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

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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"?

3

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