#honestly the discourse for those games might be catastrophic

[randomnameless]

Fort Merceus was built back when the Empire was only about the size of Hresvelg territory. They constructed the massive military base in order to subdue other clans in the area. After that, it ended up serving as the guardian of the Imperial capital, and kept getting updated and expanded. The rest is history.

From a Nopes Adrestian NPC

Which means

(graphic design is not my passion)

Between -41 and 0, we know Enbarr existed, but Willy Hresvelg was a Lord/the Lord of Enbarr.

Jury's out on what Enbarr encompassed - if it was just a city or a city + provinces, but in 0, Adrestia is founded with Enbarr as its capital, officially due to the presence of Seiros, but if it was Willy's domain/city to begin with, I can see why they picked it as the capital of the Empire.

Was it at that point that Enbarrian territory stopped being "Enbarr Provinces" and started to become "Hresvelg Territory" or it happened earlier (Willy conquering neighbour provinces before become Emperor, for Enbarr, but ultimately for him/the Hresvelg house?), or did the "Hresvelg Territory" encompass the conquests, between 0 and 32 of the most southern parts of what is now Adrestia, Boramas, Rusalka, etc, with the river with Aegir being a kind of natural border?

32 : Willy wants to unify the world

It'd make sense to have Merceus built around that time, both to protect what was already Adrestian/Enbarrian/belonged to the Hresvelg, and to have a base of operations closer to the new "lands to be conquered" than Enbarr.

Someone on Redshit made a detailed map thanks to Nopes's informations (and some guessing) and placed Fort Merceus here :

At the exit of the sort of "canyon" that is identified as "Merceus" in the general map, near the source of a river (there is a fork thing). It's kind of a strategical point, given how any army, to reach Enbarr, would have to cross the "Merceus canyon", because east of that canyon there is the Aegir River, and west of said canyon there are some mountains.

46 : Battle of Gronder 1

Things were going well for Adrestia between around 32 and 46, if they were able to reach Gronder in 46.

Sure, compared to the fast war that happens in the game, you'd have to wonder why the fuck did they take 14 years to reach Gronder, but it kinds of make sense with the idea of Adrestia building its strength slowly to ultimately be strong enough to challenge Nemesis, or the Empire wanted to make sure the newly conquered provinces were "correctly Adrestianised" before pushing forward, so they wouldn't rebel and stab Willy in the back or turn against a defenseless Enbarr if the main army is fighting up north?

Myrrdin

Ignatz notes how the Bridge of Myrddin was made during the War of Heroes - it has the same strategical value as Fort Merceus, making a fort in the only chokepoint (mountains on one side and huge river on the other) both to protect what is already Adrestianised, and to have a new base of operations.

91 Tailtean 1 : Rhea turns Nemesis in a pincushion

Between Gronder - which more or less took 14 years to reach from Merceus to Tailtean, the Adrestian army either accelerated their pace, or stopped taking a crap lot of time to "pacify/Adrestianise" the newly conquered provinces, given how in 45 years they managed to cross the Alliance and a large part of what is now Faerghus.

However, given how in 98 it is said the Empire is in control of "most" of Fodlan, I suppose they also spent time "conquering/Adrestianise" the Eastern parts of the continent, like Eastern Adrestia and Eastern Faerghus, because I sure as hell don't see Willy+Lycaon+Seiros rushing to Tailtean if half of Fodlan is still siding with Nemesis, and "pacifying/conquering" this half in the 7 years following Nemesis's defeat.

(and given how this other half encompasses Rhodos, where Cichol lived and how Seiros met him and his family there per Flayn's support, either she went like a ninja to meet them, or it was "safe enough" for her to walk from Enbarr to Rhodos - or Seiros the Warrior, just after Zanado, first went to Rhodos before going to Enbarr?)

Tl; dr : Adrestia started slowly, at least until the new Empire reached Myrrdin. Willy Seiros built forts in strategical positions/chokepoints to protect what was already Imperial Land, and also to have new bases of operation as the army moved up north.

However, we don't have any clues or info about forts and bases being built post Myrrdin (which can only have been built post 46), so it can be assumed post 46, when the Adrestian Army started to fight the Elites and their allied clans, they didn't have the same motivation anymore, even if taking roughly 50 years to reach the Tailtean Plains, given how fast the war happens in the Fodlan games, either means they were all foot units and had a crap mov stat back then, or the Adrestian Conquests of back then weren't just "kill the leader and move forward" like we see in Tru Piss (and Supreme Bullshit?) but might have been something closer to "kill the leader, bring enough 'order' to the newly conquered lands and Adrestianise them so they won't rebel, maybe let Seiros do her thing with her church stuff, ask people around if they know about "golden weapons", and then move forward".

