The Salvation War

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The "militant atheism" in the story apparently you argue about apparently is just the butthurt that assaults christians when their sky fairy isn't all-powerful and just daddy - the whole point behind the story if superstition vs reason. The natural sciences are also correct. Some details have been wrong, which is understandable in a first draft. Maybe your personal grasp on science isn't as strong as you might hope for?

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We should encourage Slade and Chandler to get together and write something. It would be worst piece of fiction in the history of human kind.

(Of course given Slade's militant atheism and Chandler's knee-jerk quasi-Christian worldview, there's no way they'd get along.)

Sweet Jimminy Christmas! I mousied along to gaijinguys livejournal page to see what all the fuss was about, when lo and behold I found that Slade's fanboys had come. Apparently they registered on livejournal for the sole purpose of defending their idol. However, you know, fans do that sort of thing when they're butthurt...

No what made me sit up and take notice was this quote:

darthyan wrote:

Here's the author's comment on your site
I would suggest though that people have some mercy for the poor guy running that site. He's obviously got a lot of very serious issues and really the appropriate response is to feel sorry for him. Anybody who can spend that much time and trouble in an effort to attack what is (in the final analysis) light entertainment must have a very sad and lonely life. Pity and sympathy is probably the most human of responses.

So if someone makes a website sporking your writings or making fun of stuff they're insane? Whoah! Even the old Soviet Union at least had the decency to have a proper show trial before declaring dissidents insane.

I mean what can you say? What can you say? [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] Honestly they're starting to remind me of Twillight fans.

KeyserSoze wrote:

Sweet Jimminy Christmas! I mousied along to gaijinguys livejournal page to see what all the fuss was about, when lo and behold I found that Slade's fanboys had come. Apparently they registered on livejournal for the sole purpose of defending their idol. However, you know, fans do that sort of thing when they're butthurt...

Oh shi- WGWers, pose together as a team because SHIT JUST GOT REAL!

Oh gods, I just posted screeds of stuff in that discussion. I'm such an idiot; I really should know better than to get involved in this kind of irrational fannish dick-waving. And after I already tried to defuse a similar wank-bomb over at alternatehistory.org just this week.

I know this is a minor thing, but the bit that really irritates me in this story is the bit about "Baldricks." If he just introduced the term, explained it, and then used it as slang from there on out, fine; but he keeps re-explaining the origin of the term again and again and again. I get the feeling he's really proud of this bit of alledged wit and wants to make sure everyone gets just how hilarious it is.

I think he only ever explained it twice, but I'm not dredging through that clusterfuck again just to get a bit of trivia right.

HEY GAIJ

MOAR SNARKING PLZ

Working on it!

(Post count +1, I know.)

I like the way the SD.net people went "NO U" to all the snarky counter-riposte comments from WGWers on that LJ post, but none of them bothered to try to respond to my relatively calm "well, from a storytelling point of view, it helps if you don't wank one side at the expense of the other" remarks.

Now they've invaded TVtropes too. Both the Salvation War page and the Salvation War discussion page is full of fans who delete everything even remotely critical. I'm definitely getting a Twilight fan / Small Name, Big Ego vibe from all of this. Maybe someone should tell them that butthurt fans and an author with an oversized ego is a bad combination online? I mean if there is one thing the internet loves it is making fun of people who take horrible fanfiction (alright, web original then) all too seriously.

By now I'm honestly starting to feel sorry for them, when I googled Salvation War pretty much every single webpage I found laughed at them and their writing. Yet they don't give up, they keep on prodding the internet more and more. Like a little kid with a stick poking a hornets nest. You know what's going to happen, but you just can't look away. I wonder if there' a point where a group of internet fans are so sad that it stops being fun to make fun of them?

No. It never gets that sad.

KeyserSoze wrote:

Now they've invaded TVtropes too.

Let's take a look at it, shall we? [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

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Disclaimer: The Salvation War is written in the style of a documentary.

Except that it shows things that have no right to be in a documentary. The thoughts of a demon as he notes the details of how modern ammo is shredding his body are just an example. The dialogue is too exact and the narrator is omniscient. It's not a documentary, it's a wankumentary.

