EnclavedMicrostate在2023-03-13~2023-03-19的言论

2023-03-19 作者: EnclavedMicrostate 原文 #Reddit 的其它文章

—– 1142.1 —–2023-03-13 17:15:52+08:00:

Apologies, but we have had to remove your submission. We ask that questions in this subreddit be limited to those asking about history, or for historical answers. This is not a judgement of your question, but to receive the answer you are looking for, it would be better suited to r/AskScienceFiction.

If you are interested in an historical answer, however, you are welcome to rework your question to fit the theme of this subreddit and resubmit it.

—– 1142.2 —–2023-03-13 20:34:39+08:00:

Unfortunately I do not know that there’s a general religion ask sub, but if there is then that’d be where to go.

—– 1142.3 —–2023-03-13 20:47:30+08:00:

Because the question is in the present tense and is implicitly about the present state of the religion. If you’d like to ask about the historical significance of Scientological doctrine, please do so in a way that clearly highlights this.

1143: (China) How exactly did Taiping Rebellion military decentralization lead to the Warlord Era?, submitted on 2023-03-15 15:22:39+08:00.

—– 1143.1 —–2023-03-16 01:12:44+08:00:

In some ways, this question is ultimately one not of historical causality, but of historiography: why have historians made the arguments they have? Because the answer is not immediately straightforward. I would posit that it all stems from citing an assumption as fact.

In 1970, Philip A Kuhn’s Rebellion and its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796-1864 was published, which advanced a bold thesis: the transition from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ processes in Chinese state and society, and the resultant breakdown of the imperial order, took place not as a result of violent contact with the West after 1839 as commonly asserted, but rather as a result of internal processes that began snowballing from the 1790s onward. Qing mishandling of the White Lotus Rebellion in 1796-1806 led to the formation of local militias, which increasingly consolidated into regional networks. These were further emboldened by Qing failures in the Opium War of 1839-42, and came to be officially co-opted into the Qing war effort on a mass scale during the Taiping War in 1851-64 with the establishment of Yongying forces under the command of such men as Zeng Guofan. This, however, was the only part that Kuhn analysed in depth, as suggested by the title of his book. While he suggested that the continued decentralisation of Qing military power would lead, eventually, to the warlord period, his actual research focussed squarely on the Jiaqing (1796-1820) and Daoguang (1820-1850) reigns of the Qing, and didn’t actually go beyond 1864. But Kuhn’s extrapolation then became taken as historically sound by a generation of scholars who simply failed to question whether the proposed trajectory was actually, well, true.

And one can detect a variety of responses to this in later literature, albeit often implicit. For instance, Edmund S.K. Fung, in The Military Dimension of the Chinese Revolution (1980), explicitly argues that the New Army that precipitated the 1911 Revolution emerged out of military overhauls after 1895 which supplanted the old Taiping-era militia forces, many of which had been downsized or disbanded following the end of the Taiping conflict. Edward J.M. Rhoads, in Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1862-1928 (2000), does not tackle warlordism as such, but does point out the rather heterogeneous nature of Qing military reforms, which attempted in the post-1895 period to establish multiethnic imperial corps, pivoting to a much more Han-dominated New Army under the New Policies enacted after 1901. What we end up, with, then, is at least one point of disjuncture – 1895 – separating the divested Taiping-era militias from the more centralised structures that the Qing attempted to impose after the defeat to Japan.

But in neither instance is there an assertion that the warlord armies were direct descendants of the New Army either. Edmund Fung notes that the primary influence of the New Army was in altering the relationship between civil bureaucracy and military leadership, allowing the latter to presume, and therefore assume, greater importance than they had done in the pre-1901 era. But the troops constituting the warlord armies were extremely varied. Some forces, particularly the Anhui and Zhili Cliques, drew heavily, even predominantly, on New Army veterans, whereas other forces were entirely composed of new recruits post-Revolution.

