Glaswegian K6BD Devils of the Hot Black Flame sounds about right for nodding to Tolkien's uruks as WW1 Tommies and then also placing different Goblin characters anywhere from fantasy Robin Hood to the fantasy Dickensian poor under the lash of their tyrannical superiors. I cannot wait for a scene where Madam Alessia has to drop her knightly formal register and talk gob to effectively command and get stuck in.
 
Really enjoyed this chapter! Love all the little details of how the goblins are dressed and go about the ambush. Lillywick seems really cool!

I am wondering how a goblin army works now though… do they compensate for a shorter stature by using like, pikes? I imagine that it's harder to rely on agility and slipping through someone's guard to get in close in a line combat sorta situation. Though a guerrilla warfare approach would play to the strengths demonstrated in this chapter. Attacking an enemy army while in camp and all… though it's not like it would be terribly hard for the opponent to dig fortifications. Hmm.
 
Uncritical solidarity with the Goblins in their struggle against incipient industrial capitalism
For some reason I'm reminded of the isekai fic which started with the MC killing Jeff Bezos in a car crash. Makes me wonder if the author had an axe to grind. Actually, it would be super cool to be a prolific writer and just kill off your favourite (?) billionaire at the start of each book you write.
 
Yeah, Chickenthief is either a reincarnator or has heard about industrialization from one. A natural industrial revolution wouldn't happen this fast.
Well, given that Iris is far from the first isekai protagonist to come to this world from ours, Bryn Mawr was either founded by a Welsh adventurer or by a female college student from Pennsylvania. Who can say?
You. :V
 
Ah, yes, modernity is a terrifying monster that ruins and destroys and, worst of all, changes social relationships in the countryside. Truly which of your influences is at play here is a riddle, clear though the theme may be.
Well, I think our ninja friend is taking a more authentically anarchist take on the "big industrializing boss in the countryside is bad for the people" trope than Tolkien did.

It bears remembering that of the four viewpoint hobbits in Lord of the Rings, three were scions of very prominent local landholding families- prominent gentry by Shire standards. And the fourth was the fanatically loyal retainer of one of those three scions. Sam Gamgee wasn't about to criticize or question the social arrangements by which, realistically, the Gamgees had spent centuries paying rent to the Bagginses and getting back a fraction of it in nice gifts and sinecure positions for their elders in their declining years.

Tolkien's Shire idyll was honestly less bad than the "dark Satanic mills" in a lot of respects, but it embraced a lot of class division.

Here, I really do think the goblins' natural social order will turn out to be more egalitarian than that. Lillywick doesn't seem to be cut from the same cloth as, say, Meriadoc Brandybuck, who certainly wouldn't be caught dead agreeing with "fuck bosses" even if he used that kind of language.
 
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Well, I think our ninja friend is taking a more authentically anarchist take on the "big industrializing boss in the countryside is bad for the people" trope than Tolkien did.

It bears remembering that of the four viewpoint hobbits in Lord of the Rings, three were scions of very prominent local landholding families- prominent gentry by Shire standards. And the fourth was the fanatically loyal retainer of one of those three scions. Sam Gamgee wasn't about to criticize or question the social arrangements by which, realistically, the Gamgees had spent centuries paying rent to the Bagginses and getting back a fraction of it in nice gifts and sinecure positions for their elders in their declining years.

Tolkien's Shire idyll was honestly less bad than the "dark Satanic mills" in a lot of respects, but it embraced a lot of class division.

Here, I really do think the goblins' natural social order will turn out to be more egalitarian than that. Lillywick doesn't seem to be cut from the same cloth as, say, Meriadoc Brandybuck, who certainly wouldn't be caught dead agreeing with "fuck bosses" even if he used that kind of language.

It's possible that the only part of the cost of industry that Tolkien really understood was industrialized warfare, from his personal experiences.
 
It's possible that the only part of the cost of industry that Tolkien really understood was industrialized warfare, from his personal experiences.
I wouldn't say that. Tolkien grew up in Victorian/Edwardian England and...


Well, the damage to the countryside from industrialization was pretty visible in places, back then. And Tolkien wasn't so sheltered that he wouldn't have grasped the consequences of Dickensian worker oppression on some level, if only by reading Dickens.
 
tbf to Tolkien he was cognizant that he was writing a deliberate Arcadian idyll in the Shire, one born of fragile and ultimately ephemeral outside and domestic circumstances, the prior social peace of Hobbit-country shattered by the industrial Scouring of the Shire as Saruman deliberately used Hobbit pawns and the legal structures of well capitalism, basically, to overturn long-standing customs and social norms maintaining Hobbit society and with his collaborators and Ruffians going full Captain Planet villain ruining mills simply to chew up the shared village greens of Hobbiton and smog up the sky. It is only later in a newly restructured Shire that a new Hobbit society is created, proclaiming itself the restoration of the old, with Samwise as Mayor and his descendants the new squire-y owners of Bag End.

