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Bacha bazi actually played an important role in recent Afghan politics. See, after the Russians were driven out and Najibullah's communist holdout government fell, the mujahideen who'd kicked them out took over. They were about as brutal and fractious as you'd expect tribal warlords to be, but one activity that particularly roused the ire of the general populace was their routine, systematic rape of children. While it was initially a Pashtun practice, the northern Tajiks also took quite enthusiastically to it, and it basically became the stereotypical warlord crime. One person who took particular notice was a young teacher at a village madrassa near Kandahar by the name of Mohammed Omar. Omar had fought during the Russian invasion in a splinter group of the infamous Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e Islami, and made quite a reputation for himself as a capable marksman before returning to religious pursuits after the war ended (and meeting some remarkably influential people, including a Saudi businessman named Osama bin Laden). When mujahideen-affiliated bandits raped and murdered a family travelling near his village, including their very young children, he decided to take matters into his own hands. He armed his students (in Pashtun, the word is 'taliban') and began recruiting from refugee camps on the Afghan-Pakistan border, intending to take the fight to the warlords despoiling the country. The rest, as they say, is history.
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Aug 19, 2019 03:52
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aphid_licker posted:We've seen in this novel that British society has a bunch of women whose honor nobody cares about, maids, the various mistresses, country girls/farmers' daughters, so you'd still have to explain why Afghans go for dancing boys rather than that model Afghanistan has a much flatter society than Victorian Britain - it's more a network of tribes than an imperial hierarchy. There are relatively few people in it so low that nobody will stab you for hurting them.
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Aug 21, 2019 14:47
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aphid_licker posted:Man that scene of him loving over his lancer sidekick still bums me out. Girls are more valuable because they can give you kids, and to survive in rural Afghanistan, you need a lot of kids. If you gently caress a boy, you're not risking his chances of safely delivering the next generation of farmers and warriors (plus a few children extra because the child mortality rate is stupid-high).
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Aug 22, 2019 13:58
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Beefeater1980 posted:I was disappointed in the Ciaphas Cain books because CC isn’t a massive dick to everyone he meets like Flashman is, and that’s part of what makes the character work. CC is as far as I can tell from the books quite a nice person (who has a feared position of authority). Flashman...isn’t. Cain isn't Flashman. He's a hero with rock-bottom self-esteem because his brand of heroism isn't appreciated or celebrated by the bizarre, monstrous empire he works for.
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Sep 29, 2019 15:02
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sebmojo posted:The second Malazan book is essentially inspired by this, I'm p sure. Probably some other great military retreat, considering the vast gap in competence between Coltaine and Elphinstone. My bet's on Xenophon's Anabasis, because damned near everyone has done that one. Darth Walrus fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Jan 19, 2020 |
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Jan 19, 2020 01:22
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Royal Flash should be interesting, seeing as you're basically doing a Let's Read of two books at once. It's a direct send-up of The Prisoner of Zenda.
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Jan 31, 2020 18:11
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PoptartsNinja posted:I like how nearly every one of them looks irritated at having to have their portrait done. Lady Digby is absolutely done with this poo poo.
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Feb 14, 2020 13:37
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aphid_licker posted:Did ze Freiherr just call Flashy fat? Just big, I think. Because he is. It's his biggest advantage when he can't avoid a fight.
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Feb 14, 2020 16:28
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Notahippie posted:Wasn't Lord of the Flies both inspired by and a direct critique of the British public school system? No, it was a direct description of what Golding wanted British public schools to turn into because he was a nihilistic, sadistic bully.
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Jul 1, 2020 22:42
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Everyone posted:But it's a really badass creation and now I'm really hoping nothing bad happens to her because Flashman is up there with Donald Trump in the "everything he touches dies" bit. I mean, her two-sentence appearance in the historical record says she's going to marry Yakub and have a bunch of kids with him, so whatever happens to her as a result of her present proximity to Flashman can't be too horrible.
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Sep 6, 2020 17:46
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Remulak posted:I didn’t know that expression so I looked it up. He's calling him gay.
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Apr 19, 2021 18:06
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I feel like this book marked a key point in the softening of Flashman as a character. He's more romantic, more competent, more capable of acts of basic decency, and less frequent and extreme in his acts of cruelty to people who really don't deserve it. Compare him to the Flashman of Afghanistan, and this one generally seems significantly less objectionable.
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Jun 18, 2021 13:10
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That said, I'd say it takes less pushing for Flashman to be helpful and useful over the course of the series, and he doesn't need to be bailed out (or to abandon people he uses as ablative armour) quite so often. There's quite a lot of times when he's more of a liability than an asset to his more traditionally heroic comrades, and that number goes down as the books progress.