The picture becomes further complicated, however, when we consider that these armies never supplanted each other outright – though not for lack of trying. During the Taiping War, the Yongying reorganised militias rubbed shoulders with local militias, Green Standard forces, and Banner soldiers, all of whom continued to exist afterward. The Wuwei Corps established after 1895 was a limited force based at Beijing, and both imperial and regional forces on older models continued to exist. The New Army reforms attempted to do away with these forces and create bifurcated armies consisting of New Army troops as the ‘tip of the spear’ and ‘Patrol and Defence Forces’ as a peacetime gendarmerie and wartime reserve, but this was still incomplete by the beginning of 1911. Hubei would not disband the last of its Green Standard forces, which constituted about a fifth of its 40,000 military personnel at the start of the year, until the end of June; many of Hunan’s Green Standards, who made up nearly half of its 35,500 troops, were still in service at the time of the revolution on 10 October. Moreover, the Banner units remained largely separate, though the Qing did establish two Manchu-only units: the Imperial Guard and the 1st Division.

So even if you did want to draw a clean genealogy, you don’t really get one: the Taiping-era Yongying didn’t uniformly transform into the New Army, which did not uniformly transition into the warlord armies. Moreover, as suggested earlier, these were not armies of comparable nature. It is easy to overlook that the Yongying armies were commanded by civilian officials given temporary extraordinary powers to maintain and command military forces, not by professional career officers as the New Army was. It is true that the heterogeneous army of 1911 ultimately broke apart in no small part thanks to the ability of charismatic individuals to consolidate control over their own portions, but they were originally, at their core, regional armies, maintained at provincial discretion and at provincial expense, along central directives. The rise of charismatic warlords was a bug rather than a feature. By contrast, the Yongying forces were fundamentally built around their charismatic leaders, and their regional character was somewhat more coincidental. Li Hongzhang’s Huai Army, named for Anhui, spent most of its existence headquartered in Zhili because its commander had gone there; Zeng Guofan’s Xiang Army, named for Hunan, ultimately recruited beyond its ostensible core province, even if it never outright shook its provincial reputation. The resemblances between the Yongying and the New Army, then, were largely superficial, and as has been said, the warlord armies were not simple successors of a fragmenting New Army.

With that I think it is safe to say that Taiping-era military decentralisation really didn’t lead to the Warlord Era. We can draw a chronological and causative chain, of course, but it is not one of a linear trajectory. The New Army replaced (well, mostly replaced) the Taiping-era militias in response to their failures, and had substantial organisational differences. The warlords did not receive the New Army wholesale, but drew on what troops they could, where they could. Two substantial points of rupture separate the Taiping from the warlords, both representing significant changes in direction.

—– 1143.2 —–2023-03-17 07:43:34+08:00:

So, to give a brief and general chronology of Qing military organisation:

Before 1644, all (or effectively all) of the armed forces of the Qing were organised through the Eight Banners, which started out as a multiethnic entity comprising Manchus, Mongols, Han Chinese, and various other, smaller groups in Manchuria. After crossing the Great Wall in 1644, however, the Qing chose not to expand the Eight Banners, but instead incorporated defecting Ming troops and new recruits into a new force, the Green Standard Army. The Green Standards were a distinctly second-line force in their conception: at some point post-conquest they were barred from using firearms, until the ban was lifted in the Yongzheng reign (1722-35); they were also mainly tasked with rural policing and personnel support for the civil service, and were largely parcelled out into very small garrisons. Any larger formation of Green Standards had to be established on an ad hoc basis, and rarely could more than a very small portion of them be mobilised out of their home regions. This was, incidentally, by design: the Green Standards were considered politically unreliable, to say the least, as the Qing state as a whole was deeply suspect about the motivations and loyalty of its Han subject population.

The Qing also maintained a local militia system as part of the baojia, a centrally-organised system which regulated both local defence and tax collection. Baojia-organised militias would then often be co-opted into Qing field armies as yong (‘braves’) for additional manpower. However, the baojia’s militia component proved to be insufficiently flexible for rural defence when the White Lotus Rebellion tore through north-central China in the 1790s, and amid a general decentring of central power in the Jiaqing reign, there came to be a proliferation of locally-organised tuanlian militia groups across China proper, which increasingly formed local networks of mutually-supporting village militias. Several such networks would be activated at various points in the Opium War of 1839-42, when the formation of tuanlian to provide yong auxiliaries was actively encouraged by the Daoguang Emperor in response to exaggerated claims of their efficacy against the British.

