Sub Machine Guns and Poison Gas had been added to the arsenal. Tactics devised based on 19th century ideas of fighting were useless on this new battlefield and the book needed to be re-written from page one. Other technologies such as mass production, mechanized farming, railways and automobiles, mass education, telecommunications and modern bureaucracies meant that an Industrial Nation could turn more of it's population into soldiers than any medieval nation could ever hope to do (Rome was hard pressed to keep up a standing army of about 1% of it's population, Germany mobilized nearly 20% during the Great War). Through bloody experience generals gradually put together some idea of how to operate in this new battlefield near the end of the Great War and between the wars they'd continue to build on it with experience in small scale wars. Even so people were still making it up as they went in WWII.

Nationalism is more abstract but just as important. In the Middle Ages, people generally identified themselves as being "a Christian Journeyman Blacksmith from London who's dad is English" or "a Jewish Master Cobbler from Munich who's mom is Sephardic" and so forth (their job, class, religion and hometown, things which they dealt with face to face day to day). If a civil war happened, they and their family were not majorly harmed and they ended up with a new noble house in charge, they would not care too much as long as the new lord upheld his feudal duties. There was a king and he ruled a bunch of land and tried to keep the peace, which was all good but the specifics of this was not a fact which defined them. This began to change with the Protestant Reformation and had a bit of build up through the Age of Enlightenment as propaganda for the masses took form, leading to the birth of nationalism with the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. People began to see their country as more than just where they lived and the guy in a funny hat who ruled them, but rather as a community of people united by common ideas, languages, beliefs, customs, ideals, and (often) ancestry, people who need to band together and set aside their differences to defend what's theirs against those stinking foreigners with their differences. Public education caught on during the Industrial Revolution, which made it possible to give these ideals to everyone from the richest businessman to the lowliest beggar. When you have two nations which have nationalistic populations and governments and other groups fond of egging nationalism on together it does not take much to get them at each others throats and keep them there.

Footnote * The Taiping Rebellion (Not to beconfused with the Boxer rebellion.) in China killed some 20-30 million people, but neither side in it was industrialized beyond buying some foreign weapons to equip some of their troops.

== The First World War ==
Also known as the Great War and the [[derp|War to End All Wars]] (SPOILER ALERT, It wasn't)
.

To understand the beginning of the major, globe-shaking clusterfuck known as the First World War, we must first look at several key issues that preceded it.

The first and probably one of the biggest contributing factors was the race for Empire. During the preceding centuries, imperialism and expansionism became extremely popular among the industrializing and booming nations of western Europe. Entire swathes of Africa and Asia were carved out by global powerhouses such as Great Britain and France, in order to fuel their industry and economy back home, often at the expense of the natives (the treatment of which varied on which European power dominated that particular region, with those under Belgium's sway being the worst off). For a while, the competition was 'merely' a case of rivalry, as each generally avoided the other's territories in order not to repeat disasters like the Seven Years' War or the Napoleonic Wars. Everything was going more or less splendidly (barring some wars of independence in the Balkans against the increasingly corrupt and stagnating Ottoman Empire), until one key event forever shattered the balance of power so carefully put into place by the Congress of Vienna: the unification of Germany by Otto von Bismark (a political genius so astute that he coined the modern term 'realpolitik').

With Germany now unified, it presented a major threat to the established powers of Europe. Not helping matters was the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, looking at Britain with barely restrained jealousy (and a huge trove of mommy and daddy issues further complicated by a deformed arm being shorter than the other due to a difficult birth causing nerve damage) and thus deciding that Germany deserved its own overseas empire and place as top dog. Complicating matters further is the fact that the royalty and nobility of Europe were all largely related to one another. In some ways, this made the coming shitstorm seem more like the biggest family feud in centuries. The race for who controlled the biggest slice of the planet was kicked into overdrive, with factories pumping out new, relatively untested weapons such as the machine gun, the repeating rifle, and the howitzer, while shipyards around Europe churned out awe-inspiring steel battleships and cruisers, complete with the largest cannons mankind had ever seen up to that point.

To counterbalance each other, the great powers formed increasingly complex and entangling military alliances, which coalesced into two pacts- the Triple Entente (France, Britain (Kind Of), and Russia) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Italy, and Austria)

Meanwhile, various nationalist and liberal revolutionary movements were sweeping the continent like a new disease from the Plaguefather. Some of their demands were met, particularly in Britain where the House of Commons gained more power. Other revolutions were violently crushed or flat-out ignored, while still others were successful in their goals through sheer force of arms (Like true comrades). The hardest hit, however, were not the more liberalized and industrious Western nations. Instead, the hardest hit by these successive waves of revolution was none other than the two oldest empires in Europe at that time- Austria and the Ottomans, both of whom were weary, tired states in dire need of reform. While some in both powers saw granting people increasing amounts of autonomy as the way to keep their state from collapsing (such as the formation of the dual monarchy and the recognition of Hungary as an equal partner, transforming the Austrian Empire into Austria-Hungary), others insisted on a more hardline approach, trying to keep the state afloat by using terror. All of this bred resentment, particularly in the Balkans, which increasingly became a powder keg that was waiting for the right spark.

That spark came in the form of the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, at the hands of Gavrilo Princip, who was a member of the infamous Yugoslav nationalist organization, the Black Hand. Austria-Hungary gave an ultimatum to Serbia(Biggest Yugoslav country), which included some frankly ridiculous and cruel terms. When the Serbs rejected a few of these terms, the Austrians took it as a casus belli and declared war on Serbia. In response, Russia declared war on Austria, to which Germany declared war on Russia, to which France declared war on Germany. Germany would then invade the neutral Belgium in an attempt to avoid French fortifications on the border, bringing the British into the conflict.

Thus began a conflict that would last for four bloody long years, see eleven million deaths as the result of horrific industrial warfare in the trenches and bombed-out fields, diseases such as the flu, and the breakup of several empires to form new nations. Truly, an entire generation of Europe's men was destroyed as a result (and is commonly known as the [[Grimdark|Lost Generation]] today) and gave rise to later extremist philosophies, the proponents of whom were all too eager to amass power for themselves by blaming their nation's misfortunes on the subversive "other." And while the civilian losses were nowhere near that of the Second World War, they were significant on both fronts, especially in Belgium where the Imperial German Army exercised collective punishment against villages suspected of harboring partisans.

While the average citizen didn't give much of a damn about the alliance system and the bickering of a bunch of politicians over some dispute halfway across the continent, the government of each country knew they had to sell the "necessity" of the war to their citizens. Propaganda from both sides painted the enemy nations as barbaric, inhuman war criminals who had to be stopped to prevent the devastation that would follow if they were allowed to go unopposed. They also reassured the public that, with their obvious technological superiority, the war would be quick and soldiers would return home by Christmas. While this illusion could be maintained with the civilians population, the soldiers sent to the front lines were quickly disillusioned by the horrors that they saw. Morale was so bad that the Russians overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and eventually came to be led by the [[Communism|Bolsheviks]] under Vladimir Lenin, and the French nearly did the same as mass mutinies broke out in the French army. Had the Americans not joined on the Allies' side to swing the war in their favor, it's likely that even more revolutions could have taken place.

Terrifying new weapons of war earned their fearsome reputation in this conflict. Machine guns and air-burst artillery shells rendered the old tactics of Napoleonic warfare suicidal, while mustard gas and the like created a new age of massive destruction. Tanks made their first debut in this war, slowly rumbling forth like invincible metal monsters, shrugging off most resistance and dealing punishing firepower themselves, only to breakdown in the middle of the battle due to being rudimentary designs. The airplane, as well, saw use in a combat role, and it would swiftly become an invaluable strategic and tactical tool, for he who dominated the skies dominated the flow of battle.

The bloodiest war in human history up to that point ended with Germany's surrender at 11:00 A.M, on November 11th, 1918, after being exhausted, starving, and dangerously close to collapse in the face of a communist uprising. The irony is that despite the announced end of the conflict, soldiers continued to fight tooth and nail to the last minute, desperately hoping that whatever few yards they could seize would somehow bring the negotiations in their countries' favor, as in the fighting continued until literally seconds before 11 AM where an American soldier who was demoted made a suicide charge on a machine gun and a Canadian guy got sniped.

=== The Punitive Expedition ===
While the United States of America sat the early part of the war out, it was not without armed conflict of its own. In 1916 failed Mexican revolutionary Francisco "Pancho" Villa launched an unprovoked attack on US settlement of Columbus, New Mexico that killed 26 Americans. The actual reasons are unclear, but seizing supplies, and/or a ploy to get the US Government to involve themselves in the revolution and wreck everything are common guesses. In response, the US sent troops into Mexico to retaliate against Villa. While the conflict was small scale, it ensured the US didn't enter the Great War totally blind to modern warfare as everyone else had. In fact, it was in this conflict that future superstar General Patton got a taste of the new vehicle-based warfare that he would become famous for.

== The Interwar ==
{{topquote|This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.|Ferdinand Foch, 1919}}
Knowing that the world could not endure another such war, US president Woodrow Wilson made it his mission to set the groundwork for long-term peace (between whites at least); he set fourth what he called the Fourteen Points, a set of foreign policy doctrines that would address many of the underlying issues behind WWI and promote better diplomacy and cooperation between nations, with its biggest selling point being the League of Nations. The Germans thought that this was actually a pretty neat idea, and were hoping to agree to these terms during the upcoming peace conference. Fortunately, none of Wilson's allies bought into his vague ideas, and slowly he was forced to compromise on all his policies just so he could get the League of Nations established (Even shittier proto-United Nations). Ironically, Wilson failed to convince the US to join the League of Nations, partly due to alienating his Republican opponents in congress, as they weren't convinced that this League wasn't completely useless, or worse, just another military alliance that would suck them into another European War. Without the US to back it, and with little power to enforce peace resolutions, the League pretty quickly collapsed in the lead-up to WWII, as the pissed off Germans had been assigned full blame for the war and wanted revenge.

Near the end of the first World War, the world was thrown into yet another cataclysm. The Spanish Flu, named such because neutral Spain was the only place that paid much attention to it over the ongoing war, spread rapidly and killed many thanks to the conditions caused by the war (overcrowding, especially in transport ships for returning soldiers, malnourishment, etc.). The death toll was horrendous, with the minimum estimate of 50 million being over double the entire war's death toll. After this, Europe needed decades to recover from the horrible destruction the war and flu had caused. Various post war conflicts continued in the regional level, most famously the Anatolian conflict between Greece, Armenia, French Colonial Forces and the nationalist wings of the Ottoman military that revolted under Mustafa Kemal's regime. The latter won after deals with Armenia (which was not ratified as the Soviets nommed them, the new regime made another treaty which was officially ratified and guaranteed by the Soviets) and France, while Greece was rather soundly defeated. After another peace treaty with the Allies at Lausanne and the nationalist regime reforming into a Republic and abolishing the monarch and caliphate, the local wars pretty much ended barring minor border disputes and posturing. The rest of the world wasn't so lucky.

America, however, was having its best years ever. The Washington Naval Treaty had Britain officially cede the position of Earth’s mightiest navy, which the Royal Navy held for centuries, by recognizing the US Navy’s power as at least equal to it. The so called "Roaring Twenties" saw a rapid increase in the standard of living. President Harding managed to do the impossible and eliminate the deficit, though some of his appointees trying to sell [[Wikipedia:Teapot Rock|some government owned rock in the middle of nowhere]] marred his legacy (looking back historians realize there's a lack of evidence suggesting he had any knowledge or involvement though that isn't really a compliment, you do need to pay attention when you are damn head of state). The American economy of the time was doing well; unlike the other powers of Europe, it had not been strained extensively by being in a war economy for four years that strained productivity, had prime farmland turned into no man's land like France, its economy pushed to the breaking point like Germany, broken up into squabbling states like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or had all of that and was taken over by communists after a civil war (with some like Turkey as aforementioned getting lucky and successfully reforming), while having basically everyone in Europe owe American bankers to pay for the war.

