Are you sure she wasn’t just trying to talk you into babysitting for a while? Mama cats do be like that sometimes

Max Miller has a great bit on this starting around 3:15 here

Huh? In all her officially sanctioned art they have four limbs and two wings

I’m not saying bend over backwards. I’m saying ‘everyone involved in war will SUFFER and live horrible lives and be miserable WRETCHES until they die!’ is in its own way just as bad as ‘and after the war everything will turn out SPARKLY and PERFECT with sunshine and unicorns and rainbows!’, just on the opposite end of the spectrum.

The message ‘you’ll have a terrible life and there’s nothing you can do’ isn’t ever a good message to teach kids, I think.

The truth is the human condition is more nuanced than that. From war, you get everyone from Mad Jack, who routinely charged entire enemy camps with his bagpipes, his sword, and maybe one person as backup, complained when the war ended ‘because it was so much fun’, stayed in the army until retirement, then went on to race boats and make radio-controlled model ships; to the grimly determined people like JRR Tolkien who went through the trenches, processed the horror, and eventually moved on from it, to people like General Ulysses S Grant, who never really recovered from the horrors of war and descended into alcoholism.

If children are old enough to be taught ‘war is hell’ in graphic detail, then I think they’re old enough to understand that different people will react to traumatic events differently. I also think showcasing how people can maybe recover from the trauma of war if they seek help is a better thing to teach than a blanket ‘you’re doomed’.

Eeeehhh the ending was a little…

Like, the author said she wanted to make it as depressing as possible to drive home the point that war is bad.

And yeah, I agree war is really, really bad, and plenty of people never really recover from it. But at the same time plenty of people do, and go on to live at least decent lives. Some of them even turn what they went through into something inspiring. I doubt The Lord of the Rings would have been half as good without JRR Tolkien’s experiences in WWI, for example.

I think that exploring both those themes, and what it takes to come back to yourself after the horrors of war, would have been more poignant. And I also feel that perhaps showing a way through that darkness for at least some of the characters might have been better than the message ‘war sucks and since you got involved you’re going to suffer and have a shitty life forever with no possible escape from the pain but death, fuck you’.

No-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine they made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.

-Sir Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

His echoes will continue for a long time to come. RIP Sir Patrick.