In turn, tuanlian would be drawn upon during the Taiping War, initially by Zeng Guofan and Hu Linyi, at the behest of the imperial government, in order to establish more permanent units known as yongying (‘brave camps’) that would remain in the field until the Taiping were dealt with. At the war’s conclusion in 1864, Zeng Guofan disbanded his army (Hu Linyi’s army appears to have dissolved and been partially reincorporated into Zeng’s after his own death in 1861); however a number of other, smaller yongying forces existed across China, in areas with and without fighting. Cen Yuying led yongying forces against rebels in Yunnan until their defeat in 1873, and the residual Yunnanese yongying would then go on to fight the French in Vietnam in 1884-5; a splinter branch of the Hunan Army under Zuo Zongtang fought in northwest China and latterly Xinjiang between 1865 and 1878. On the other hand, Li Hongzhang retained his Huai Army in northern China after 1864, but its only significant action after the Taiping conflict was in 1894-5, when they formed the core of the Qing army that fought (and lost to) the Japanese in Korea.

We then have a weird interlude in 1895-1900 with the establishment of the modernised Wuwei Corps, a heterogeneous force of five unequally-sized divisions, three of which were made up of Han, one of Hui (Sinophone Muslims), and one of Manchus. This force only existed in Beijing and doesn’t seem to have intentionally presaged any sort of later organisation, but it had a strong degree of yongying roots: all three commanders of the Han divisions (Nie Shicheng, Song Qing, and Yuan Shikai) had been officers of the now-defunct Huai Army, and indeed Song Qing had originally assembled his own unit during the Taiping War which was then absorbed into Li Hongzhang’s army.

What happened with the New Army reforms was an attempt to rationalise the increasingly complicated state of Qing military organisation by creating three clearly-delineated branches: the Banners would remain as before, while Green Standard and yongying units would be broken up and reorganised into the New Army and the Patrol and Defence Forces. To do this, there was to be a systematic personnel review in each province to divide the troops into three tiers: the best men would fill the quota for the New Army, the next best would go to the Patrol and Defence Forces, and the worst men, now in excess of the quotas, would be discharged altogether. As the answer noted, this process was still very much ongoing in most provinces in 1911, and so most of the New Army and Patrol and Defence Forces had only recently transitioned out of Green Standard and yongying formations. And even then, again as noted, those transitions were still incomplete at the time of the revolution.

—– 1143.3 —–2023-03-18 08:52:22+08:00:

So the Black Flag Army is its own kettle of worms, one which I’ve never written a full answer on, but Bradley Camp Davis’ Imperial Bandits is the thing to read for that. As for Cen Yuying, there is scant little on him in English, but he does crop up in the latter chapters of David Atwill’s The Chinese Sultanate on the Yunnanese uprising.

To try to give a concise summary, the Black Flag Army was not a pro-Qing entity in its conception, but it was co-opted to support Qing interests in the latter part of the 1860s. Nor did it have any real Taiping roots: its leader, Liu Yongfu, had originally joined a rebel group called the Yanling Kingdom, led by one Wu Lingyun who claimed to be a Taiping officer, but that was the only actual link. That didn’t stop the French from running with and inflating that genealogy of leadership and asserting that any anti-French Chinese guerrillas in Vietnam were ex-Taipings, but it was never really ‘true’ in that sense.

In many ways the Black Flags, although not originally a yongying force, were actually pretty similar: A force cohering around a charismatic leader, co-opted into the Qing military organisation, and given considerable latitude to raise its own income, particularly off internal customs duties (although in this instance it was given it by the Vietnamese government rather than the Qing). Given the prevalence of defections during the various intra-Qing conflicts from the Taiping onward,* the rapid rehabilitation of the Black Flags is pretty comprehensible. And, like many defecting rebels, it would start out in large part by fighting against former fellow rebels, in this instance the Yellow Flags, a separate splinter of the Kingdom of Yanling which had aligned itself with Tai indigenous groups in northern Vietnam who were then rebelling against Vietnamese rule.

* Take, for example, Miao Peilin, a leader of Nian bandits in north China who betrayed Taiping general Chen Yucheng to the Qing in 1862, then went back to being a rebel and was himself executed in 1863. For an example closer to the Black Flags geographically, in 1863 a Muslim rebel leader named Ma Rulong, who ruled over the eastern part of Yunnan, submitted to Qing authority and began fighting against his erstwhile ally Du Wenxiu in the southwest – again, see The Chinese Sultanate.

1144: The Fastest possible Japanese Restoration!, submitted on 2023-03-16 01:02:39+08:00.

—– 1144.1 —–2023-03-16 19:07:15+08:00:

At the time Japan was under a policy called Sakoku, literally translates to locked country.

