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#You couldn't have Akutagawa checking the time on a wristwatch in chapter 38 if WWI never happened–
kyouka-supremacy · 1 year
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Wait there's no WWII in BSD?? I knew there was a different, additional "Great War" but—
Well... It's hard to say.
I've always been under the impression that something close to WWI happened (bsd's “Great War”), and no WWII was ever mentioned. Yet if we follow that logic, some things don't add up. As shown in chapter 73, the borders in north Europe are the same of the current, post WWII and post cold war with no Denmark for some reason:
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which are different compared to the post WWI borders (notice the change in Germany / Poland confines):
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Furthermore, the UN canonically exist in the bsd universe, and the UN was created as direct consequence of WWII... I find it really hard to figure wether the organization would exist or not if WWII never happened.
And those are just the two major things, but there's so many other little consequences of WWII and of the cold war that pervade our society (the technological advancement, the deeply roothed capitalistic system, the civil rights standards¹ and more) that as it appears - not paying mind to aesthetic liberties - are more or less the same in the bsd world.
I always linked bsd's “Great War” with WWI: because WWI is typically associated with trench warfare and Yosano's chapters portrayed a trench-based kind of war, because WWI is literally called “Great War”; but maybe I've been misleaded. As I seem to understand, The Great War 大戦 as it's called in the manga is used in both the WWI and WWII Japanese names, 第一次世界大戦 and 第二次世界大戦 respectively. Perhaps, it could then indicate WWI and WWII being one single big war in the bsd universe² (but honestly, then the translation choice of calling it “great war” in the official English edition of the manga is misleading at best, given that's the actual name of one of the most widely known wars in human history).
In the end, I guess it's just that the course of history in the bsd world is fundamentally different than ours, although it surprisingly still lead to a quite similar society with similar laws. The timeline too is different: it took us 70 years after the second world war to reach this level of technology advancement, yet people in the bsd world have more or less our same technology level, with airports, cars, laptops and smartphones³, and it's only been 15 years since the end of The Great War; man, that's for us like if WWII had ended in 2005, most people alive in the bsd war still remember living through it. That's why I'd say it ultimately lacks sense to try and reconduct bsd's Great War to one of our world wars, or question if our wars ever happened, because the history of the bsd world is just different.
¹ Well, maybe not all civil rights standards, taking in the absence of juvenile laws. Maybe the bsd world really lacks the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
² Which by the way is the take of some historians in our world too, WWI and WWII being the same war with a short break in the midst.
³ and to an extent even greater technology, given the advanced cybernetics apparently portrayed in Stormbringer and ai technology of the Eyes of God. Then again, it's an unfair comparison with a world with superpowers...
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