After Harding's death during the scandal, his Vice-President, Calvin Coolidge, took over. This was rather sudden and Coolidge was sworn in during the middle of the night by his father on the family Bible, with his first act was to pray to God to bless the American people and give him the strength to lead them. Unlike Harding, Coolidge proved wildly popular despite (or because of) his quiet nature. His economic policies really kicked off the Roaring Twenties and he was popular enough he was elected by a landslide in an election ''he didn't campaign for'' (this was common in American politics at the time, it was considered undignified to campaign for yourself). Coolidge continued Harding's deficit free budgets to the point the US was able to repay most of the national debt. Despite his wild popularity, Coolidge shocked the world with his announcement that [[Wikipedia:I do not choose to run|"I do not choose to run"]] for reelection and, true to his nature, did not really explain why (he would later elaborate in his autobiography that he did not wish to break the (then unofficial) rule set by Washington of a max of two terms among other issues). He would be followed by Herbert Hoover, who largely rode on his success (justifiably though; Hoover had been Commerce Secretary for 8 years). This would change in October of 1929 when the stock market crashed and ushered in the Great Depression.

There had been a series of stock market crashes through the the 19th century in the US every decade or so, each with increasing severity and effects in the US as more people moved into cities and were more dependent on wages. The 1920s saw a rise in consumer culture, payment plans, investment by common people, loans for buying stock with, and a lot of scams which culminated in the biggest crash yet. Moreover, since the US was now linked to a bunch of other countries thanks to improved communications, trade, transportation, and so forth, the crash not only tanked the US economy, but that of basically every other developed country save for the USSR under Stalin (which had its own Stalin-related problems, and boy were they big problems), which further hindered recovery. It also didn't help that large swaths of Europe were still battle scarred wastelands useless for agriculture, an entire generation of young working men had been killed or crippled, and that the formerly super-productive Germany was now teetering with an ineffectual government and crippling reparations to pay. Throw in a crushing multi-year drought in the United States that ruined harvests across wholes states and the stage is set for chaos.

The old ways of dealing with things did not work and people turned to new ideas. In the US, this was various public works projects and assistance programs, collectively called the New Deal, to get people back working and build confidence in the economy and financial regulations. Similar ideas were tried in England, Australia and the UK. It should be noted that afterwards there was no major economic setbacks until 2008 after New Deal era financial regulations were pulled. In Germany, the response was more severe and was seen as a failure of democracy, which contributed to the rise of socialist parties like the KPD and SPD which in turn led to the Nazi (National Socialists German Workers Party) party to counter them (possibly with help from western powers seeking a wall against communism) with a newfound hate of the Allies thanks to the colossal reparations to the rest of Europe that Germany had been forced to pay in the Treaty of Versailles. Responding to the collapse gave the Nazis the political currency to get into power, stimulate the economy by gearing it up to war and made the UK less willing to intervene to stop them while they were rising due to nobody wanting to be the one to start another war. And ideals of peace and disarmamemt certainly somewhat popular in the UK and France.

To their credit, in the mid 30's the Nazis did appear to be doing good things, even if there was a clear air of racial supremacy about the whole affair. Europe was collectively terrified of Marxism, and a nation that was forcefully rebuilding and modernizing itself without resorting to collectivization was tolerated by the French and British out of fear of the alternative. Between constructing the autobahn, hosting the olympics, and achieving a number of engineering feats such as the first practical helicopter, Germany appeared to be getting shit done. So nobody was too disturbed when Germany started making noises about reunifying some Germanic peoples in border regions they'd ceded in the Treaty...

== The Second World War ==

=== The War in the West ===
See also [[Nazi]]s

With Poland unwilling to roll over before the Nazis, the Nazis securing a ceasefire with Soviet Russia and with Britain and France finally stirred to the defense of Poland, it was clear that war was inevitable and so, on September 1st 1939, after creating a false-flag incident to offer the thinnest fig leaf of legality (and also dispose of a few dissenting Germans on the Nazis' hitlist) Germany struck at Poland. Two days later on September 3rd Britain and France declared war on Germany. Contrary to the popular imagination, Poland did not simply crumble before the German onslaught, and the myth of Polish cavalry trying to charge German tanks was yet another piece of propaganda. But after a month of hard fighting, with the Soviets entering the war on the German side and striking Poland in the rear, Poland finally gave in to the inevitable.

=== The War in the East ===
Since at least 1853, when Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Harbor, the Japanese feared the day when the powers of Europe would stomp all over them like they did China. In response they began building up their industrial base, importing guns, ships, factory machinery, engineers, textbooks, and professors. Some Japanese people came to the idea that the best way to fend off imperialism was to become imperialists themselves, and they began gobbling up their neighbors from the late 19th century onward (at first, in the name of liberating them and creating a "Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere", but with more brutality and for more obviously selfish reasons as time went on). They kept this going into the 20th century (when this sort of behavior was finally falling out of fashion among the Western powers, especially after WWI), by which time the military had become central to Japanese politics. In 1931, they invaded Manchuria, and invaded China in 1937, killing millions as they went(four times the death toll of the Holocaust to be precise, something that is largely ignored in light of Holocaust itself and Japan's contemporary PR effort). The rest of the world was outraged and cut Japan off from trade, which caused them to dig their heels in and keep it up, lest they be perceived as paper tigers. Tensions built until eventually the US threatened to cut off the oil Japan needed to keep their massive fleet running, and the overconfident Army managed to push the Imperial Japanese Navy into launching an attack on the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor (timed to hit approximately 30 minutes after delivering the declaration of war, thus [[Rules lawyer|effectively being a surprise attack without technically being a surprise attack]]).

The idea was that if everything went right, the fickle American public would be dismayed by the prospect of a hard fight over distant lands (especially while contemplating joining the war in Europe), the IJN could seize control of the Pacific while the crippled US fleet was out of action, and the US would be left with no choice but negotiation. However, while the Pearl Harbor attack did work pretty well and they did overrun a lot of Allied holdings around Asia, they missed all but one of the US carriers which only suffered minor damaged, enraged an American public that was previously tepid on war (especially since mistakes delayed even the planned token warning), and the fact was that the US had more than 10 times the Industry that Japan did as well as plenty of fuel. They also aligned themselves with the Nazis, based on shared enemies and ultra-Imperialist/Nationalist ideologies, but thus reinforcing the narrative of them being a part of the barbaric Forces of Evil who needed to be completely defeated for the sake of the civilized world.

As time went on, and with some shaky starts, the Allies quickly learned how to rely on carriers instead of traditional battleship tactics, a lucky and devastating win at the Battle of Midway put the IJN on the back foot, now finding themselves as the proverbial one legged man in an ass kicking contest with the cream of Japanese carrier aviation at the bottom of the Pacific. Ferocious naval engagements gave way as the star of the show to even more brutal amphibious warfare as the Marines began their island hopping campaign across the Pacific, painfully prying each strategically important Japanese occupied island from their well dug in defenders. The jungle, cave and amphibious warfare of this stage of the campaign was especially horrific even by World War 2 standards, not helped by racism against the Japanese on the part of Americans and the racism against everyone crossed with the suicidal fanaticism of the Japanese further exacerbating this.

One major note from a wargaming perspective in this theater is Operation Ten Go, the last sortie of the IJN against the US military forces invading Okinawa. The largest battleship made by human hands, the Yamato, and her support fleet, sortied... and were promptly destroyed by massed American air power. Thus proving the change in the IRL meta of naval warfare to carrier dominance, which has endured to this day. They also set up various military units for holding prisoners and scientific experiments - best exemplified by Unit 731 - which gave Auschwitz a run for its money on human rights abuses, the only difference being the lack of a genocidal goal.

=== The Manhattan Project ===
At the tail end of the 19th century, scientists began to work out some odd properties of matter, which eventually got them to realize that splitting atomic nuclei after processing Uranium in a cyclotron releases millions of times more energy than an equivalent mass of a chemical reaction. Naturally, instead of using it as cheap energy first, people thought "How can we weaponize this?" Such a weapon would be a game changer for warfare (less for the raw destruction it would cause, since firebombing cities was already horrifyingly effective, but because it would only take one bomber getting through air defenses to do the job instead of dozens or hundreds), and the Nazis getting it first would be an intolerable state of affairs. As such the Brits and the Americans pooled their scientific and industrial resources at Los Alamos to work out how to build a bomb. 20000 '''tons''' of silver wiring were built to enrich the Uranium into something that will recreate a small sun for a brief moment.

They were not ready in time to use it against the Nazis, but the first two were dropped on Japan to convince them that they wouldn't be able to fight to the stalemate they were now aiming for, thus ending the war quickly at the cost of a few hundred thousand Japanese civilians, rather than a long and costly slog that would potentially result in millions dead if the fanatical Japanese military forced it through to completion (including both the Japanese civilians who would be mobilized into militias and untold American service members). Some accounts also say it was intended to intimidate the Soviet Union, but since the Russians ended up nicking the research data (supposedly, Stalin knew that the Manhattan Project succeeded before Truman), this just paved the way for the nuclear stalemate known as [[the Cold War]].

== The appeal of the World Wars ==
These are the biggest armed conflicts of world history, rolling across continents using modern weapons, from tanks to planes to automatic weapons. Modern War was born in the trenches of the Somme, in the skies above London and over the fields of Poland during the Blitzkrieg, the flanking in France, the naval bombardment and air bombing in the Pacific, the hell in the Eastern front cities, in the bombing of Europe from the air, in the atomic fire of Hiroshima and Japan. We entered the century and went 14 years thinking everything was right and as great as it could be. Thirty years, a war, a pandemic, an economic crash, another war and several genocides later the man who was born into the first large scale factories witnessed the power of the atom burn the hopes and dreams of two cities.

Of the two wars, World War One gets relatively little media attention and what little it does get is somber. Part of that is because it's hard to craft a heroic action-packed adventure out of the hopeless horror of trench warfare, the other part is that the morality of the war is very, very grey. There was no clear right side, with both the Central and Allied powers equally chomping at the bit for a fight (at least to start with), and ready to start shooting for ''any'' convenient reason. When some angry Illyrians in the Balkans finally set everything off, the ''only'' motivation the common people had (besides being drafted and having no choice anyway) to go fight was the extensive propaganda campaigns telling them how totally awful for realsies the enemy was, and anyone asking questions or doubting was shut down ''hard''. When it was all over the country blamed and punished for the whole mess wasn't even the one that started it (in fact, the country that actually started it made bank off the entire thing. Germany was still the one to go to war with Belgium and get the British involved so they could certainly take some blame.) All told, the First World War is largely seen as a great tragedy, and is widely considered a wasteful war as winnings were slim on the Allied side. If Russia didn't get involved or if the Axis didn't go for Belgium or if Italy either started under the allies or stayed in the axis or if Italy was the cause of WW1 as it likely would have been depending on how things would have continued in AH if the either the Duke dying didn't result in a war or if the Duke was never assassinated a war with one side getting a much greater victory could have transpired.