Nope. Sakoku was a term retroactively applied by opponents of the Shogunate to decry its apparent short-sightedness. Japan certainly did a lot to economically insulate itself, but it was not without interest in world affairs; hyper-protectionism rather than outright isolationism might be the best way of describing it.

1145: Why do we today consider China “absorbed” foreign invaders (Mongol, Manchu), but Rome “fell” (Lombard, Moslem)?, submitted on 2023-03-17 03:44:19+08:00.

—– 1145.1 —–2023-03-18 00:13:34+08:00:

Thanks for the tag! I still agree with what I wrote then, and I would also add in these answers of mine going into the problems of asserting Chinese state continuity:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wc8uwr/why_has_china_repeatedly_reunified_and_splintered/iic6g70/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tcppnt/was_there_ever_a_hui_or_tibetan_dynasty/i0qlr3v/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yjjw2u/why_were_the_manchus_assimilated_into_the_han/iuol7yk/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/pm35v6/why_is_the_qing_dynasty_not_considered_chinese_by/hceyn5m/

1146: What do you historians think of the tartaria mud flood theory?, submitted on 2023-03-17 09:18:23+08:00.

—– 1146.1 —–2023-03-17 13:08:12+08:00:

So, the answers to your questions are not wholly straightforward; I would recommend the linked podcast episode and the text post as starting points.

To give a bit of a summary here: As noted in the linked posts, the modern Tartaria conspiracy is a composite of two discursive frames: a textual one based on historical manuscript and print media such as books and maps, which attempts to pinpoint a historical Tartaria in space and time; and a material one based on buildings, which assert a Tartarian origin to various architectural styles. The text-based framing originates with the New Chronology of Russian nationalist pseudohistorian Anatoly Fomenko, while the building-based framing originates with the ‘Cultural Layer’ mudflood conspiracy theory. In a sense, then, the origins of both are relatively old: Fomenko was mainly active in Russia in the early 1990s, culminating in the book Novaia Khronologia in 1995 but his theories were made available to the English-speaking world after the publication of the four-volume History: Fiction or Science? in 2002. Mudfloods/Cultural Layer originally cohered around the forum stolenhistory.org, which appears to have come online by May 2017; the subreddit r CulturalLayer would be set up in September.

These two would combine into the Tartaria conspiracy we all know and love today by late 2018. There’s evidence from early in the year of Russian-speaking members of the CulturalLayer subreddit encountering Fomenko’s Tartaria theory on the Russian web, and in April the founder of StolenHistory, KorbenDallas, posted a thread discussing the Tartaria theory on the forum. This would culminate in the r Tartaria subreddit being founded in December as the primary repository of Tartaria-related posts, at least for the immediate future. Where it has gone since then is somewhat beyond me at this point, as I genuinely haven’t kept a close eye on things in years.

To be honest, while it’s funny, it is also very, very niche, and I can understand how one could miss it quite easily. While there are ostensibly 25,000 subscribers to the Tartaria subreddit, Reddit subscriber numbers are pretty meaningless, and the subreddit is increasingly moribund anyway. There are a few people around who have come across it – and I know some in real life – but it’s not that high up on the internet pseudohistory iceberg, at least not yet.

1147: [Hobby Scuffles] Week of March 20, 2023, submitted on 2023-03-19 23:01:45+08:00.

—– 1147.1 —–2023-03-20 02:48:01+08:00:

Your mention of it made me go and check, and for some reason the creator of the most famous My Inner Life reading, manwithoutabody/Mutant Museum, seems to have purged their old account, then… migrated to a new one? This is particularly unfortunate for My Inner Life’s TVTropes page, which refers heavily to that particular reading.

—– 1147.2 —–2023-03-20 03:17:06+08:00:

That would explain a lot.

—– 1147.3 —–2023-03-20 11:31:42+08:00:

Might also post this as a non-drama comment, but this weekend saw Hololive’s 4th Fes and Expo happen, which was very fun as last year, helped immensely by the fact that Japan no longer bans cheering at concerts and so for those of us viewing on stream, we finally had some audience reactions. I couldn’t catch most of Day 1’s concert live and haven’t got round to the VOD yet, but I watched Day 2 (which in any event had most of the members I wanted to watch) and I had a really good time of it!