It's subtle but there's like specifically almost Isekai energy of Merry and Pippin becoming Knights of Rohan and Guards of the Tower and treated as like princely ambassadors and heroic warlords of their people, like some cash-poor merely middle-upper-class young gentlemen of the Victorian British countryside suddenly swept up in some Quixotic properly properly medieval social structures with the Rohirrim rocking the mead-halls of Beowulf and the Captains and Stewards of Gondor as just the Podestas, Gastalds, and Capetans of the cities of Lombardic and Byzantine Italy.

And while yes ultimately Tolkien does have the Shire-hobbits turn to an idealized fundamentally reactionary and feudal solution to the problem of the Scouring, as much as it is the Thain's lot to call the Hobbitry-at-Arms, it was fundamentally the masses of the Hobbits organizing themselves as yeoman militias and choosing to attend to the Thain that made it all work, in the same way that Caesar was Caesar because of the common masses of the legionnaires acclaiming him so, or Germanic chieftains and Jarls and Ealdormen raised as so up on the shields of the moot/thing/etc...

In embodying the idealized British Squirarcy, the old Hobbit-hole dwelling families of Shire good society bend towards notions of private households, not as noble courts that hold public life within themselves, but tied up together in an exterior public life uplifting and affirming the construction of a Hobbit society, and public notions of social prestige and respectibility.

A Took who is not just respectably eccentric and fanciful but is in disrepute as a complete layabout and drunkard is barely a Took at all, manorhouse or no manorhouse.
 
Interestingly, Chickenthief is close to Chickenhound, the slaver fox from Redwall who took on the name Slagar the Cruel. Most likely a coincidence but I like the unintended thematic similarity.
 
tbf to Tolkien he was cognizant that he was writing a deliberate Arcadian idyll in the Shire, one born of fragile and ultimately ephemeral outside and domestic circumstances, the prior social peace of Hobbit-country shattered by the industrial Scouring of the Shire as Saruman deliberately used Hobbit pawns and the legal structures of well capitalism, basically, to overturn long-standing customs and social norms maintaining Hobbit society and with his collaborators and Ruffians going full Captain Planet villain ruining mills simply to chew up the shared village greens of Hobbiton and smog up the sky. It is only later in a newly restructured Shire that a new Hobbit society is created, proclaiming itself the restoration of the old, with Samwise as Mayor and his descendants the new squire-y owners of Bag End.

It's subtle but there's like specifically almost Isekai energy of Merry and Pippin becoming Knights of Rohan and Guards of the Tower and treated as like princely ambassadors and heroic warlords of their people, like some cash-poor merely middle-upper-class young gentlemen of the Victorian British countryside suddenly swept up in some Quixotic properly properly medieval social structures with the Rohirrim rocking the mead-halls of Beowulf and the Captains and Stewards of Gondor as just the Podestas, Gastalds, and Capetans of the cities of Lombardic and Byzantine Italy.
Definitely with you except for the "cash-poor" part. Fairly sure that Merry and Pippin, at least at home, were rich by the standards of any Shire-folk who hadn't had any chance to pocket dragon-loot. The Tooks and Brandybucks were big family names in the Shire. If anything, I think it was the Bagginses who were the poor relations by comparison to those two. Because we hear about the Tooks effectively dominating social relations for an area miles around their home, and the Brandybucks are the big names of Buckland likewise, but the Bagginses don't seem to have quite that same degree of influence around Hobbiton.

And even so, they were no doubt doing pretty well for themselves, even without counting those two chests full of dragon-loot he brought home.

And while yes ultimately Tolkien does have the Shire-hobbits turn to an idealized fundamentally reactionary and feudal solution to the problem of the Scouring, as much as it is the Thain's lot to call the Hobbitry-at-Arms, it was fundamentally the masses of the Hobbits organizing themselves as yeoman militias and choosing to attend to the Thain that made it all work, in the same way that Caesar was Caesar because of the common masses of the legionnaires acclaiming him so, or Germanic chieftains and Jarls and Ealdormen raised as so up on the shields of the moot/thing/etc...