Probably one of the only noble (and almost certainly the cleanest) aspects of WW1 was the war in the air, where fighter pilots were effectively chivalric knights of the sky. One famous example was Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron), easily the most famous Ace fighter of the war, with 80 victories to his name in his distinctive red tri-plane (which only accounted for his last 17). He was so well respected among his adversaries that when he was finally shot down, the Allied officers who recovered his body buried him with full honors, including an honor guard and gun salute. This didn't stop the ruthless pragmatism, a few pilots even publicly boasted of shooting down parachuting airmen to prevent them from returning to the fight.

Another event stands out known as the Christmas Truce; early on in the war, troops on the Western Front pretty quickly realized that the guys they were shooting at didn’t want to be there any more than they did, and agreed to a ceasefire to celebrate Christmas. When the truce looked like it was going to last, commanders put a kibosh on the whole thing and told them to start fighting again and even cracked down on small mutinies arising. Another such truce would never happen as the fighting became more destructive, as poison gas attacks and tank assaults made each side far more wary of the other.

The Second World War is a much more palatable conflict of more or less Good vs Evil, with both the Nazis and Imperial Japan going out to conquer their respective hemispheres of the world and exterminating millions as key objectives and Italy playing the incompetent sidekick/comic relief which isn't too far off the truth in a series of spectacular displays of military incompetence on the part of Mussolini and his generals. The Axis Powers provided a clear and easy villain for the rest of the world to rally against (as well as providing easy media villains for the rest of the century and into the next millennium). The far more mobile and urban warfare of WW2 also allowed for more personal initiative and heroism, and stories of the extraordinary accomplishments of individual squads, or even individual soldiers, are far more commonplace here than they were back in WW1, when individual men or units had no real hope of making a difference, no matter what they did (mind, it was still industrial weight and technology that won the war, but it is far easier to remember Simo Hayha than say, Alvin York).

As a result, a solid majority of [[Alternate History]] fiction is set in WWII one way or another. Even if WWI (or any of the many, many 19th Century to 1913 events and trends that lead to it) is the point of divergence, the story is likely to be in the late interwar to WWII periods.

== World War inspired Games, Factions and Settings ==
* A lot of stuff from the [[Imperium of Man]], especially the Death Korps of Krieg.
* [[Dieselpunk]] is the WWII equivalent of Steampunk. If you like the general aesthetics and mood of the time period but don’t want to be limited by the period’s technology, or perhaps want to see what would happen if the Nazi “Wunderwaffen” had been fully realized, this is the setting for you.
* [[Bolt Action]], [[Flames of War]], and other similar military tabletop games are set in WWII.
* [[Star Wars]] takes a great deal of inspiration from this time period, and in regards to the prequels, it especially takes a lot of inspiration from the transformation of the democratic-but-ineffectual Weimar Republic into the nightmarishly totalitarian Third Reich (though it was also influenced by the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire).
* Indiana Jones. Do we need to explain this?
* The 1920+ universe, inspired by the art of Jakub Rozalski, envisions an alternate Europe where Nikola Tesla’s super science lead to the development of Mechs as the dominant war machine. Best known for the RTS game “Iron Harvest” that pits Imperial Germany, Imperial Russia, and Poland in a version of WWI with WWII elements mixed in. Even Rasputin makes an appearance as the leader of a shadowy cabal looking to seize power by fomenting revolution in all three factions and take over Tesla’s super-advanced city-state.

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[[Category: History]]

The World Wars

2020-12-15T03:27:22Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:F837:86D5:E198:595D: /* The War in the West */

{{topquote|War will become rare, but more terrible. [...] That's my horoscope|Arthur Conan Doyle, 1883}}
During the [[Industrial Revolution]], Europe was comparatively peaceful for the most part. The 19th century started with the Napoleonic Wars when Industrialization was building up steam in England and afterwards there were a series of colonial conflicts and small to middling wars between the various industrial powers*. The Civil War was on the upper end of conflicts in this era but was limited to the comparatively sparsely populated US, was still fought with muskets and saw about 600-750,000 people dead. The Franco Prussian war was won in six months (GOTT MIT UNS!), but in a chilling prelude to things to come killed some 180,000 combatants. Things changed in 1914 when Arch Duke Ferdinand was assassinated, starting the Great War, also known as the ''First World War''. This would be followed up by the ''Second World War'' in 1939-45, which largely stemmed from the consequences of the Great War. '''The World Wars''' would spread across the world and saw conflict and destruction beyond anything that was ever seen before or since.

There are two important factors in the World Wars: Technology and Nationalism. Technology is the easier of the two to understand, in the Napoleonic War the average soldier had a flintlock musket that could shoot 2-6 bullets a minute with an effective range of 100 meters, was supported by muzzle loading cannons that could shoot accurately to about 1km and was supplied by ox carts while steam engines were just beginning to propel boats and move loads of coal around mines in England. In 1914 the average soldier had a rifle that could shoot 15-30 bullets a minute (which could go through three men and still be deadly) at ranges of over a kilometer and was backed up by cannons that could fire shells six kilometers or more on ballistic courses which exploded in the air raining a spray of balls over a wide area and machine guns which could shoot 450 bullets a minute and airplanes. By the end of the Great War tanks, Sub Machine Guns and Poison Gas had been added to the arsenal. Tactics devised based on 19th century ideas of fighting were useless on this new battlefield and the book needed to be re-written from page one. Other technologies such as mass production, mechanized farming, railways and automobiles, mass education, telecommunications and modern bureaucracies meant that an Industrial Nation could turn more of it's population into soldiers than any medieval nation could ever hope to do (Rome was hard pressed to keep up a standing army of about 1% of it's population, Germany mobilized nearly 20% during the Great War). Through bloody experience generals gradually put together some idea of how to operate in this new battlefield near the end of the Great War and between the wars they'd continue to build on it with experience in small scale wars. Even so people were still making it up as they went in WWII.

Nationalism is more abstract but just as important. In the Middle Ages, people generally identified themselves as being "a Christian Journeyman Blacksmith from London who's dad is English" or "a Jewish Master Cobbler from Munich who's mom is Sephardic" and so forth (their job, class, religion and hometown, things which they dealt with face to face day to day). If a civil war happened, they and their family were not majorly harmed and they ended up with a new noble house in charge, they would not care too much as long as the new lord upheld his feudal duties. There was a king and he ruled a bunch of land and tried to keep the peace, which was all good but the specifics of this was not a fact which defined them. This began to change with the Protestant Reformation and had a bit of build up through the Age of Enlightenment as propaganda for the masses took form, leading to the birth of nationalism with the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. People began to see their country as more than just where they lived and the guy in a funny hat who ruled them, but rather as a community of people united by common ideas, languages, beliefs, customs, ideals, and (often) ancestry, people who need to band together and set aside their differences to defend what's theirs against those stinking foreigners with their differences. Public education caught on during the Industrial Revolution, which made it possible to give these ideals to everyone from the richest businessman to the lowliest beggar. When you have two nations which have nationalistic populations and governments and other groups fond of egging nationalism on together it does not take much to get them at each others throats and keep them there.

Footnote * The Taiping Rebellion (Not to beconfused with the Boxer rebellion.) in China killed some 20-30 million people, but neither side in it was industrialized beyond buying some foreign weapons to equip some of their troops.

== The First World War ==
Also known as the Great War and the [[derp|War to End All Wars]] (SPOILER ALERT, It wasn't)
.

To understand the beginning of the major, globe-shaking clusterfuck known as the First World War, we must first look at several key issues that preceded it.

The first and probably one of the biggest contributing factors was the race for Empire. During the preceding centuries, imperialism and expansionism became extremely popular among the industrializing and booming nations of western Europe. Entire swathes of Africa and Asia were carved out by global powerhouses such as Great Britain and France, in order to fuel their industry and economy back home, often at the expense of the natives (the treatment of which varied on which European power dominated that particular region, with those under Belgium's sway being the worst off). For a while, the competition was 'merely' a case of rivalry, as each generally avoided the other's territories in order not to repeat disasters like the Seven Years' War or the Napoleonic Wars. Everything was going more or less splendidly (barring some wars of independence in the Balkans against the increasingly corrupt and stagnating Ottoman Empire), until one key event forever shattered the balance of power so carefully put into place by the Congress of Vienna: the unification of Germany by Otto von Bismark (a political genius so astute that he coined the modern term 'realpolitik').

With Germany now unified, it presented a major threat to the established powers of Europe. Not helping matters was the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, looking at Britain with barely restrained jealousy (and a huge trove of mommy and daddy issues further complicated by a deformed arm being shorter than the other due to a difficult birth causing nerve damage) and thus deciding that Germany deserved its own overseas empire and place as top dog. Complicating matters further is the fact that the royalty and nobility of Europe were all largely related to one another. In some ways, this made the coming shitstorm seem more like the biggest family feud in centuries. The race for who controlled the biggest slice of the planet was kicked into overdrive, with factories pumping out new, relatively untested weapons such as the machine gun, the repeating rifle, and the howitzer, while shipyards around Europe churned out awe-inspiring steel battleships and cruisers, complete with the largest cannons mankind had ever seen up to that point.

To counterbalance each other, the great powers formed increasingly complex and entangling military alliances, which coalesced into two pacts- the Triple Entente (France, Britain (Kind Of), and Russia) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Italy, and Austria)

Meanwhile, various nationalist and liberal revolutionary movements were sweeping the continent like a new disease from the Plaguefather. Some of their demands were met, particularly in Britain where the House of Commons gained more power. Other revolutions were violently crushed or flat-out ignored, while still others were successful in their goals through sheer force of arms (Like true comrades). The hardest hit, however, were not the more liberalized and industrious Western nations. Instead, the hardest hit by these successive waves of revolution was none other than the two oldest empires in Europe at that time- Austria and the Ottomans, both of whom were weary, tired states in dire need of reform. While some in both powers saw granting people increasing amounts of autonomy as the way to keep their state from collapsing (such as the formation of the dual monarchy and the recognition of Hungary as an equal partner, transforming the Austrian Empire into Austria-Hungary), others insisted on a more hardline approach, trying to keep the state afloat by using terror. All of this bred resentment, particularly in the Balkans, which increasingly became a powder keg that was waiting for the right spark.

That spark came in the form of the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, at the hands of Gavrilo Princip, who was a member of the infamous Yugoslav nationalist organization, the Black Hand. Austria-Hungary gave an ultimatum to Serbia(Biggest Yugoslav country), which included some frankly ridiculous and cruel terms. When the Serbs rejected a few of these terms, the Austrians took it as a casus belli and declared war on Serbia. In response, Russia declared war on Austria, to which Germany declared war on Russia, to which France declared war on Germany. Germany would then invade the neutral Belgium in an attempt to avoid French fortifications on the border, bringing the British into the conflict.

Thus began a conflict that would last for four bloody long years, see eleven million deaths as the result of horrific industrial warfare in the trenches and bombed-out fields, diseases such as the flu, and the breakup of several empires to form new nations. Truly, an entire generation of Europe's men was destroyed as a result (and is commonly known as the [[Grimdark|Lost Generation]] today) and gave rise to later extremist philosophies, the proponents of whom were all too eager to amass power for themselves by blaming their nation's misfortunes on the subversive "other." And while the civilian losses were nowhere near that of the Second World War, they were significant on both fronts, especially in Belgium where the Imperial German Army exercised collective punishment against villages suspected of harboring partisans.