—– 1147.4 —–2023-03-20 19:34:24+08:00:

Yeah, for a good while audience vocalising at concerts was banned to limit COVID transmission. There’s quite a fun case of that in action, and creative circumvention thereof, described in this writeup.

Elaborating a little internally, Hololive’s case, there’d already been some rulebreaking back in August when Mori Calliope did her first live concert and the ‘no cheering’ rule kinda went out the window by the last third or so; the ban was officially lifted by the time Suisei did her second concert back in late January, and the audience energy was really strong there, even on the stream.

—– 1147.5 —–2023-03-20 21:33:10+08:00:

Oh right sorry for the confusion – yeah it was a temporary COVID thing, not a longstanding practice.

—– 1147.6 —–2023-03-22 04:32:24+08:00:

I’ve gone back and forth between ‘meh’ and ‘I genuinely like it’ for Discovery, but I will absolutely concede that it has a considerable degree of premise whiplash. To some extent I think it’s fundamentally because the show’s function was to try and reboot the Trek franchise for the modern era, and so it kind of needed to do a lot to test the waters. So you have S1 as something intentionally a bit iconoclastic, S2 as something a little more callback-y, and S3 as something just completely different. What things worked and to what extent is very YMMV, but I feel like that was both intentional and unavoidable.

—– 1147.7 —–2023-03-22 04:33:54+08:00:

FWIW I don’t really like the current season, even if I agree that some of the ‘guff’ of S1-2 did deserve to be stripped out. It’s competently executed but in service of a story that to me seems utterly superfluous.

—– 1147.8 —–2023-03-22 05:46:59+08:00:

Didn’t help that they fired (I think) S2’s showrunners partway in, citing abusive behaviour, making S3 the first season which had the same showrunners from conception to execution.

—– 1147.9 —–2023-03-22 08:57:02+08:00:

the UK punk scene at the time was associated with anarchism

Yeah but the Sex Pistols in particular were more nihilistic than anarchistic – indeed, ‘Anarchy in the UK’ was written as a mockery of anarchists. Crass or The Clash would stand out as actual anarchist or at least anarchist-leaning groups with some degree of actual idealism involved.

—– 1147.10 —–2023-03-23 16:29:43+08:00:

The fourth Hololive Fest (HoloFes for short) took place over the weekend, which was good fun. That said, the only parts I was able to catch live were the last few songs of the Day 1 concert and then the whole of Day 2; I have yet to get through the Day 1 VOD, haven’t yet watched the Holo*27 concert, and I’ve also not been as up to speed on the Expo as I was last year. But that’s due to a mix of business and jetlag for the most part. Now, this year’s HoloFes was drama-free and everyone agreed it was great – Hololive Indonesia and English’s respective second generations got to debut, everyone got themed outfits, Hakos Baelz absolutely slew, we had a MoRyS duet, Haachama made a chair, it was all fun.

Which is why instead, I want to talk about last year’s HoloFes, on 19-20 March 2022. Because just over three weeks before, Hololive had terminated a member for the first time since May 2018. The full details of that incident have been adeptly narrated by /u/_dk in this post, but reasons of space precluded the inclusion of this particular element of the fallout.

As was noted at the time, firing Rushia so close to 3rd Fes implied that the issues – whatever they may have been – were too serious to even temporarily elide, and for that reason, mild uncertainty hung over how the agency was going to deal with a last-minute lineup reduction so close to their flagship event. They themselves acknowledged that not everything could be changed in time, but that which could be changed generally was. Most obviously, Rushia was cut from the second day’s concert, which meant her solo was out, but the decision also had the collateral effect of also taking out her duet with Gen 2’s Nakiri Ayame – an especially unfortunate circumstance because Ayame had been dipping in and out of hiatus for over a year at that point, and 3rd Fes would have been one of her biggest appearances in an agency-wide event in a good while.

Merch would be a particular headache, as some were not as easily withdrawn as others. Badges and keychains were relatively straightforward, but by that stage it was evidently too late to remove her from the playing card set (she’s there as the 5 of diamonds); when it came to Hololive’s collab with TCG Weiß Schwarz, whose owner Bushiroad sponsored 3rd Fes, already-printed sets and booster packs were obviously not going to see Rushia excised last minute, although I understand that new runs since the firing have excluded her.