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Jun 20, 2021 10:21
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Phenotype posted:But then, when it comes right down to it, he'll push a woman out of a sledge or leave his man to die to save his own skin. He IS talented, so when he's thrown into a bad situation he might be able to behave as a hero when that's what it takes to survive, but he's not, y'know, trying to accomplish his mission or anything, he just wants to live. It's not like he actually spent his time undercover as a sepoy trying to find out intelligence or root out Count Ignatiev, he just had a fun time playing soldier (and then a less-fun time playing survivor). I guess it WAS kinda heroic that he actually went to see the Rani instead of laying low in Jhansi, or reporting back that he announced himself and she wouldn't see him. Also, he did actually keep his charge alive and safe on that escort mission despite all his whingeing, and did his bit on the walls during the siege of Cawnpore. That's an improvement on his past track record.
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Jun 20, 2021 16:41
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Xander77 posted:Leaving aside Cain's own warm and fuzzy personality - few things about the transposition work because you can't really have fascinating historical tidbits about the grimdark fictional world of Warhammer, Cain doesn't even interact with other interesting characters from the setting like Horus or Eisehorn... It's worth noting, though, that 'the Imperium does considerably more harm than good' is not actually an unusual take within 40K literature and source material, especially in the really early stuff where they were more of a distant menace than the protagonists. At least half of their wars with the Eldar and Tau, for instance, are due to them being dumb racist fanatics, and it's not an especially alien take that the Imperium's insane, repressive paranoia and anti-intellectualism makes it more of a breeding ground for Chaos cults than a bulwark against it.
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Jul 6, 2021 10:58
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How are u posted:It's a little difficult to make value judgements in a fictional world where demons are real and so are elves, in space. 40K is a descendant of/sister franchise of 2000AD, and has had extremely blunt political satire baked into it from the very beginning. The way that the Imperium deals with elves and demons is very frequently a pisstake of real-world cultures both ancient and modern.
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Jul 7, 2021 18:31
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Yeah, him ruining her life in a way that's both unprovoked and premeditated is a level of evil we don't often see from Flashman. It's not outright out-of-character (he's a bully by habit, and getting to earn that kind of money from his cruelty while removing a potential danger would be a powerful temptation for him), but I genuinely can't think of the last time in the series that we saw him do something quite this bad.
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Mar 28, 2022 19:58
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sebmojo posted:When he tossed that woman out of the sleigh? That was much more spur-of-the-moment, and much more of a matter of immediate personal survival. It was incredibly callous, but it wasn't quite in the same league as this sort of careful, premeditated betrayal to secure himself a useful-but-not-strictly-necessary advantage.
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Mar 29, 2022 04:42
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Norwegian Rudo posted:That's exactly what I was going to say. This doesn't feel like something Flashy would do (in this situation), but something Fraser needs to drive the plot. Again, we know that he's not above slave-trading, and we know that, being a habitual bully, premeditated cruelty in a peaceful environment is one of his favourite hobbies (when he's put in a position of power, he almost always resorts to terrorising his subordinates), so this kind of calculated betrayal for personal gain is not exactly out of character. It's just not something we see of him often on-page, and it's usually a lot more glossed over than this. Normally, it's more that there are narrative circumstances preventing him from immediately betraying someone for personal gain, but this time, there absolutely weren't, and so here we are. Darth Walrus fucked around with this message at 12:20 on Mar 29, 2022 |
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Mar 29, 2022 12:18
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Genghis Cohen posted:It's very interesting to read the slightly humorous/adventurous stylings of Flashman in this American frontier environment, and compare it to the way the conflict between native Americans and settlers is portrayed in, say, Blood Meridian or Lonesome Dove. Funny you should mention Blood Meridian. For readers of that novel, the name 'John Gallantin' should be ringing certain bells.
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Apr 4, 2022 15:06
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tokenbrownguy posted:Yeah that stood out. What’s it mean? '(Highly unpleasant racial slur for black people) in the woodpile' is an archaic American-originating turn of phrase that has similar connotations to 'fly in the ointment', assuming that you're the sort of person who might object to finding an escaped slave in your firewood storage area.
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Nov 30, 2022 19:42
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That's definitely a demonstration of Flashman's evolution into a competent man of action (if still a deeply amoral one) - he showed off the quick thinking and martial prowess of any traditional Victorian hero there.
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Apr 20, 2023 11:42
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