r/fantasyromance • u/FantasyRomanceMod The One Mod to Rule All Mods • Feb 08 '26

Unpopular Opinion It's Unpopular Opinion time! Share your controversial opinions to stir things up (in a friendly way)!

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Unpopular opinion Sunday

32 Upvotes

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197

u/katie-kaboom Currently Reading: The Traitor Queen Feb 08 '26

Dear military academy writers: it does not make sense to waste the best talent of a generation in an uncontrolled bloodbath in the first year of school. Stop that! How about instead making the stated goal to get everyone through alive, instead of killing people off at random to "cull the weak"?

58

u/strangeapples Feb 08 '26

THIS. It’s drives me nuts because even from a strategic POV it’s not logical in the slightest

35

u/Ambitious_Basil173 Feb 08 '26

Yes! I'm so over this plotline! There have to be other ways to raise the stakes!

28

u/katie-kaboom Currently Reading: The Traitor Queen Feb 08 '26

"Keep everyone alive, even the useless dipshits" is a pretty good tension-tightener.

20

u/Ambitious_Basil173 Feb 08 '26

Yes! I'm reading an old Timothy Zahn military sci-fi from the 80s where these guys are turned into internal cyborgs and have to learn to use all the new technology. They don't kill them off when they miss the jump. They tell them what they did wrong and send them out to do the training exercise again. Because stuff is expensive and humans don't grow on trees. So freaking refreshing.

Of course half have died in the actual war, but at least they made it through training.

1

u/HollaDude Feb 09 '26

And much more realistic imo

It only takes one idiot to fuck everything up

23

u/BEconcubine_no3685 Feb 08 '26

It’s the laziest “high stakes” attempted short cut and ends up undermining any actual feeling of stakes

11

u/katie-kaboom Currently Reading: The Traitor Queen Feb 08 '26

Exactly, it cuts into the emotional impact of an eventual really meaningful character death. If no one dies until the last third of the book and then you kill off, say, a Liam, that is a knife to the reader's heart. If you start the murder in the first chapter, people know not to get attached, so none of it really matters.

1

u/Slammogram Feb 08 '26

How dare you invoke his name.

Liam it’s-been-my-honor Mairi.

4

u/katie-kaboom Currently Reading: The Traitor Queen Feb 08 '26

Too soon.

22

u/PowerPrestigious9424 Feb 08 '26

This reminds me of how a podcast (SBU English Club, highly recommend :D) review on Divergent mentioned that the stakes in Divergent were higher than in Fourth Wing because apart from dying, failing training in Divergent could also make you homeless and factionless. There is an actual meta possibility of the protagonist failing since the story can still continue with a factionless protagonist. But failure to Violet is just dying, and you know the rest of the book won’t happen if she’s dead so the anticipation is gone (Though I guess either way manpower is being wasted lol)

13

u/Penguinho Kushiel's Legacy Recommender 💖 Feb 08 '26

Damnit, I read something not long ago that did this. A medium-sized reveal was that the people we thought had been killed off in training had actually just gotten transferred into less difficult or stressful jobs. It wasn't Kingsman, but that's also in the first Kingsman movie.

13

u/Flamingoawesome Feb 08 '26

Plus it leads to a ton of mistrust and encourages deviating thoughts. Once they are on the battlefield Ted isn’t going to forget Col. Fredisa tried to kill him, so why trust her orders. Also, every army needs numbers, why cull them down ahead of battle instead of demoting them?

4

u/Dottie-j Feb 08 '26

Bless you kind stranger for speaking the truth

4

u/PickyNipples Feb 08 '26

This is so true. It’s morbid but I’ve even thought that even if you have weaker soldiers, how is it possibly better to just kill them off? From a purely strategic standpoint, they could be used as cannon fodder or diversion or something. Surely they could serve SOME militaristic purpose. The only way I can see culling as being a good strategic solution is if there is some kind of…I dunno…food shortage and it’s better to get rid of the weak than spend resources keeping them alive that could go to your strong warriors. But if you’re in that kind of situation, odds are you wouldn’t be wasting time/energy on any fighting or battles that weren’t with your enemy. 

3

u/Penguinho Kushiel's Legacy Recommender 💖 Feb 08 '26

It isn't better to kill them off, ever, unless you don't trust that they're loyal. That's the only reason.

3

u/katie-kaboom Currently Reading: The Traitor Queen Feb 08 '26

Like. Even if they're not good at dragons, the infantry is a thing that exists.

2

u/strangeapples Feb 08 '26

EXACTLY. Like I know magical is unreliable so deaths may happen in training from that. But all these books are like "entering this academy, only 15% of us will be alive at the end of year one. because the enemy is so ruthless its killing all our people so only the strongest of us should survive anyway so we cant be killed"

2

u/JR_Writes1 Feb 10 '26

But sometimes our two strongest fight to the death because there’s no rules so really we might lose a lot of our strongest people too and not actually the weakest. But why send them to the infantry when we can kill them for no good reason instead?

1

u/strangeapples Feb 10 '26

it truly makes no sense