The Expo area also saw a change or two – the 2022 Expo featured a costume lineup where they had commissioned RL versions of the members’ outfits to put on mannequins, and Rushia’s rather obviously wasn’t there. But perhaps the more notable excision was in the HoloJP group photo, based on a render that had been done when Kiryu Coco graduated (retired) the previous July. What’s especially interesting is that not only did they remove Rushia, they also modified it to have Noel and Flare holding hands to fill the space in a bit, which I’m sure also gratified a lot of shippers. On the other hand, some items are supposed to have still featured Rushia, though at this stage I’ve not been able to easily track down what in particular.

And finally, the excisions extended to the advertising, where, on the poster outside the venue, there was a noticeable gap in the full cast lineup, thanks to the removal of Himemori Luna.

Yes, you heard me right. They removed someone completely different.

And they kept Rushia.

This, er, did not go over too well. The subreddit thread had a mix of humorous ribbing and some deserved annoyance, but later on fellow Gen 4 member Tokoyami Towa would publicly call out the incident. Nevertheless, there was general acknowledgement that the mistake was an easy one to make for someone who was simply contracted to do it: For one, Luna was third from left in the front row and Rushia third from right, which means if the directions weren’t fully clear (stage right, or right from the perspective of the characters?) then the mistake might have come about that way. Alternatively, it was the similarity of the names – the official Anglicisations of Rushia and Luna don’t seem to be that similar, but in kana they’d be るしあ ru-si-a and ルーナ ru-u-na, and if hiragana and katakana had somehow been mixed up, or the names were rendered directly into Romaji, then that could also have contributed.

But there is a bit of a happy ending here – in penance, some of the promotional material for the concert Blu-Ray would feature Luna exclusively.

So ends my lay.

—– 1147.11 —–2023-03-23 16:32:47+08:00:

I look at some of the 20mm minis I painted years ago, and while I continue to be impressed by some of my freehand work, I do think that being willing to do washes and shading – even in limited degrees – has helped my figures ‘pop’ visually for relatively minimal extra time. That said, my current major project is 28mm (for reasons of figure availability rather than any inherent attachment to the scale), so it’s comparing apples to oranges to an extent – things that are acceptable at 20mm simply don’t look that nice when scaled up some 50%.

—– 1147.12 —–2023-03-23 16:33:07+08:00:

That has to be a fetish thing, right?

—– 1147.13 —–2023-03-23 19:33:17+08:00:

I’m surprised I forgot that one given that I saw that thread too – I upvoted some comments there.

—– 1147.14 —–2023-03-23 19:54:49+08:00:

I recall Headhunter Productions, a PNGTuber who used to do short-form bad movie reviews and now mostly does D&D, was hacked a while back. I also recall there was a terrain-building channel along the lines of ‘No Game Without Terrain’ (or maybe that was the name of its series) that has since been lost to the void because it was hacked a couple of years after they ceased uploading. It’s something that comes in waves and usually affects smaller channels.

—– 1147.15 —–2023-03-26 10:42:30+08:00:

No spoilers, but I watched the episode and… I’m not crying you’re crying.

—– 1147.16 —–2023-03-26 10:48:27+08:00:

bad animation

Huh, I completely missed The Discourse on that. RWBY pivoting from ‘the plot is there to give some tenuous backing to the fight scenes’ to ‘this is a worldbuilding-heavy show with a character focus and less fight stuff’ between V3 and V4 is pretty well known, so I wasn’t surprised about the writing-related comments on V8, which commits to the path set down from V4 onward. But I hadn’t heard about animation issues.

—– 1147.17 —–2023-03-26 10:49:24+08:00:

Oddly, CR has comments for RWBY going back to 2013, so I don’t know how recent that 4.5 rating is or if it’s genuinely the cumulative average over a decade.

—– 1147.18 —–2023-03-26 11:00:55+08:00:

So on the one hand, I do agree – there is nothing groundbreaking here, and the show’s let’s say slow-burn approach, short seasons, and long production lead times have not helped it in just falling behind of the rest of the web media scene.

That said, I feel like The Discourse isn’t so much ‘this is a step forward for representation’ as it is, ‘it’s really cathartic that it has finally happened.’ (Or should I say cat-heart-ic given that Yang’s logo is a heart and Blake is… er… look just ignore me okay)

—– 1147.19 —–2023-03-26 12:44:16+08:00:

Even by Volume 8 I wasn’t particularly involved in the FNDM anymore so the only people I was discussing it with were, like me, generally positive with some reservations, so I admit that at the time, I didn’t see many criticisms of the writing myself either. It’s just that I’m less surprised about writing critiques than I am about animation critiques.