While the average citizen didn't give much of a damn about the alliance system and the bickering of a bunch of politicians over some dispute halfway across the continent, the government of each country knew they had to sell the "necessity" of the war to their citizens. Propaganda from both sides painted the enemy nations as barbaric, inhuman war criminals who had to be stopped to prevent the devastation that would follow if they were allowed to go unopposed. They also reassured the public that, with their obvious technological superiority, the war would be quick and soldiers would return home by Christmas. While this illusion could be maintained with the civilians population, the soldiers sent to the front lines were quickly disillusioned by the horrors that they saw. Morale was so bad that the Russians overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and eventually came to be led by the [[Communism|Bolsheviks]] under Vladimir Lenin, and the French nearly did the same as mass mutinies broke out in the French army. Had the Americans not joined on the Allies' side to swing the war in their favor, it's likely that even more revolutions could have taken place.

Terrifying new weapons of war earned their fearsome reputation in this conflict. Machine guns and air-burst artillery shells rendered the old tactics of Napoleonic warfare suicidal, while mustard gas and the like created a new age of massive destruction. Tanks made their first debut in this war, slowly rumbling forth like invincible metal monsters, shrugging off most resistance and dealing punishing firepower themselves, only to breakdown in the middle of the battle due to being rudimentary designs. The airplane, as well, saw use in a combat role, and it would swiftly become an invaluable strategic and tactical tool, for he who dominated the skies dominated the flow of battle.

The bloodiest war in human history up to that point ended with Germany's surrender at 11:00 A.M, on November 11th, 1918, after being exhausted, starving, and dangerously close to collapse in the face of a communist uprising. The irony is that despite the announced end of the conflict, soldiers continued to fight tooth and nail to the last minute, desperately hoping that whatever few yards they could seize would somehow bring the negotiations in their countries' favor, as in the fighting continued until literally seconds before 11 AM where an American soldier who was demoted made a suicide charge on a machine gun and a Canadian guy got sniped.

=== The Punitive Expedition ===
While the United States of America sat the early part of the war out, it was not without armed conflict of its own. In 1916 failed Mexican revolutionary Francisco "Pancho" Villa launched an unprovoked attack on US settlement of Columbus, New Mexico that killed 26 Americans. The actual reasons are unclear, but seizing supplies, and/or a ploy to get the US Government to involve themselves in the revolution and wreck everything are common guesses. In response, the US sent troops into Mexico to retaliate against Villa. While the conflict was small scale, it ensured the US didn't enter the Great War totally blind to modern warfare as everyone else had. In fact, it was in this conflict that future superstar General Patton got a taste of the new vehicle-based warfare that he would become famous for.

== The Interwar ==
{{topquote|This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.|Ferdinand Foch, 1919}}
Knowing that the world could not endure another such war, US president Woodrow Wilson made it his mission to set the groundwork for long-term peace (between whites at least); he set fourth what he called the Fourteen Points, a set of foreign policy doctrines that would address many of the underlying issues behind WWI and promote better diplomacy and cooperation between nations, with its biggest selling point being the League of Nations. The Germans thought that this was actually a pretty neat idea, and were hoping to agree to these terms during the upcoming peace conference. Fortunately, none of Wilson's allies bought into his vague ideas, and slowly he was forced to compromise on all his policies just so he could get the League of Nations established (Even shittier proto-United Nations). Ironically, Wilson failed to convince the US to join the League of Nations, partly due to alienating his Republican opponents in congress, as they weren't convinced that this League wasn't completely useless, or worse, just another military alliance that would suck them into another European War. Without the US to back it, and with little power to enforce peace resolutions, the League pretty quickly collapsed in the lead-up to WWII, as the pissed off Germans had been assigned full blame for the war and wanted revenge.

Near the end of the first World War, the world was thrown into yet another cataclysm. The Spanish Flu, named such because neutral Spain was the only place that paid much attention to it over the ongoing war, spread rapidly and killed many thanks to the conditions caused by the war (overcrowding, especially in transport ships for returning soldiers, malnourishment, etc.). The death toll was horrendous, with the minimum estimate of 50 million being over double the entire war's death toll. After this, Europe needed decades to recover from the horrible destruction the war and flu had caused. Various post war conflicts continued in the regional level, most famously the Anatolian conflict between Greece, Armenia, French Colonial Forces and the nationalist wings of the Ottoman military that revolted under Mustafa Kemal's regime. The latter won after deals with Armenia (which was not ratified as the Soviets nommed them, the new regime made another treaty which was officially ratified and guaranteed by the Soviets) and France, while Greece was rather soundly defeated. After another peace treaty with the Allies at Lausanne and the nationalist regime reforming into a Republic and abolishing the monarch and caliphate, the local wars pretty much ended barring minor border disputes and posturing. The rest of the world wasn't so lucky.

America, however, was having its best years ever. The Washington Naval Treaty had Britain officially cede the position of Earth’s mightiest navy, which the Royal Navy held for centuries, by recognizing the US Navy’s power as at least equal to it. The so called "Roaring Twenties" saw a rapid increase in the standard of living. President Harding managed to do the impossible and eliminate the deficit, though some of his appointees trying to sell [[Wikipedia:Teapot Rock|some government owned rock in the middle of nowhere]] marred his legacy (looking back historians realize there's a lack of evidence suggesting he had any knowledge or involvement though that isn't really a compliment, you do need to pay attention when you are damn head of state). The American economy of the time was doing well; unlike the other powers of Europe, it had not been strained extensively by being in a war economy for four years that strained productivity, had prime farmland turned into no man's land like France, its economy pushed to the breaking point like Germany, broken up into squabbling states like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or had all of that and was taken over by communists after a civil war (with some like Turkey as aforementioned getting lucky and successfully reforming), while having basically everyone in Europe owe American bankers to pay for the war.

After Harding's death during the scandal, his Vice-President, Calvin Coolidge, took over. This was rather sudden and Coolidge was sworn in during the middle of the night by his father on the family Bible, with his first act was to pray to God to bless the American people and give him the strength to lead them. Unlike Harding, Coolidge proved wildly popular despite (or because of) his quiet nature. His economic policies really kicked off the Roaring Twenties and he was popular enough he was elected by a landslide in an election ''he didn't campaign for'' (this was common in American politics at the time, it was considered undignified to campaign for yourself). Coolidge continued Harding's deficit free budgets to the point the US was able to repay most of the national debt. Despite his wild popularity, Coolidge shocked the world with his announcement that [[Wikipedia:I do not choose to run|"I do not choose to run"]] for reelection and, true to his nature, did not really explain why (he would later elaborate in his autobiography that he did not wish to break the (then unofficial) rule set by Washington of a max of two terms among other issues). He would be followed by Herbert Hoover, who largely rode on his success (justifiably though; Hoover had been Commerce Secretary for 8 years). This would change in October of 1929 when the stock market crashed and ushered in the Great Depression.

There had been a series of stock market crashes through the the 19th century in the US every decade or so, each with increasing severity and effects in the US as more people moved into cities and were more dependent on wages. The 1920s saw a rise in consumer culture, payment plans, investment by common people, loans for buying stock with, and a lot of scams which culminated in the biggest crash yet. Moreover, since the US was now linked to a bunch of other countries thanks to improved communications, trade, transportation, and so forth, the crash not only tanked the US economy, but that of basically every other developed country save for the USSR under Stalin (which had its own Stalin-related problems, and boy were they big problems), which further hindered recovery. It also didn't help that large swaths of Europe were still battle scarred wastelands useless for agriculture, an entire generation of young working men had been killed or crippled, and that the formerly super-productive Germany was now teetering with an ineffectual government and crippling reparations to pay. Throw in a crushing multi-year drought in the United States that ruined harvests across wholes states and the stage is set for chaos.

The old ways of dealing with things did not work and people turned to new ideas. In the US, this was various public works projects and assistance programs, collectively called the New Deal, to get people back working and build confidence in the economy and financial regulations. Similar ideas were tried in England, Australia and the UK. It should be noted that afterwards there was no major economic setbacks until 2008 after New Deal era financial regulations were pulled. In Germany, the response was more severe and was seen as a failure of democracy, which contributed to the rise of socialist parties like the KPD and SPD which in turn led to the Nazi (National Socialists German Workers Party) party to counter them (possibly with help from western powers seeking a wall against communism) with a newfound hate of the Allies thanks to the colossal reparations to the rest of Europe that Germany had been forced to pay in the Treaty of Versailles. Responding to the collapse gave the Nazis the political currency to get into power, stimulate the economy by gearing it up to war and made the UK less willing to intervene to stop them while they were rising due to nobody wanting to be the one to start another war. And ideals of peace and disarmamemt certainly somewhat popular in the UK and France.

To their credit, in the mid 30's the Nazis did appear to be doing good things, even if there was a clear air of racial supremacy about the whole affair. Europe was collectively terrified of Marxism, and a nation that was forcefully rebuilding and modernizing itself without resorting to collectivization was tolerated by the French and British out of fear of the alternative. Between constructing the autobahn, hosting the olympics, and achieving a number of engineering feats such as the first practical helicopter, Germany appeared to be getting shit done. So nobody was too disturbed when Germany started making noises about reunifying some Germanic peoples in border regions they'd ceded in the Treaty...

== The Second World War ==

=== The War in the West ===
See also [[Nazi]]s

With Poland unwilling to roll over before the Nazis, the Nazis securing a ceasefire with Soviet Russia and with Britain and France finally stirred to the defense of Poland, it was clear that war was inevitable and so, on September 1st 1939, after creating a false-flag incident to offer the thinnest fig leaf of legality (and also dispose of a few dissenting Germans on the Nazis' hitlist) Germany struck at Poland. Two days later on September 3rd Britain and France declared war on Germany. Contrary to the popular imagination, Poland did not simply crumble before the German onslaught, and the myth of Polish cavalry trying to charge German tanks was yet another piece of propaganda. But after a month of hard fighting, with the Soviets entering the war on the German side and striking Poland in the rear, Poland finally gave in to the inevitable.

=== The War in the East ===
Since at least 1853, when Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Harbor, the Japanese feared the day when the powers of Europe would stomp all over them like they did China. In response they began building up their industrial base, importing guns, ships, factory machinery, engineers, textbooks, and professors. Some Japanese people came to the idea that the best way to fend off imperialism was to become imperialists themselves, and they began gobbling up their neighbors from the late 19th century onward (at first, in the name of liberating them and creating a "Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere", but with more brutality and for more obviously selfish reasons as time went on). They kept this going into the 20th century (when this sort of behavior was finally falling out of fashion among the Western powers, especially after WWI), by which time the military had become central to Japanese politics. In 1931, they invaded Manchuria, and invaded China in 1937, killing millions as they went(four times the death toll of the Holocaust to be precise, something that is largely ignored in light of Holocaust itself and Japan's contemporary PR effort). The rest of the world was outraged and cut Japan off from trade, which caused them to dig their heels in and keep it up, lest they be perceived as paper tigers. Tensions built until eventually the US threatened to cut off the oil Japan needed to keep their massive fleet running, and the overconfident Army managed to push the Imperial Japanese Navy into launching an attack on the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor (timed to hit approximately 30 minutes after delivering the declaration of war, thus [[Rules lawyer|effectively being a surprise attack without technically being a surprise attack]]).

The idea was that if everything went right, the fickle American public would be dismayed by the prospect of a hard fight over distant lands (especially while contemplating joining the war in Europe), the IJN could seize control of the Pacific while the crippled US fleet was out of action, and the US would be left with no choice but negotiation. However, while the Pearl Harbor attack did work pretty well and they did overrun a lot of Allied holdings around Asia, they missed all but one of the US carriers which only suffered minor damaged, enraged an American public that was previously tepid on war (especially since mistakes delayed even the planned token warning), and the fact was that the US had more than 10 times the Industry that Japan did as well as plenty of fuel. They also aligned themselves with the Nazis, based on shared enemies and ultra-Imperialist/Nationalist ideologies, but thus reinforcing the narrative of them being a part of the barbaric Forces of Evil who needed to be completely defeated for the sake of the civilized world.