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Characters will talk from their own POV, make mistakes, misspeak (if they're lucky), or talk out their ass (if they're not). Previously discussed plans might go off without a hitch,
fail completely or be abandoned either due to changing circumstances or because a better idea came up.

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Those looking for a conventional Three Act Structure, an exclusive focus on dramatic tension, or the other properties of a traditional dramatic narrative sometimes find it an off-putting story-telling style.

Those are not mutually excludent. In fact, having characters who act as people and various degrees of unpredictability are elements of any good world-scale story.

This is just them trying to cover their ass. "Lack of dramatic tension? DOCUMENTARY! The writing is dull? DOCUMENTARY! The narrative is unrealistic and incoherent? DOCUMENTARY!"

KeyserSoze wrote:

Now they've invaded TVtropes too. Both the Salvation War page and the Salvation War discussion page is full of fans who delete everything even remotely critical.

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WHY IS THERE SO MANY JUSTIFYING EDITS?!

The Author wrote:

Reading up on how daemons were supposed to fight, it resolved into "we can do that" , "we can do that", "they can't do that", "they wouldn;t even understand how we did that". It quickly became apparent that daemons as described in the appropriate mythology don't stand a hope in hell against us. The phrase "hope in hell" set a light off in my head and so The Salvation War: Armageddon??? started. It caught on.

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The Author wrote:

Reading up on how daemons were supposed to fight, it resolved into "we can do that" , "we can do that", "they can't do that", "they wouldn;t even understand how we did that". It quickly became apparent that daemons as described in the appropriate mythology don't stand a hope in hell against us. The phrase "hope in hell" set a light off in my head and so The Salvation War: Armageddon??? started. It caught on.

Which mythology was this guy reading? The Bible (which I would have thought was the most 'appropriate') barely if ever mentions armies of demons fighting! Paradise Lost is a possibility ("O Prince, O Chief of many-throned powers/That led th'embattled seraphim to war"), as is Dante's Inferno, but those are basically fanfiction/fanon.

And as for other mythologies...the gods and adversaries of many real-world mythologies could smash a 21st-century military without breaking a sweat, just by doing things they were explicitly shown as doing in the original myths. Like picking up and dropping whole mountains or even entire countries (Hawaiian mythology says New Zealand was ripped from the seabed by one guy), for example. How are the wanked humans of TSW supposed to defeat Biblical God when he can just inundate the entire Earth and drown everyone? Basically, it's a less intelligent and interesting version of His Dark Materials: bring the despised religious figures down to a beatable (in this case, laughably easily beatable) level by making them poseurs who don't actually measure up to the myths.

KeyserSoze wrote:

Now they've invaded TVtropes too. Both the Salvation War page and the Salvation War discussion page is full of fans who delete everything even remotely critical.

Well, really, who else would read it? I'd never even heard of it pre-snark.

KeyzerSoze wrote:

By now I'm honestly starting to feel sorry for them, when I googled Salvation War pretty much every single webpage I found laughed at them and their writing. Yet they don't give up, they keep on prodding the internet more and more. Like a little kid with a stick poking a hornets nest. You know what's going to happen, but you just can't look away. I wonder if there' a point where a group of internet fans are so sad that it stops being fun to make fun of them?

Stay strong, buddy, stay strong.

Keith Fraser wrote:

Basically, it's a less intelligent and interesting version of His Dark Materials: bring the despised religious figures down to a beatable (in this case, laughably easily beatable) level by making them poseurs who don't actually measure up to the myths.

They do exactly that, and it's even in their edited TV Tropes entries. In The Salvation War, Heaven conveniently doesn't have the power to actually do all the Apocalypse stuff, for example, because the description of it was a drug-induced vision from God, courtesy of Michael, and the angels are scrambling for a way to follow through because God is treating it as an immutable battle plan.

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Reading up on how daemons were supposed to fight, it resolved into "we can do that" , "we can do that", "they can't do that", "they wouldn;t even understand how we did that". It quickly became apparent that daemons as described in the appropriate mythology don't stand a hope in hell against us. The phrase "hope in hell" set a light off in my head and so The Salvation War: Armageddon??? started. It caught on.