—– 1147.20 —–2023-03-26 16:37:07+08:00:

Oh sure, I’m definitely on board with the switch to Maya and the loss of Monty Oum leading to a notable decline/change in fight animation, I just don’t recall there being a lot of uproar specific to Vol 8. But as noted I wasn’t as FNDM-involved by that stage so point very much taken.

—– 1147.21 —–2023-03-26 17:16:44+08:00:

If you’re the sort that’s into modern recordings of historical music – particularly military-themed – then you may well have become aware of the more dubious elements of it. Now, my friend /u/IlluminatiRex wrote over on r/badhistory about a more insidious subject in the form of neo-Nazis attempting to pass off fascist-written songs as WWI and earlier German music, but I want to talk about something moderately more innocuous: the case of ‘The Dutch in the Medway’. If you look up that particular title, you’ll find a few uploads such as this one, this one, or this one, claiming to be an ‘English Folk Song’ or an ‘Anglo-Dutch War Song’. Now, the Dutch raid on the Medway in June 1667 did in fact happen – the Dutch sacrificed 8 vessels for use as fireships, in exchange for sinking 43 and capturing 2 of the English fleet at Chatham, which by that stage represented the bulk of the Royal Navy, including some of its heaviest ships. So the subject of the song isn’t dubious.

However, the lyrics are distinctly not contemporary. ‘The Dutch in the Medway’ started out as a poem by Rudyard Kipling, published as part of A School History of England in 1911, authored primarily by C. R. L. Fletcher with 23 illustrative poems added by Kipling. Even at the time, the book’s anti-Irish bent and overt subscription to colonial racialism were denounced by those in more liberal circles, and well you probably don’t need me to talk about Kipling as a whole. But the particular poem in question doesn’t really overtly get into those more unsavoury elements, and is instead a cautionary tale about ensuring that you keep your defence spending up. Of the three uploads I linked, only one acknowledges that this is actually an early 20th century poem, not a mid-17th century one.

None of them, however, credit the original tune, nor the person who decided to sing the poem to that tune. That tune is Cupid’s Garden, which is actually relatively contemporary to the events, first attested in print in 1686 and thus probably even older. You can hear it sung here by a quartet led by Jon Boden in 2011. What’s interesting is the question of how these two came to be linked.

The answer to that is the folk singer Peter Bellamy, who got quite a lot of mileage out of setting various Kipling poems to music, and whose particular compositions have been covered a couple of times as well. Bellamy believed, based partly on his own reading of the poems and partly from comments about Kipling’s writing process, that he often, if not always, had music in mind when writing his poems. In some instances, he claimed that Kipling was setting his poems to existing songs: in this particular instance, the line ‘Our ships in Portsmouth harbour’ at the start of the third stanza seemed to be similar to the line ‘‘Twas down in Portsmouth Harbour’ which opens the fifth verse of ‘Cupid’s Garden’, and in turn suggested that the poem as a whole was written to that particular tune. And to be fair, it does fit quite well. I’m not entirely clear on when Bellamy started performing ‘The Dutch in the Medway’ to the tune of ‘Cupid’s Garden’, but the first recording of it is on his 1982 album The English Maritime Suite, where it is sung solo to accompaniment by fiddle and piano, and it was then re-recorded as an a cappella duet for the 1989 album Rudyard Kipling Made Exceedingly Good Songs.

Bellamy actually set a pretty large number of Kipling poems to music that was primarily of his own original composition, mainly in four albums: Oak Ash and Thorn (1970), Merlin’s Island of Gramarye (1972), Barrack Room Ballads of Rudyard Kipling (1975), and the aforementioned Rudyard Kipling Made Exceedingly Good Songs. The only one I’ve listened to in full is the Barrack Room Ballads, which… look, there’s a not insubstantial of hard-r n-words copied wholesale from the original texts, and it is uncomfortable whenever one of those comes up. So that’s the fair warning before dipping in. But it was in listening through that that I first got clued in to some interesting things going on with a different song purporting to be one thing while actually being mostly Kipling, but the story there is different and requires me to do a lot more looking into it first. So stay tuned after the new thread goes up, I suppose!

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