As time went on, and with some shaky starts, the Allies quickly learned how to rely on carriers instead of traditional battleship tactics, a lucky and devastating win at the Battle of Midway put the IJN on the back foot, now finding themselves as the proverbial one legged man in an ass kicking contest with the cream of Japanese carrier aviation at the bottom of the Pacific. Ferocious naval engagements gave way as the star of the show to even more brutal amphibious warfare as the Marines began their island hopping campaign across the Pacific, painfully prying each strategically important Japanese occupied island from their well dug in defenders. The jungle, cave and amphibious warfare of this stage of the campaign was especially horrific even by World War 2 standards, not helped by racism against the Japanese on the part of Americans and the racism against everyone crossed with the suicidal fanaticism of the Japanese further exacerbating this.

One major note from a wargaming perspective in this theater is Operation Ten Go, the last sortie of the IJN against the US military forces invading Okinawa. The largest battleship made by human hands, the Yamato, and her support fleet, sortied... and were promptly destroyed by massed American air power. Thus proving the change in the IRL meta of naval warfare to carrier dominance, which has endured to this day.

=== The Manhattan Project ===
At the tail end of the 19th century, scientists began to work out some odd properties of matter, which eventually got them to realize that splitting atomic nuclei after processing Uranium in a cyclotron releases millions of times more energy than an equivalent mass of a chemical reaction. Naturally, instead of using it as cheap energy first, people thought "How can we weaponize this?" Such a weapon would be a game changer for warfare (less for the raw destruction it would cause, since firebombing cities was already horrifyingly effective, but because it would only take one bomber getting through air defenses to do the job instead of dozens or hundreds), and the Nazis getting it first would be an intolerable state of affairs. As such the Brits and the Americans pooled their scientific and industrial resources at Los Alamos to work out how to build a bomb. 20000 '''tons''' of silver wiring were built to enrich the Uranium into something that will recreate a small sun for a brief moment.

They were not ready in time to use it against the Nazis, but the first two were dropped on Japan to convince them that they wouldn't be able to fight to the stalemate they were now aiming for, thus ending the war quickly at the cost of a few hundred thousand Japanese civilians, rather than a long and costly slog that would potentially result in millions dead if the fanatical Japanese military forced it through to completion (including both the Japanese civilians who would be mobilized into militias and untold American service members). Some accounts also say it was intended to intimidate the Soviet Union, but since the Russians ended up nicking the research data (supposedly, Stalin knew that the Manhattan Project succeeded before Truman), this just paved the way for the nuclear stalemate known as [[the Cold War]].

== The appeal of the World Wars ==
These are the biggest armed conflicts of world history, rolling across continents using modern weapons, from tanks to planes to automatic weapons. Modern War was born in the trenches of the Somme, in the skies above London and over the fields of Poland during the Blitzkrieg, the flanking in France, the naval bombardment and air bombing in the Pacific, the hell in the Eastern front cities, in the bombing of Europe from the air, in the atomic fire of Hiroshima and Japan. We entered the century and went 14 years thinking everything was right and as great as it could be. Thirty years, a war, a pandemic, an economic crash, another war and several genocides later the man who was born into the first large scale factories witnessed the power of the atom burn the hopes and dreams of two cities.

Of the two wars, World War One gets relatively little media attention and what little it does get is somber. Part of that is because it's hard to craft a heroic action-packed adventure out of the hopeless horror of trench warfare, the other part is that the morality of the war is very, very grey. There was no clear right side, with both the Central and Allied powers equally chomping at the bit for a fight (at least to start with), and ready to start shooting for ''any'' convenient reason. When some angry Illyrians in the Balkans finally set everything off, the ''only'' motivation the common people had (besides being drafted and having no choice anyway) to go fight was the extensive propaganda campaigns telling them how totally awful for realsies the enemy was, and anyone asking questions or doubting was shut down ''hard''. When it was all over the country blamed and punished for the whole mess wasn't even the one that started it (in fact, the country that actually started it made bank off the entire thing. Germany was still the one to go to war with Belgium and get the British involved so they could certainly take some blame.) All told, the First World War is largely seen as a great tragedy, and is widely considered a wasteful war as winnings were slim on the Allied side. If Russia didn't get involved or if the Axis didn't go for Belgium or if Italy either started under the allies or stayed in the axis or if Italy was the cause of WW1 as it likely would have been depending on how things would have continued in AH if the either the Duke dying didn't result in a war or if the Duke was never assassinated a war with one side getting a much greater victory could have transpired.

Probably one of the only noble (and almost certainly the cleanest) aspects of WW1 was the war in the air, where fighter pilots were effectively chivalric knights of the sky. One famous example was Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron), easily the most famous Ace fighter of the war, with 80 victories to his name in his distinctive red tri-plane (which only accounted for his last 17). He was so well respected among his adversaries that when he was finally shot down, the Allied officers who recovered his body buried him with full honors, including an honor guard and gun salute. This didn't stop the ruthless pragmatism, a few pilots even publicly boasted of shooting down parachuting airmen to prevent them from returning to the fight.

Another event stands out known as the Christmas Truce; early on in the war, troops on the Western Front pretty quickly realized that the guys they were shooting at didn’t want to be there any more than they did, and agreed to a ceasefire to celebrate Christmas. When the truce looked like it was going to last, commanders put a kibosh on the whole thing and told them to start fighting again and even cracked down on small mutinies arising. Another such truce would never happen as the fighting became more destructive, as poison gas attacks and tank assaults made each side far more wary of the other.

The Second World War is a much more palatable conflict of more or less Good vs Evil, with both the Nazis and Imperial Japan going out to conquer their respective hemispheres of the world and exterminating millions as key objectives and Italy playing the incompetent sidekick/comic relief which isn't too far off the truth in a series of spectacular displays of military incompetence on the part of Mussolini and his generals. The Axis Powers provided a clear and easy villain for the rest of the world to rally against (as well as providing easy media villains for the rest of the century and into the next millennium). The far more mobile and urban warfare of WW2 also allowed for more personal initiative and heroism, and stories of the extraordinary accomplishments of individual squads, or even individual soldiers, are far more commonplace here than they were back in WW1, when individual men or units had no real hope of making a difference, no matter what they did (mind, it was still industrial weight and technology that won the war, but it is far easier to remember Simo Hayha than say, Alvin York).

As a result, a solid majority of [[Alternate History]] fiction is set in WWII one way or another. Even if WWI (or any of the many, many 19th Century to 1913 events and trends that lead to it) is the point of divergence, the story is likely to be in the late interwar to WWII periods.

== World War inspired Games, Factions and Settings ==
* A lot of stuff from the [[Imperium of Man]], especially the Death Korps of Krieg.
* [[Dieselpunk]] is the WWII equivalent of Steampunk. If you like the general aesthetics and mood of the time period but don’t want to be limited by the period’s technology, or perhaps want to see what would happen if the Nazi “Wunderwaffen” had been fully realized, this is the setting for you.
* [[Bolt Action]], [[Flames of War]], and other similar military tabletop games are set in WWII.
* [[Star Wars]] takes a great deal of inspiration from this time period, and in regards to the prequels, it especially takes a lot of inspiration from the transformation of the democratic-but-ineffectual Weimar Republic into the nightmarishly totalitarian Third Reich (though it was also influenced by the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire).
* Indiana Jones. Do we need to explain this?
* The 1920+ universe, inspired by the art of Jakub Rozalski, envisions an alternate Europe where Nikola Tesla’s super science lead to the development of Mechs as the dominant war machine. Best known for the RTS game “Iron Harvest” that pits Imperial Germany, Imperial Russia, and Poland in a version of WWI with WWII elements mixed in. Even Rasputin makes an appearance as the leader of a shadowy cabal looking to seize power by fomenting revolution in all three factions and take over Tesla’s super-advanced city-state.

{{Skub}}
{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Edgy

2020-12-15T02:58:58Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:F837:86D5:E198:595D: /* Notable Edgelords */

{{Topquote|As far as I can make out "edgy" occurs when middlebrow, middle-aged profiteers are looking to suck the energy--not to mention the spending money--out of the "youth culture." So they come up with this fake concept of "seeming to be dangerous when every move they make is the result of market research and a corporate master plan".|[[Daria 40k|Daria]], Episode [3.05] The Lost Girls.}}

{{Topquote|My name is Not Important; what is important is what I'm going to do. I just fucking hate this world, and the human worms feasting on its carcass. My whole life is just cold, bitter hatred, and I always wanted to die violently. This is the time of vengeance, and no life is worth saving, and I will put in the grave as many as I can. It's time for me to kill and it's time for me to die; my genocide crusade begins... here!|The Crusader, aka Not Important}}

{{Topquote|Make it [[World of Darkness|dark]], make it [[Grimdark|grim]], make it [[ANGRY MARINES|tough]] but then, for the love of God, [[Comedy Marines|tell a joke]].|Joss Whedon giving a nice example on how to avoid being edgy even while creating a dark world}}

[[File:Marvel Edge.jpg|200px|thumb|left|Unabashed Edginess from the 1990s]]
'''Edginess''' refers to people pushing violent and controversial subject matter in their stories, especially when they're doing it to to try and be popular with tragic, violent or controversial stories. This often takes the form of senselessly driving a vague argument, a plotline or a scenario to its darkest possible outcome, all the while openly expressing their disdain for whoever "the establishment" is, rationalizing villains or finding a middle ground in discourses. Like most internet terminology, it has been beaten to death, resurrected hastily, and then beaten some more. Has no relation to ''[[Hunter: The Reckoning]]''.

Another far less negative use of the term is to describe something on the 'edge' of what's acceptable, pushing established boundaries of convention. For example, by this definition ''Batman: The Animated Series'' was edgy for making an animated series which defied expectations of how true to its base concept and generally well-written a show designed to sell toys could be. Some more examples of this would be Ren and Stimpy (which was crude and vulgar) or Invader Zim (which could get dark in subject matter, and used a fair bit of black humor); in both cases, a decent bit of the comedy was of the "I can't believe that they did ''THAT'' on a kid's cartoon show!" variety. A milder version of this was Sonic the Hedgehog in contrast to Mario. In 1989 the Simpsons was the Edgy take on the classic family sitcom archetype and in 1999 Family Guy had slotted itself in as the Edgy version of The Simpsons. For the 1990s and early 2000s Edgy was a favored term of cynical marketing types which drew the attention of the world's sarcastic snarkers, many of which came to congregate on sites such as 4chan.

An "edgelord" is someone who essentially is guilty of serial attempts to be edgy, like [[that guy]] at your tabletop role playing group who always, without fail, makes a specific type of self insert or wish fulfillment character; brooding loners skilled at violence who hate anyone else having authority over them, are anti-conformist and have a troubled past - all without the nuance or skill to actually pull it off (with their opponents often being stand-ins for whoever the edgelord considers "The Man™" such as big business, law enforcement or organized religion). The end result is they makes themselves look silly. "Art" done by edgelords contain characters who are as dark, brooding and as painfully unhappy as possible, conflicts have zero compromise, institutions are the villains unless the edgelord made them and any conflict of interest will have the worst possible outcome. In writing, edgelords will go out of their way to make the story extra depressing, and subject multiple aspects of it to an increased shock factor when it's clearly '''illogical''' to do so. Needless to say, it can drive a perfect idea to make an entertaining story into the shitter, grating the nerves of even the most jaded audience. When commenting, the "edgelord" will simply push any predicament in the artwork to the darkest, deepest, worst outcome, while describing his fantasies. For example: In an adult and/or bondage predicament picture, edgelords can be found describing a paragraph of horrible fate the captive would suffer, *should* suffer because slaves are shit, and *deserve* abuse, even when the picture was of a predicament with nothing in context. Or he will simply fill the comment of any NSFW picture with his own sick fantasies, surely adding "women DESERVE it".

