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Old 2007-09-24, 18:31   Link #195
Avatar_notADV
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Join Date: Dec 2005
One point about the TSAB...

In the real world, we don't have any examples of "too much progress". There are no examples of a society having progressed technologically to the point where that technology destroyed them; we can talk about global warming, and we certainly have myths of such societies, but there are no actual historical occurrences of that. It's GOOD to be more advanced than the other guy.

This is plainly not true for the TSAB. The events that destroyed Al Hazard or whatever you want to call it were plainly civilization-altering for them. The TSAB as a government is considerably younger than the United States, and the "mythological" period of the Velka Saints isn't any older than the later colonization period of our world, where we have extensive historical knowledge. Frankly, they got kicked in the collective balls, really hard. Getting too powerful, too successful, too advanced in their structure is a very, very bad thing that will bring the whole structure crashing down on everybody.

SF is full of civilizations that progress to a point and then kind of coast - they make advancements here and there, but not at the breakneck pace we're used to these days. Eventually you've got all the stuff you reasonably want, your people are pretty happy, and you're the only one left developing more powerful weaponry - why go past that point and threaten your current happy existence?

Of course, the TSAB has to deal with a lot of Lost Logia, some of which are genuinely dangerous to their entire civilization. This means they can't just put the guns down, as it were, but they can't afford to make the same mistake again just to counter the old threat...

Finally, it's hard to evaluate the TSAB in light of the context of a magical girl show, even if it is Nanoha. We had a small army and a super-battleship defeated by a freakin' squad, folks, with a bit of local forces for backup. Clausewitz and Rommel and even Sun Tzu simply fail in the face of that kind of power imbalance. The only things we can really conclude are that there are certainly a bloody lot of people in the TSAB, and Nanoha, Fate, and Hayate aren't the new Three Admirals (well, maybe they aren't), so theoretically the rest of them should be something more than useless. And for all we know, they are - Chrono, for example, kicked a lot of ass personally, back in A's. But obviously there's something in the structure of their training and organization that is preventing the cream from rising to the top...

...or it's entirely possible that the naval forces simply co-opt the best officers and the ground forces are the dregs that can't manage the prestige foreign postings. Again with the Imperial Britain model - there's no glory belonging to the rag-tag army that's holding the ground that nobody can invade because the navy's doing the real job of defense. You don't rise socially or politically with an army commission - unless that's the best you can manage, in which case you're already at a disadvantage compared to the dashing heroes of the navy. And the TSAB has it even worse, because they don't have an India (that we know about)... they aren't really imperialists, so there's no foreign places for that army to be deployed to in order to get some battle experience and honors.
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