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Given Russia's performance in Ukraine, it wouldn't even be a stretch to depict them as a massive, terrifying force comprised of incompetent jobbers and cannon fodder, much like Nazis in popular fiction.
I love this comment as a glittering example of "Comes so close to noticing but then the crimestop kicks in"
To wit: don't you think it a little... suspicious... that the """reports from IRL""" that your news media pipes you from Ukraine, map so neatly into the tropes you've been fed for decades from your entertainment?
Does that not strike you as a little, err, improbable to be an organic occurrance?
(So no-one accuses me of not speaking plainly: I am forwarding this as circumstantial evidence that Western reporting from the Ukraine War is very, very contaminated by Western attempts to narrative craft it into the pre-prepared slot in the Western psyche of "Just like my Indiana Jones movies".)
I would like to state for the record that my impression of Russian incompetence is, as HaroldWilson kind-of touched on, driven less by Western reporting and more by evidence surfaced by internet randos (i.e. Twitter people and Channers) looking for the dankest, funniest, you-literally-could-not-make-this-shit-up-if-you-tried bits of intel that trickle out of the area.
With that out of the way, I want to reiterate that we are talking about fiction. I suppose that if I had phrased my post as "the modern Russian army has now ascended to the tier of Enemy-faction-that-is-safe-to-use for fiction creators," maybe I would not be writing this post now. I can acknowledge that the reality isn't quite as popular image makes it seem. The Nazis were genuinely more threatening than certain hero-fantasy media (e.g. Rat Patrol, Indiana Jones, Wolfenstein) makes them out to have been. Similarly, the Russians aren't a complete laughingstock and still represent an undefined, nebulous threat.
But, in the ragged parlance of our sitting President, come on, man. Again, alluding to my first paragraph, some of the reports about the reality of Russian capability in the beginning of the war and beyond* were so out there that any fiction writer who depicted them as such before the war would have been slammed and roasted by no end of YouTube rantsona channels, armchair generals, and 4Chan pedants. However, we clearly live in the Dank Timeline, and I will never not be amused by the idea of future generations using the 2022 Russians in the manner described above.
*(using insecure commercial radios instead of actual encrypted military radios; tires that fell apart from lack of maintenance, making Russian trucks incapable of necessary off-roading; a Russian plane that avoided starting WWIII only because a missile failed to launch from, again, lack of maintenance; the Cope Cage)
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Clearly journalists do have to construct a kind of narrative around every ongoing event they report, whether it be election campaigns, sporting events or indeed wars, but there's nothing wrong with that (that is what every historian will try to do in their own way after the war is over after all, journalists are just doing it in real time) as that's the only way to comprehend anything, and I don't think they really are crafting that narrative to fit in a pre-prepared slot. After all, what other interpretation can there be except that Russia has so far failed emphatically? And most Western reporting, while certainly emphasising Russian failure, doesn't seem to me to have gone in particularly hard on Russian incompetence, tending to focus on the role of Western support and the effectiveness of Ukraine defence.
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What’s with the triple quotes? That’s the bit which sets off my speaking-plainly alarms.
As for the quality of news reports, there are two facts that matter:
Russia is occupying parts of Ukraine
Russia has not occupied all of Ukraine
Neither of these are really in dispute, and they’re the ones that put Russia into “Saturday morning cartoon villain” territory. The news could be lying about everything else—they’re certainly inclined to spin it—and Americans would still pattern-match it to Indiana Jones. It’s not a complex narrative.
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Ironically, the NATO tweet invoked just about everything but Indy: https://twitter.com/NATO/status/1628687961477750790#m
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