This is not to say that said dark elements like murder, slavery, rape and bodily harm are bad for literature, but rather that their sloppy execution with no regard to their depth is. As shown above, even the most "edgelord" of concepts can be salvaged and even made bearable with proper handling, especially going by the latter definition - but if you do it enough, the boundaries shift and what was edgy becomes the new norm, and there is always the risk of falling ''over'' the edge. This is why the old definition has fallen increasingly out of favor as time has gone on — people began seeing the dross sold under the title of "edgy", and the idea of what it meant thus moved away from the positive connotations marketing execs desired and closer to the qualities described above. Plus, this is the internet, and people would rather a word just be an insult or a compliment to reduce confusion.

==The Anatomy of Edginess==
Edginess is in some ways like a cargo cult. During WWII in the Pacific, the US military set up bases on remote, but inhabited islands, bringing with them a lot of stuff like planes and cars and so forth that was quite amazing to the stone age natives, to whom the world had been a few dozen square kilometers of land surrounded by ocean, with hazy stories of other such islands. When the military left, some of the natives took to making coconut and wooden radios and flight towers based off of some vague recollection of the military variants, unaware that making the shape alone does not get you the functional item.

In that vein, most of what comes to mind when people envision "edgy" artworks tends to be the result of people who wanted to make ''morally grey'' characters and subject matter, but lack the maturity/experience/focus necessary to NOT end up with anything other than a multiple-personality-disordered mess or a power fantasy wrapped in propaganda. Someone with (at best) mediocre creative abilities sees some fiction that makes good use of melodrama, gritty settings, dark humor and such, made by people who know what the hell they're doing and figures "I can do that!", leading to said person haphazardly applying those elements incorrectly. The results of such efforts are either tiresome, unintentionally funny or just painful. The stereotypical teenager, especially one with gothic/emo tendencies, commonly embody this - all too eager for "adult" things (eg: violence, sex, etc.) in their limited perception of such, often born of denial. Individuals who pander to said demographic (or are otherwise just downright hacks) will favor this approach over any sense of complexity, subtlety, nuance and some actual understanding of the human condition.

===Edgy and [[Grimdark]]===
While edginess is frequently associated with invoking grimdark [[Derp|for the sake of it and nothing else]], it's important to remember that this alone does not edgy make. As an example, [[WH40K]]'s [[Imperium of Man]] has reasons to be fair and kind when capable: though it has plenty of genocide, xenocide (completely annihilating species even when they are gentle and kind), torture, forced labor (they draw the line at commercialized chattel slavery, but un-unionized indentured servitude is fair game), witch hunts and militarism that would give Hitler a chubby beyond the grave, said horrors have reasonable justifications. Aliens were buying and selling humans like pets and culling them by the billion, operating slaver outposts even in our solar system before the Emperor came into leading humanity into a roaring rampage of revenge. And regarding souls and the universe after the Heresy, any deviation from faith in the Emperor will ''literally'' send a human to hell upon death, with their soul becoming dæmon food (and/or sex toys).

Any mistreated machinery will attract foul entities and corruption that will fuck you up seven ways till Monday and chew you out; any ill-coaxed [[Machine Spirit]] will jam and blow up in your face; and any laxity will make [[Chaos]] cults pop up by the billion in a week. Then there's [[Necrons|the genocidal robots from another age]], [[Eldar|space elves that would murder a planet on the off chance that their]] [[Farseer]] would break a nail otherwise (and they're still the nice space elves despite that, as their [[Dark Eldar|webway dwelling cousins are even worse - murdering entire planets just because they like the sound of millions of people screaming]]), [[Orks|the ambulatory (AND belligerent) fungi that plague the entire galaxy in a series of wars]], and [[Tyranids|extragalactic horrors that intend to eat everyone's face.]] [[TL;DR]] The Imperium acts like an asshole Hitler/Hirohito bastard child because the alternative is much, MUCH worse.

At the level of narrative, the fact that things are very very bad is a core thematic element of this world. As pointed out there are reasons why things are so miserable in this world which flow logically and despite this there can be points of contrast. Imperials still have the same potential to love and be kind like modern real world humans do. The Tau are hopeful despite the evils of this world. Occasionally pragmatism can overcome the deep seeded prejudices to overcome greater evils, if only for a while. And even if it is preformed by Conscript Guardsmen, Commissars or Space Marines, each the product of horrendous military institutions, can fight to achieve acts of genuine (if still typically brutal) heroism.

Now if you want a senselessly edgy story in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, an example would be the now non-canon [[Khornate Knights]].

===Edgy Villains===

There's an important argument to be made about villains and edginess. Frequently, it's necessary to engage in authorial behavior that would be considered edgy in order to properly develop a bad guy. There are a few important questions to ask in this case, the largest ones being "is this a [[Mary Sue|Villain Sue]] situation?" and "is the author's sympathies clearly with the villain's agenda?"<ref>Not with the villain himself; plenty of villains clearly have the author's sympathy (what [[TVTropes]] might call a "Villain Woobie" or "Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds"); what matters here is does the author believe what the villain believes. That may sound odd, but many cases of "The Bad Guy Was Right" either involve characters made by another creator, or are about heroes.</ref>

===Edgelords and [[Mary Sue]]s===

A lot of edgy characters also qualify as [[Mary Sue]]s. This is because many writers who aim for "edgy" in their works are terrible at writing, and writing a [[Mary Sue]] is a common result of terrible writing. Be on the look out for plot armor, protagonists who not only share their author's values, but are not challenged on these views in any way, and the other major Sue factors covered in our [[Mary Sue]] article.

===In closing===
There are many paths to success for a storyteller, some of which include going over dark territory in various ways or by innovating and pushing boundaries. However, all of them require care and attention to detail to pull off well. Being dark is not a magic bullet for achieving profoundness without trying.

==How Can I Tell If My Character Is An Edgelord?==

Every edgelord has at least four qualities; skilled at violence, aggressive, has easy access to weapons and are some kind of non-conformist. These alone or even together do not make a character an edgelord. If the character has these four traits, each "Yes" answer from the list below gives your character a piece of edgelorddom;

* Are they a power fantasy against "The Man™"? Note, a "Yes" answer here automatically grants the character edgelord status regardless of whether or not they have anything else on this list.
** Bonus points if the writer's idea of "The Man™" is big business, the education system or organized religion. Double bonus points if it ''is'' a real-life group or industry, and triple bonus points if the real life group is already frequently targeted this way (like car manufacturers for companies or Christianity for religions).
* Do they openly mock gods/faith/hope/love/peace/compromise/fate/all of the above? Bonus points if they ever attack representatives of the Power-That-Be at the cosmic level (ranging from openly mocking religious characters to an outright war on the gods).
* Do they have a tragic and/or violent backstory?
* Are forgiveness and redemption things the character disregards if not actively despises?
* Do they not care if they live or die? Or do they want to die?
* Do they have problems with authority? As in a negative attitude towards anyone besides themselves having authority.
* Are they heavily scarred individuals? (physical, emotional, whatever...)
* Do they regularly quote-mine philosophers or works of fiction and spout these quotes to validate their worldview? Bonus points if they alter the original quote.
* Do they share any of the same beliefs as the work's creator and openly express them? (for example, the protagonists of stories by Ayn Rand or Jack Chick). Bonus points if they're a nihilist. <ref>This item is more a [[Mary Sue]] trope, but there is significant overlap between edgelords and Mary Sues.</ref>
** Are these views never challenged or refuted in the story? Or, for partial credit, are the challengers clearly strawmen?
** The Star Trek Captain Exception: If said belief is cleanly confined to one speech towards the end of the story/episode, and the author seems to be legitimately trying to just sum up and state the message of the story, it usually doesn't count. (Normally not an issue for edgelords, but it has happened occasionally.)
* Do they always wear sinister-looking attire?
** Do they wear a cloak, a coat or an overcoat that looks like a cloak.
** If they wear armor, does it have blades or spikes built in to it?
** Is it emblazoned with insults, profanities or threats of violence?
** Does it come in dark colors?
* Do they have tattoos or wear warpaint?
* Do they have built in weapons, such as horns or cybernetics? Bonus points if they're alterations of their original body's state.
* Do they swear like a drunk pirate?
* Do they have a vice, such as smoking? Bonus points if they have an addiction (fantastical addictions count)
* Do they have plot armor? (such as the Punisher being able to go toe-to-toe against superpowered beings who’d mop the floor with him otherwise)
* Are they a protagonist or antagonist written by Gav Thorpe, Garth Ennis, George RR Martin, Pat Mills or Alan Moore? (Note, an edgelord can be written by someone who's none of these people. And Moore and Martin, at least, are quite capable of writing protagonists and antagonists who aren't Edgelords; it's just that a lot of their characters tend to be unnecessarily edgy.)

==Notable Edgelords==

===Comics===
* The Punisher (pictured above), depending on the writer but especially when it's Garth Ennis; the ultimate example being the professionally published Hate Fic [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punisher_Kills_the_Marvel_Universe "Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe"].
* Billy Butcher from The Boys, another of Garth's stories (Garth is quite the edgelord himself), this one an anti-superpowers power fantasy. Billy is violent, racist, often dresses in black and is such a Punisher knock-off he even recycles Punisher's story arc from the comic linked above.
* The title character from the Marshall Law comics.
* Lord Edgelord, later Lord Edgegod from Slackwyrm Keep. He's aware, and <s>he's loving it</s><span style='color:red;font-size:100%'>***CLANG!*** There's no love in edge, only chaos!</span>
* The Joker, depending on the writer.
* Adversary from DC comics (pictured below), as a jab at edgelord characters and perhaps also their fans. In addition to meeting most of the criteria above, he works for a demon named Lord Satanus who gave him his powers and is actually a kid in a wheelchair.

===Film===
* Jared Leto's Joker in "Suicide Squad" is an almost textbook example of pointless "edgelord".
** The difference can be seen compared to the Joker portrayals in ''The Dark Knight'' and ''Joker'' (2019), which are both "edge with a point"; the former was about exploring human evils regarding terrorism and the latter was about exploring the origins of evil (and both avoiding ideological baggage).
* Tyler Durden from "Fight Club", albeit with an element of "edge with a point"; criticizing the growing cultural and familial vacuum prevalent in the 90's, though it was wrapped in edgelord antics.
* [[Star Wars|Kylo Ren]] AKA Krylo Ben AKA Ben Swolo. The writers were doing it on purpose, to play up the First Order's dogmati,c North Korea in space schtick, and to that end made Kylo an incredibly unsubtle Darth Vader pastiche. While "Kylo" may be the worst Skywalker ever, there is no denying that the edge is strong in his family. His mom's side are a bunch of crybaby desert backworlders with an incestuous sex drive and his dad was a scruffy, nerf herding spice smuggler - and all were war criminals, some with body counts in the hundred thousands and some with children's blood on their hands... He probably fits the mold better than we'd like to admit. Also his edge is undermined by fact that he never won a fight against [[Mary_Sue|Mar-Rey Sue Palpatine]] which doesn’t help things either.

