Cultural Attitudes Towards War

 Happy Guy Fawkes Day! 

This week has been mostly better than the last one, in terms of how I’m feeling by the end, but I STILL need to put up pictures of the trip and I hope to get to that this weekend. That, and a review of Black Adam. Next weekend is YALLFest, so it’s probable that there isn’t a Saturday Note to post.

Thought about this because I re-read Servant of the Underworld this past week.

[Side note: I would really, REALLY like to see one of those “You butcher and slaughter in the name of your god” speeches aimed at like… a Norse warrior in a temple for Odin.]

Cultural Attitudes Towards War

So I started re-reading Aliette de Bodard’s Obsidian & Blood trilogy. This is one of those cool little book serieses that is pretty darn cool, but almost nobody has heard of–it’s a historical fantasy murder mystery set in the Aztec Triple Alliance at the height of its power. The main character, Acatl, is high priest of Mictlantecuhtli, the god of the dead, and he solves magical murders. It’s great fun–though if you’re squeamish about blood, probably skip because while de Bodard cuts back on the human sacrifices, there is still a LOT of sacrificing going on.

[I saw one reader on Goodreads give the first book a bad review because of cruelty to animals. No, really.]

One thing that comes up a lot in the first book is that Acatl had a strained relationship with his parents while they were alive, because unlike his brother Neutemoc, Acatl chose the priesthood as his career, whereas Neutemoc became a warrior, which was seen as a much more honorable calling. Warriors were the elites in the Mexica society of the time; the chief god was the god of war, the one who led the Mexica people from their homeland and let them dominate their region for decades. The heir apparent to the Reverend Speaker (read: Emperor) is the supreme commander of the empire’s armies. And while Acatl never wanted that role, and he’s very critical of how warriors can be sometimes, he doesn’t really question the idea that the role of warriors should be higher than priests or any other type of occupation.

So I’ve been thinking.

Modern attitudes towards war tend to be… “War is bad.” And I’m not going to argue with that one, it’s an attitude that I happen to agree with. Okay, sure, there are people who call for war, but we tend to characterize that as a necessary evil, rather than something that’s good in and of itself. People lionize the military, but in a way that emphasizes the sacrifice soldiers make for their country, fighting to protect the nation and its people, rather than because they think fighting a war is good. There are exceptions to this, but generally (and thankfully!) we view war as bad.

This is not the view everyone throughout history has had. And I think it’s wise to bring that up when writing fantasy or historical fiction.

There are cultures throughout history that absolutely worshiped the concept of war. War was not bad, they said, it’s actually very good! And we should do it more often! This attitude often came from the warrior elites, those who led the wars and suffered the least consequences from it. Women, peasants, and clergymen had a rather different idea of war because they were more likely to be victims. Warrior elites like knights were heavily armored, on horseback, and less likely to suffer debilitating injuries from combat (though there were exceptions, of course). And obviously, they gained the most from it in spoils, land, and reputation.

[I’ve seen it argued that part of the reason for the Crusades was an attempt to make all those annoying warriors wrecking havoc go somewhere else and try to curb that violence into something deemed productive. It didn’t…quite work out.]

You have to understand that this “War is good!” mentality wasn’t just against people that were unliked (though that did exist too), it was that war was in and of itself something good. It was what the warrior elites were supposed to be doing, according to them, and so they were fulfilling their divinely-ordained role. If you decide to set a story in a historical time period and feature aristocrats, be aware that this was a completely normal attitude to have. Otherwise learned characters would be all about that war if they were raised in that caste.

I’m not saying all your characters should express this attitude, but if they don’t, if their ideas are more in line with modern sensibilities, give a reason why. Maybe they suffered a raid from the civilian perspective, or maybe they weren’t raised in this climate. But you have to give something other than have characters inexplicably express a modern opinion without a reason so that the audience knows who the good guy is right off the bat.

There’s a scene in the “Siege of Paris” expansion for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla in which Eivor and another warrior express horror at the idea of harming civilians, even though they have no reason to. Vikings of this time period made their money looting civilian locations and walking off with the gold and slaves–something the game skips by making all the monasteries full of enemy soldiers and barely mentioning slavery. This opinion should be alien to them! They shouldn’t bat an eye at Siegfried killing a church full of women and children refugees–though because the game doesn’t trust the audience to realize this is bad unless the characters react badly to it, then it’s spelled out that this is a Bad Thing.

Attitudes towards war didn’t really take a full swing until after massive, horrible conflicts like the World Wars in which the advantages that the warrior elites had no longer counted for beans in the face of modern weaponry, bombs, and chemicals. If you’re putting that viewpoint in a fantasy setting as widespread, consider what might cause that shift in a constructed world–widespread use of a new kind of magic, perhaps?

War IS bad. But if your characters in fiction take that moral standpoint, there should be some cause for that.

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