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I read a blog by someone who is very enthusiastic about stuff like logistics in war. A lot of fictional battles are utterly absurd, and it gets worse when you consider wars, the timelines and distances between battles and so on. A lot of authors and directors who write pre-modern battle scenes just don’t care about any semblance of realism or basic logic, and the limited time (and the troubles of depicting battles with living, breathing actors) you have in visual media makes it even worse.
Check out A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry.
Love this blog! There’s a great resource for world-building and a wonderful section how some very basic things like bread or iron making actually work in real life in the middle ages.
In a similar way, I can really recommend the “timetravellers guide to” books.
It would also just be… not fun to watch on screen. Lots of time waiting in the dirt and the mud, the heat or the rain or the snow, standing watch on long nights when nothing happens, fighting off rats more than enemy troops, dealing with the diseases that spread easily through camps, digging ditches and stockades and latrines, hoping the other guys run out of food first. The reality of such battles is dirty and ugly.
You’re not wrong, it definitely makes sense to take some artistic license to make it more interesting. But that doesn’t mean that you have to completely throw away all logic. Some movies/series are so bad with it that the battles hardly even have narrative continuity, it just completely disjointed scenes that don’t make sense. And for the man-to-man fighting, HEMA (which is still stylized, because some techniques aren’t safe even with blunt weapons, plus battles aren’t usually 1:1 fights) is fairly entertaining while being much more realistic than most movie swordfights.
i.e. there’s a middleground between “very realistic but boring” and “not making the least bit of sense”. e.g. the Lord of the Rings did fairly well with its battles, they had relatively clear logic and they weren’t unrealistically far apart. The Rings of Power or the later seasons of Game of Thrones … less so.
I’m not a history expert or anything like that but my biggest peeve is when nobody does even the most basic scouting/recon. Getting your war camp “surprise attacked” should be literally impossible! Or showing up to the battle just to be aghast the enemy has some strange new unit or fortification the good guys could never have anticipated! Or any time there’s a “we’ll figure it out as we go along” battle plan. Yeeesh.
But yeah I get it, audiences love to be surprised. In reality, there’s far less surprises in war because tacticians take as much care as possible to not be surprised.
Pop Khorne! ❤️
For the real World Eaters™
But it makes you really appreciate the ones who put in the effort.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1 & 2 are good examples. There are a few anachronisms but they explain the reason why they are included in the codex. Usually it’s for gameplay purposes.