===Live Action TV===
* Stargate's Sohkar- It's hard to get more edgelord than literally masquerading/cosplaying as Satan.

===Video Games===
* [[/v/|Shadow the Hedgehog]] for the PS2/XBox/Gamecube. For the unfamiliar: An edgy game about a cartoon hedgehog shooting enemies, yet ESRB rated for Everyone 10 and up.
** The villain Infinite from ''Sonic Forces'', as a parody of edgy Villain Sue characters.
* Illidan Stormrage (pictured below), Deathwing and Sylvanas Windrunner from the Warcraft franchise.
* Reaper from Overwatch.
* Caesar's Legion and Caesar himself in [[Fallout|Fallout: New Vegas]] (along with some of their fans and the writer who created them).
* Not Important aka The Antagonist aka The Crusader from Hatred. Imagine every trope related to nihilistic spree shooters, push them to their uncomfortable extremes and then plop the result in a monochromatic mess of a game. What you get is the story about a very unlikable man with dialogue written by less likeable people (including an edgy as fuck death metal band) going around and killing everyone because...fuck you, it's edgy.

===Literature===
* [[Elric]] of Melnibone, arguably the first one.
* Euron Greyjoy, Littlefinger and Ramsay Bolton from [[A Song of Ice and Fire]].
* Hamlet (yes, THAT Hamlet), possibly an example that predates Elric. After his father dies dies, he starts wearing black, becomes foreboding and dramatic and revenge obsessed for at least 6 months. Has monologues with skulls and murders his friends and the harmless father of his girlfriend.

===Tabletop Games===
* [[Konrad Curze]]
* [[Blackguard]]s
* Vlaakith, the Queen of the [[Githyanki]]. A callous, violent, paranoid tyrannical lich, she hates religion but wants to become a goddess herself, values strength but kills people who ''might'' become powerful enough to challenge her, and all without a higher goal than her own selfish gain... textbook edgelord.
* [[Lolth]] from Dungeons and Dragons. Started with trying to overthrow her divine husband because she didn't like her job and it all went downhill from there.
* Warhammer settings have too many to list them all;
** 40k is the worst offender in that regard, so let's just say the [[Black Templars]], the [[Marines Malevolent]], the [[Dark Eldar]] and most [[Chaos Space Marine|traitor marines]] for this one.
** For Warhammer Fantasy there's [[Valnir the Reaper]], [[Nagash]] and most Dark Elves.
** On that note, [[Malal]] among the Chaos Gods.

===Fan Works===
* [[Drizzt]] clones with extreme Alignment leanings, either towards good or evil.
* Various [[Original character, do not steal|fan-made]] and canon Sonic characters, particularly Shadow.
* The protagonist of "Ambience: A Fleet Symphony" and the story itself. A Fallout KanColle crossover fanfic that thinks it's a regular KanColle fanfic. It revolves around rape and eugenics, and when the story was posted to a forum and scorned, the writer went ballistic against their critics.
* The whole "*teleports behind you* Nothing personal kid. *stabs you*" meme originated as a parody of edgelord characters.

===Anime===
* Half of the [[Animu]] protagonists in existence. Bonus points if the genre is [[Isekai]], triple points if there's a harem involved.

[[Category:Gamer Slang]]

==Gallery==
<gallery>
File:Lord_of_the_edge_by_takfloyd-d99sq48.png|The edgelord mindset in a nutshell.
File:1699592-elric_of_melnibone_by_isra2007.jpg|If any fictional edgelord could be called well-written, it'd be Elric.
File:Adversary_01.jpg|"Adversay" from DC Comics. Sinister clothes? Check. Aggressive sounding name? Check. Smoking? Check. Swearing? Check. Wants Superman dead for "rep"? Check! Edgelord confirmed.
File:Tyler-durden-7.jpg|The face that launched a thousand edgelords (ironically doesn't wear dark clothes).
File:Darion Mograine.jpg|There's a small but distinct line between edgy...
File:531939-vertical-blizzard-wallpapers-2560x1440.jpg|... and edgelord.
</gallery>

Edgy

2020-12-15T02:57:15Z

2406:3400:20F:FFC0:F837:86D5:E198:595D: /* Comics */

{{Topquote|As far as I can make out "edgy" occurs when middlebrow, middle-aged profiteers are looking to suck the energy--not to mention the spending money--out of the "youth culture." So they come up with this fake concept of "seeming to be dangerous when every move they make is the result of market research and a corporate master plan".|[[Daria 40k|Daria]], Episode [3.05] The Lost Girls.}}

{{Topquote|My name is Not Important; what is important is what I'm going to do. I just fucking hate this world, and the human worms feasting on its carcass. My whole life is just cold, bitter hatred, and I always wanted to die violently. This is the time of vengeance, and no life is worth saving, and I will put in the grave as many as I can. It's time for me to kill and it's time for me to die; my genocide crusade begins... here!|The Crusader, aka Not Important}}

{{Topquote|Make it [[World of Darkness|dark]], make it [[Grimdark|grim]], make it [[ANGRY MARINES|tough]] but then, for the love of God, [[Comedy Marines|tell a joke]].|Joss Whedon giving a nice example on how to avoid being edgy even while creating a dark world}}

[[File:Marvel Edge.jpg|200px|thumb|left|Unabashed Edginess from the 1990s]]
'''Edginess''' refers to people pushing violent and controversial subject matter in their stories, especially when they're doing it to to try and be popular with tragic, violent or controversial stories. This often takes the form of senselessly driving a vague argument, a plotline or a scenario to its darkest possible outcome, all the while openly expressing their disdain for whoever "the establishment" is, rationalizing villains or finding a middle ground in discourses. Like most internet terminology, it has been beaten to death, resurrected hastily, and then beaten some more. Has no relation to ''[[Hunter: The Reckoning]]''.

Another far less negative use of the term is to describe something on the 'edge' of what's acceptable, pushing established boundaries of convention. For example, by this definition ''Batman: The Animated Series'' was edgy for making an animated series which defied expectations of how true to its base concept and generally well-written a show designed to sell toys could be. Some more examples of this would be Ren and Stimpy (which was crude and vulgar) or Invader Zim (which could get dark in subject matter, and used a fair bit of black humor); in both cases, a decent bit of the comedy was of the "I can't believe that they did ''THAT'' on a kid's cartoon show!" variety. A milder version of this was Sonic the Hedgehog in contrast to Mario. In 1989 the Simpsons was the Edgy take on the classic family sitcom archetype and in 1999 Family Guy had slotted itself in as the Edgy version of The Simpsons. For the 1990s and early 2000s Edgy was a favored term of cynical marketing types which drew the attention of the world's sarcastic snarkers, many of which came to congregate on sites such as 4chan.

An "edgelord" is someone who essentially is guilty of serial attempts to be edgy, like [[that guy]] at your tabletop role playing group who always, without fail, makes a specific type of self insert or wish fulfillment character; brooding loners skilled at violence who hate anyone else having authority over them, are anti-conformist and have a troubled past - all without the nuance or skill to actually pull it off (with their opponents often being stand-ins for whoever the edgelord considers "The Man™" such as big business, law enforcement or organized religion). The end result is they makes themselves look silly. "Art" done by edgelords contain characters who are as dark, brooding and as painfully unhappy as possible, conflicts have zero compromise, institutions are the villains unless the edgelord made them and any conflict of interest will have the worst possible outcome. In writing, edgelords will go out of their way to make the story extra depressing, and subject multiple aspects of it to an increased shock factor when it's clearly '''illogical''' to do so. Needless to say, it can drive a perfect idea to make an entertaining story into the shitter, grating the nerves of even the most jaded audience. When commenting, the "edgelord" will simply push any predicament in the artwork to the darkest, deepest, worst outcome, while describing his fantasies. For example: In an adult and/or bondage predicament picture, edgelords can be found describing a paragraph of horrible fate the captive would suffer, *should* suffer because slaves are shit, and *deserve* abuse, even when the picture was of a predicament with nothing in context. Or he will simply fill the comment of any NSFW picture with his own sick fantasies, surely adding "women DESERVE it".

This is not to say that said dark elements like murder, slavery, rape and bodily harm are bad for literature, but rather that their sloppy execution with no regard to their depth is. As shown above, even the most "edgelord" of concepts can be salvaged and even made bearable with proper handling, especially going by the latter definition - but if you do it enough, the boundaries shift and what was edgy becomes the new norm, and there is always the risk of falling ''over'' the edge. This is why the old definition has fallen increasingly out of favor as time has gone on — people began seeing the dross sold under the title of "edgy", and the idea of what it meant thus moved away from the positive connotations marketing execs desired and closer to the qualities described above. Plus, this is the internet, and people would rather a word just be an insult or a compliment to reduce confusion.

==The Anatomy of Edginess==
Edginess is in some ways like a cargo cult. During WWII in the Pacific, the US military set up bases on remote, but inhabited islands, bringing with them a lot of stuff like planes and cars and so forth that was quite amazing to the stone age natives, to whom the world had been a few dozen square kilometers of land surrounded by ocean, with hazy stories of other such islands. When the military left, some of the natives took to making coconut and wooden radios and flight towers based off of some vague recollection of the military variants, unaware that making the shape alone does not get you the functional item.

In that vein, most of what comes to mind when people envision "edgy" artworks tends to be the result of people who wanted to make ''morally grey'' characters and subject matter, but lack the maturity/experience/focus necessary to NOT end up with anything other than a multiple-personality-disordered mess or a power fantasy wrapped in propaganda. Someone with (at best) mediocre creative abilities sees some fiction that makes good use of melodrama, gritty settings, dark humor and such, made by people who know what the hell they're doing and figures "I can do that!", leading to said person haphazardly applying those elements incorrectly. The results of such efforts are either tiresome, unintentionally funny or just painful. The stereotypical teenager, especially one with gothic/emo tendencies, commonly embody this - all too eager for "adult" things (eg: violence, sex, etc.) in their limited perception of such, often born of denial. Individuals who pander to said demographic (or are otherwise just downright hacks) will favor this approach over any sense of complexity, subtlety, nuance and some actual understanding of the human condition.

===Edgy and [[Grimdark]]===
While edginess is frequently associated with invoking grimdark [[Derp|for the sake of it and nothing else]], it's important to remember that this alone does not edgy make. As an example, [[WH40K]]'s [[Imperium of Man]] has reasons to be fair and kind when capable: though it has plenty of genocide, xenocide (completely annihilating species even when they are gentle and kind), torture, forced labor (they draw the line at commercialized chattel slavery, but un-unionized indentured servitude is fair game), witch hunts and militarism that would give Hitler a chubby beyond the grave, said horrors have reasonable justifications. Aliens were buying and selling humans like pets and culling them by the billion, operating slaver outposts even in our solar system before the Emperor came into leading humanity into a roaring rampage of revenge. And regarding souls and the universe after the Heresy, any deviation from faith in the Emperor will ''literally'' send a human to hell upon death, with their soul becoming dæmon food (and/or sex toys).

Any mistreated machinery will attract foul entities and corruption that will fuck you up seven ways till Monday and chew you out; any ill-coaxed [[Machine Spirit]] will jam and blow up in your face; and any laxity will make [[Chaos]] cults pop up by the billion in a week. Then there's [[Necrons|the genocidal robots from another age]], [[Eldar|space elves that would murder a planet on the off chance that their]] [[Farseer]] would break a nail otherwise (and they're still the nice space elves despite that, as their [[Dark Eldar|webway dwelling cousins are even worse - murdering entire planets just because they like the sound of millions of people screaming]]), [[Orks|the ambulatory (AND belligerent) fungi that plague the entire galaxy in a series of wars]], and [[Tyranids|extragalactic horrors that intend to eat everyone's face.]] [[TL;DR]] The Imperium acts like an asshole Hitler/Hirohito bastard child because the alternative is much, MUCH worse.