Except, ya know, fighting is not really the demons' forte. Seducing, causing dissension and generally bringing the worst in their targets pretty much is. Things which they don't do much in this dreck. Instead, we get HELL sending DIPLOMATS to Earth. And not even to try and put the world leaders against each other. They just sent a formal note asking for surrender, because apparently Satan is old-fashioned and cares about honor and all that crap. FUCKING SATAN. As in, the Prince of Lies, the Serpent of Eden, the guy who wrote the book on dickery, backstabbiness and all things evil.
Even without any demons spreading lies and dissent, it would be ludicrously hard to unite all the world in a single, coordinated front with common objectives like humanity in TSW does. Demons in medieval script were able to do things like borrow a dead human body to manifest as a normal person (they could even be as pretty as they wanted); just imagine the havoc that a few Evil Chancellors and Corrupt Corporate Executives from hell could do when put on the right jobs. They could either replace assassinated targets, impersonate people outright, or just come out of nowhere with a forged identity. The possibilities are so many.
Of course, the TSW are not interested in how much damage the demons could cause to humanity, only the opposite. The demons don't even realize that they have a gajillion dead humans with knowledge of post-Bronze Age technology/society there, and they could have gotten a clue in all those centuries.

What kills me is the way they completely miss the irony of some of the decisions. Like the fact that they have a big name skeptic like James Randi as a hero in charge of discovering real psychics, while apparently not realizing that Randi's entire career in debunking the supernatural is rendered worthless by the fact that the supernatural exists. Of course being proven undeniably, shamefully wrong doesn't seem to phase him in the slightest.

Chaltab wrote:

What kills me is the way they completely miss the irony of some of the decisions. Like the fact that they have a big name skeptic like James Randi as a hero in charge of discovering real psychics, while apparently not realizing that Randi's entire career in debunking the supernatural is rendered worthless by the fact that the supernatural exists. Of course being proven undeniably, shamefully wrong doesn't seem to phase him in the slightest.

ONLY RELIGIOUS PEOPLE ARE STUPID AND EMO ENOUGH TO KILL THEMSELVES CHALTAB

DUHHHH

Just so everyone knows:

Not everyone on TV Tropes is a fan of this story.

I skimmed a chapter or two and decided that it wasn't my thing and that I'd rather stay out of the discussions surrounding it. Pretty much all I ever had to say was a comment wondering about the religious demographics of its readers.

Though there were one or two times when I tried to pop in to play interpreter between the two sides.

At times like these, I prefer to fall back on my Holy Explanation Trinity of "people are crazy," "people are idiots," and above all else "people are weird" (pick and choose as you see fit; between them they cover nearly all quandaries), and go back to whatever it is I've been watching or reading lately.

EDIT: Though God being excommunicated made me think of an exchange from Oh, God!, in which God responds to a protest of "I don't even go to any church!" from His reluctant prophet with "Neither do I."

Shay Guy wrote:

Just so everyone knows:

Not everyone on TV Tropes is a fan of this story.

Oh, honey, don't you worry about that. A lot of us are tropers, too. If anything, I was a bit surprised to see that there were stupid people in what I tend to think of as an awesome, intelligent community, because I am optimistic to the point of delusion in some areas. Thanks for confirming my belief, though, and have a look around while you're here, you might like it [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Sweet wank is sweet

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However, in the last possible moment, the project was deliberately destroyed by a Ukrainian religious fundamentalist named Cholnik who pirated the books, putting them out as an illegal torrent.

Because, as he is reminded, it's not like it was already available free on the website.

Also, is the snark of this just dead?

The topic is fairly dead. The author has run away from public websites (at least stardestroyer.net) and not posted there for over six months. Something about being accused of violating their rules against serious lies. I'm not surprised though, every single time that guy opened his mouth about something I knew anything about he was dead wrong.

Looking back, some of what I said wasn't as accurate as it should've been. Still, though. Friggin' ridiculous.

Penguin wrote:

Looking back, some of what I said wasn't as accurate as it should've been. Still, though. Friggin' ridiculous.

The most amusing part is how the fans of the series accuse *everyone* who makes complaints of being:
a) Religious fanatics.
b) Unhealthily obsessed with the series.
c) Utterly wrong about everything.

The way they go on about it you'd think that the Salvation War was some sort of Lord of the Rings for the non-believer, instead of an unbelievably awful online fic. BTW he was still able to get published since he's not a real published author, but rather pays lulu to publish books for him.