In embodying the idealized British Squirarcy, the old Hobbit-hole dwelling families of Shire good society bend towards notions of private households, not as noble courts that hold public life within themselves, but tied up together in an exterior public life uplifting and affirming the construction of a Hobbit society, and public notions of social prestige and respectibility.

A Took who is not just respectably eccentric and fanciful but is in disrepute as a complete layabout and drunkard is barely a Took at all, manorhouse or no manorhouse.
All quite true.
 
Ah, yes, modernity is a terrifying monster that ruins and destroys and, worst of all, changes social relationships in the countryside. Truly which of your influences is at play here is a riddle, clear though the theme may be.

Uncritical solidarity with the Goblins in their struggle against incipient industrial capitalism

Glaswegian K6BD Devils of the Hot Black Flame sounds about right for nodding to Tolkien's uruks as WW1 Tommies and then also placing different Goblin characters anywhere from fantasy Robin Hood to the fantasy Dickensian poor under the lash of their tyrannical superiors. I cannot wait for a scene where Madam Alessia has to drop her knightly formal register and talk gob to effectively command and get stuck in.

Yeah so, Tolkien conceived of the orcs/goblins as the urban working class, dehumanized by industrialization, slaves to the Dark Lord who hate him only slightly less than they hate the Free Peoples. I wanted to play on that and make the goblins the heroes of their own story, throwing off their own oppression (with a little help from our protagonists course).

Well, I think our ninja friend is taking a more authentically anarchist take on the "big industrializing boss in the countryside is bad for the people" trope than Tolkien did.

It bears remembering that of the four viewpoint hobbits in Lord of the Rings, three were scions of very prominent local landholding families- prominent gentry by Shire standards. And the fourth was the fanatically loyal retainer of one of those three scions. Sam Gamgee wasn't about to criticize or question the social arrangements by which, realistically, the Gamgees had spent centuries paying rent to the Bagginses and getting back a fraction of it in nice gifts and sinecure positions for their elders in their declining years.

Tolkien's Shire idyll was honestly less bad than the "dark Satanic mills" in a lot of respects, but it embraced a lot of class division.

Here, I really do think the goblins' natural social order will turn out to be more egalitarian than that. Lillywick doesn't seem to be cut from the same cloth as, say, Meriadoc Brandybuck, who certainly wouldn't be caught dead agreeing with "fuck bosses" even if he used that kind of language.

Well, that's the interesting thing! The one time in Lord of the Rings where we get two orcs having a conversation with each other alone, what do they talk about?

"What d'you say? - if we get a chance, you and me'll slip off and set up somewhere on our own with a few trusty lads, somewhere where there's good loot nice and handy, and no big bosses."

Emphasis mine.

Really enjoyed this chapter! Love all the little details of how the goblins are dressed and go about the ambush. Lillywick seems really cool!

I am wondering how a goblin army works now though… do they compensate for a shorter stature by using like, pikes? I imagine that it's harder to rely on agility and slipping through someone's guard to get in close in a line combat sorta situation. Though a guerrilla warfare approach would play to the strengths demonstrated in this chapter. Attacking an enemy army while in camp and all… though it's not like it would be terribly hard for the opponent to dig fortifications. Hmm.

Under normal circumstances, goblins don't fight out in the open if they can help it. They stick to skirmishing/hit and run tactics, ambushes and the like. Underground they can be quite disciplined, you pack them into a tunnel shield to shield with lines of spears facing outward and they're incredibly hard to dislodge.

The trick is getting them to bring that disciplined formation out onto the surface and drill them hard enough to overwhelm the instinct to run back underground, to receive a charge instead of breaking.

For some reason I'm reminded of the isekai fic which started with the MC killing Jeff Bezos in a car crash. Makes me wonder if the author had an axe to grind. Actually, it would be super cool to be a prolific writer and just kill off your favourite (?) billionaire at the start of each book you write.

Okay you got me, Iris died taking out Elon Musk.

(This is a joke)

Interestingly, Chickenthief is close to Chickenhound, the slaver fox from Redwall who took on the name Slagar the Cruel. Most likely a coincidence but I like the unintended thematic similarity.

I did always like those books.
 
Okay you got me, Iris died taking out Elon Musk.

(This is a joke)
Nonsense, everyone knows Elon Musk dies when one of his own self-driving robot cars hiccups, mistakes a grocery bag for a road sign, and drives off a cliff at 70 mph with him stuck inside.

The robot car is then isekai-reincarnated as a gender-nonconforming android (gynoid?) (???) in a society of synthetic intelligences. :p
 
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