At the level of narrative, the fact that things are very very bad is a core thematic element of this world. As pointed out there are reasons why things are so miserable in this world which flow logically and despite this there can be points of contrast. Imperials still have the same potential to love and be kind like modern real world humans do. The Tau are hopeful despite the evils of this world. Occasionally pragmatism can overcome the deep seeded prejudices to overcome greater evils, if only for a while. And even if it is preformed by Conscript Guardsmen, Commissars or Space Marines, each the product of horrendous military institutions, can fight to achieve acts of genuine (if still typically brutal) heroism.

Now if you want a senselessly edgy story in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, an example would be the now non-canon [[Khornate Knights]].

===Edgy Villains===

There's an important argument to be made about villains and edginess. Frequently, it's necessary to engage in authorial behavior that would be considered edgy in order to properly develop a bad guy. There are a few important questions to ask in this case, the largest ones being "is this a [[Mary Sue|Villain Sue]] situation?" and "is the author's sympathies clearly with the villain's agenda?"<ref>Not with the villain himself; plenty of villains clearly have the author's sympathy (what [[TVTropes]] might call a "Villain Woobie" or "Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds"); what matters here is does the author believe what the villain believes. That may sound odd, but many cases of "The Bad Guy Was Right" either involve characters made by another creator, or are about heroes.</ref>

===Edgelords and [[Mary Sue]]s===

A lot of edgy characters also qualify as [[Mary Sue]]s. This is because many writers who aim for "edgy" in their works are terrible at writing, and writing a [[Mary Sue]] is a common result of terrible writing. Be on the look out for plot armor, protagonists who not only share their author's values, but are not challenged on these views in any way, and the other major Sue factors covered in our [[Mary Sue]] article.

===In closing===
There are many paths to success for a storyteller, some of which include going over dark territory in various ways or by innovating and pushing boundaries. However, all of them require care and attention to detail to pull off well. Being dark is not a magic bullet for achieving profoundness without trying.

==How Can I Tell If My Character Is An Edgelord?==

Every edgelord has at least four qualities; skilled at violence, aggressive, has easy access to weapons and are some kind of non-conformist. These alone or even together do not make a character an edgelord. If the character has these four traits, each "Yes" answer from the list below gives your character a piece of edgelorddom;

* Are they a power fantasy against "The Man™"? Note, a "Yes" answer here automatically grants the character edgelord status regardless of whether or not they have anything else on this list.
** Bonus points if the writer's idea of "The Man™" is big business, the education system or organized religion. Double bonus points if it ''is'' a real-life group or industry, and triple bonus points if the real life group is already frequently targeted this way (like car manufacturers for companies or Christianity for religions).
* Do they openly mock gods/faith/hope/love/peace/compromise/fate/all of the above? Bonus points if they ever attack representatives of the Power-That-Be at the cosmic level (ranging from openly mocking religious characters to an outright war on the gods).
* Do they have a tragic and/or violent backstory?
* Are forgiveness and redemption things the character disregards if not actively despises?
* Do they not care if they live or die? Or do they want to die?
* Do they have problems with authority? As in a negative attitude towards anyone besides themselves having authority.
* Are they heavily scarred individuals? (physical, emotional, whatever...)
* Do they regularly quote-mine philosophers or works of fiction and spout these quotes to validate their worldview? Bonus points if they alter the original quote.
* Do they share any of the same beliefs as the work's creator and openly express them? (for example, the protagonists of stories by Ayn Rand or Jack Chick). Bonus points if they're a nihilist. <ref>This item is more a [[Mary Sue]] trope, but there is significant overlap between edgelords and Mary Sues.</ref>
** Are these views never challenged or refuted in the story? Or, for partial credit, are the challengers clearly strawmen?
** The Star Trek Captain Exception: If said belief is cleanly confined to one speech towards the end of the story/episode, and the author seems to be legitimately trying to just sum up and state the message of the story, it usually doesn't count. (Normally not an issue for edgelords, but it has happened occasionally.)
* Do they always wear sinister-looking attire?
** Do they wear a cloak, a coat or an overcoat that looks like a cloak.
** If they wear armor, does it have blades or spikes built in to it?
** Is it emblazoned with insults, profanities or threats of violence?
** Does it come in dark colors?
* Do they have tattoos or wear warpaint?
* Do they have built in weapons, such as horns or cybernetics? Bonus points if they're alterations of their original body's state.
* Do they swear like a drunk pirate?
* Do they have a vice, such as smoking? Bonus points if they have an addiction (fantastical addictions count)
* Do they have plot armor? (such as the Punisher being able to go toe-to-toe against superpowered beings who’d mop the floor with him otherwise)
* Are they a protagonist or antagonist written by Gav Thorpe, Garth Ennis, George RR Martin, Pat Mills or Alan Moore? (Note, an edgelord can be written by someone who's none of these people. And Moore and Martin, at least, are quite capable of writing protagonists and antagonists who aren't Edgelords; it's just that a lot of their characters tend to be unnecessarily edgy.)

==Notable Edgelords==

===Comics===
* The Punisher (pictured above), depending on the writer but especially when it's Garth Ennis; the ultimate example being the professionally published Hate Fic [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punisher_Kills_the_Marvel_Universe "Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe"].
* Billy Butcher from The Boys, another of Garth's stories (Garth is quite the edgelord himself), this one an anti-superpowers power fantasy. Billy is violent, racist, often dresses in black and is such a Punisher knock-off he even recycles Punisher's story arc from the comic linked above.
* The title character from the Marshall Law comics.
* Lord Edgelord, later Lord Edgegod from Slackwyrm Keep. He's aware, and <s>he's loving it</s><span style='color:red;font-size:100%'>***CLANG!*** There's no love in edge, only chaos!</span>
* The Joker, depending on the writer.
* Adversary from DC comics, as a jab at edgelord characters and perhaps also their fans. Always smoking, swears a lot, wants to kill Superman to build his reputation, works for a demon named Lord Satanus who gave him his powers and is actually a kid in a wheelchair.

===Film===
* Jared Leto's Joker in "Suicide Squad" is an almost textbook example of pointless "edgelord".
** The difference can be seen compared to the Joker portrayals in ''The Dark Knight'' and ''Joker'' (2019), which are both "edge with a point"; the former was about exploring human evils regarding terrorism and the latter was about exploring the origins of evil (and both avoiding ideological baggage).
* Tyler Durden from "Fight Club", albeit with an element of "edge with a point"; criticizing the growing cultural and familial vacuum prevalent in the 90's, though it was wrapped in edgelord antics.
* [[Star Wars|Kylo Ren]] AKA Krylo Ben AKA Ben Swolo. The writers were doing it on purpose, to play up the First Order's dogmati,c North Korea in space schtick, and to that end made Kylo an incredibly unsubtle Darth Vader pastiche. While "Kylo" may be the worst Skywalker ever, there is no denying that the edge is strong in his family. His mom's side are a bunch of crybaby desert backworlders with an incestuous sex drive and his dad was a scruffy, nerf herding spice smuggler - and all were war criminals, some with body counts in the hundred thousands and some with children's blood on their hands... He probably fits the mold better than we'd like to admit. Also his edge is undermined by fact that he never won a fight against [[Mary_Sue|Mar-Rey Sue Palpatine]] which doesn’t help things either.

===Live Action TV===
* Stargate's Sohkar- It's hard to get more edgelord than literally masquerading/cosplaying as Satan.

===Video Games===
* [[/v/|Shadow the Hedgehog]] for the PS2/XBox/Gamecube. For the unfamiliar: An edgy game about a cartoon hedgehog shooting enemies, yet ESRB rated for Everyone 10 and up.
** The villain Infinite from ''Sonic Forces'', as a parody of edgy Villain Sue characters.
* Illidan Stormrage (pictured below), Deathwing and Sylvanas Windrunner from the Warcraft franchise.
* Reaper from Overwatch.
* Caesar's Legion and Caesar himself in [[Fallout|Fallout: New Vegas]] (along with some of their fans and the writer who created them).
* Not Important aka The Antagonist aka The Crusader from Hatred. Imagine every trope related to nihilistic spree shooters, push them to their uncomfortable extremes and then plop the result in a monochromatic mess of a game. What you get is the story about a very unlikable man with dialogue written by less likeable people (including an edgy as fuck death metal band) going around and killing everyone because...fuck you, it's edgy.

===Literature===
* [[Elric]] of Melnibone, arguably the first one.
* Euron Greyjoy, Littlefinger and Ramsay Bolton from [[A Song of Ice and Fire]].
* Hamlet (yes, THAT Hamlet), possibly an example that predates Elric. After his father dies dies, he starts wearing black, becomes foreboding and dramatic and revenge obsessed for at least 6 months. Has monologues with skulls and murders his friends and the harmless father of his girlfriend.

===Tabletop Games===
* [[Konrad Curze]]
* [[Blackguard]]s
* Vlaakith, the Queen of the [[Githyanki]]. A callous, violent, paranoid tyrannical lich, she hates religion but wants to become a goddess herself, values strength but kills people who ''might'' become powerful enough to challenge her, and all without a higher goal than her own selfish gain... textbook edgelord.
* [[Lolth]] from Dungeons and Dragons. Started with trying to overthrow her divine husband because she didn't like her job and it all went downhill from there.
* Warhammer settings have too many to list them all;
** 40k is the worst offender in that regard, so let's just say the [[Black Templars]], the [[Marines Malevolent]], the [[Dark Eldar]] and most [[Chaos Space Marine|traitor marines]] for this one.
** For Warhammer Fantasy there's [[Valnir the Reaper]], [[Nagash]] and most Dark Elves.
** On that note, [[Malal]] among the Chaos Gods.

===Fan Works===
* [[Drizzt]] clones with extreme Alignment leanings, either towards good or evil.
* Various [[Original character, do not steal|fan-made]] and canon Sonic characters, particularly Shadow.
* The protagonist of "Ambience: A Fleet Symphony" and the story itself. A Fallout KanColle crossover fanfic that thinks it's a regular KanColle fanfic. It revolves around rape and eugenics, and when the story was posted to a forum and scorned, the writer went ballistic against their critics.
* The whole "*teleports behind you* Nothing personal kid. *stabs you*" meme originated as a parody of edgelord characters.

===Anime===
* Half of the [[Animu]] protagonists in existence. Bonus points if the genre is [[Isekai]], triple points if there's a harem involved.

[[Category:Gamer Slang]]

==Gallery==
<gallery>
File:Lord_of_the_edge_by_takfloyd-d99sq48.png|The edgelord mindset in a nutshell.
File:1699592-elric_of_melnibone_by_isra2007.jpg|If any fictional edgelord could be called well-written, it'd be Elric.
File:Adversary_01.jpg|"Adversay" from DC Comics. Sinister clothes? Check. Aggressive sounding name? Check. Smoking? Check. Swearing? Check. Wants Superman dead for "rep"? Check! Edgelord confirmed.
File:Tyler-durden-7.jpg|The face that launched a thousand edgelords (ironically doesn't wear dark clothes).
File:Darion Mograine.jpg|There's a small but distinct line between edgy...
File:531939-vertical-blizzard-wallpapers-2560x1440.jpg|... and edgelord.
</gallery>