It's all conjecture, of course, given how we don't have enough intel, but with the presence of those forts and the abnormaly long time it took for the Adrestian Army to conquer Fodlan and deck Nemesis, even if he and his Elites put up a fight with the help of Mole People, I can't really explain nor understand why it took around 65 years for Willy to conquer Fodlan.

In comparison, Supreme Leader "only" takes 5 years in FE16 (and that's only because she was "very sad uwu" when Billy fell in a ravine in Tru Piss), but Nopes shows how starting the War of Unification when her home base/state isn't "orderly" enough bites her, in Nopes Aegir Sr who wasn't "dealt with" rebels and we have bits of pseudo civil wars (even if it's always subdued thanks to the Supreme rule of thumb regarding the Fodlan games), in AG she ultimately becomes Supreme Puppet because dealing with evil lizard lady was more important than making sure Uncle'n'pals were "dealt with", which also happens in Supreme Bullshit.

So, in a way, Supreme Leader conquered Fodlan way faster than her stupid ancestor did (5 years vs 60) but she had to face opposition and rebellions within her own forces, let it be by people she deposed and called a day (Aegir Sr) or her embarassing allies - she either "deals" with them after the Conquest, or forgets to deal with them and it destroys Adrestia (AG) or is another surprise force she has to fight against (but ultimately succeeds because she has a plot mc guffin siding with her, or an imbecile who does all of the heavy work for her).

[bondsmagii]

Miceál, my brother has become an incel... He used to be such a smart and, deep down, sweet boy, but now all he does is play lol. He almost never leaves is room, he doesn't shower, doesn't wash his clothes, doesn't ventilate his room, all of that makes him smell like a death animal. He survives off coca cola, fries and burgers and vent his anger by harassing women and minorities. I suspect the reason he is the way he is now is because of some traumatizing events during our childhood, I guess the way he coped was playing online game to forget about everything. My parents no longer give a crap about what is he gonna do once he becomes a legal adult, but I'm personally deeply worried about him. After all, I kind of understand that after all, he's just a 16 year old who didn't get the emotional support he needed. Do you have any advice on how can I help him realize that his lifestyle is not healthy at all? He won't listen to me (nor anyone else, really), whenever I try talking to him he just tells me to fuck off and leave him the fuck alone. Sorry for bothering with such things, but when it comes to this type of stuff you seem to give good advice.

honestly, this is the worst situation I can imagine when it comes to ideology and people you care about. unfortunately the only tips I have are time consuming and often unsuccessful -- with this kind of thing, the person has to consent to helping themselves, too. if they refuse, there's not really anything that can be done.

unfortunately I'm speaking from experience. a short while ago I had a friend I was close to and who I'd known for two years. one day, totally out of the blue, she told me she felt we were close enough that I would "understand", and that she didn't think I would judge her because I was so "open-minded", and a bunch of other compliments that she laid on thick before telling me she was a TERF. her own words. she was a straight-up TERF, ran a discourse blog full of TERF shit, had an entire group of friends who were TERFs... it was a mess. at first I talked to her about it, and similarly to your brother she had been through a lot of trauma when she was younger, relating to her sexuality and gender presentation. it had forced her into making changes to her body that she regretted and was in the process of reversing. she was angry and bitter, and rightly so, but again like your brother she was misdirecting her anger towards those who didn't deserve it rather than the system that allowed it all to happen in the first place. at first it was promising, and she really did seem to realise what she was doing wasn't the right way to go and made some real progress in moving away from the circles... but then a few months later she was back into it again, sending me link upon link to "proof" and trying to persuade me that she was right. at that point I broke off the friendship and stopped contact with her.

I'm sorry this doesn't have a happy ending, but unfortunately these groups -- TERFS, incels, Nazis, etc -- are very good at targeting the vulnerable and telling them exactly what they want to hear: it's not their fault, all the shit that's happened to them and the pain and resentment they feel. it's the fault of whatever minority or group they want to target, be it women, trans people, immigrants, Jewish people, whatever. it's an attractive concept for these people because it means it's not their fault and there's a cause they can rally behind to make things Right. these groups are also very good at indoctrination, building up slowly and exposing people to the really nasty stuff when they're ready to accept it. it is a form of grooming, and it's so slow-burning and insidious that we often don't notice until it's too late. the left is also catastrophically bad at recruiting and maintaining activism because of the purity culture and the constant infighting; a lot of the jokes the alt-right make about the left are completely true. to somebody like your brother, the incel community is organised, saying what he wants to hear, and the political altnerative is a bunch of weirdos shouting at one another about children's cartoons. it's a no-brainer. he feels powerful and enlightened, which is a very attractive thing for someone who is, at root, a traumatised child.

the best thing you can do at this point, I think, is try to separate him from as much of this input as possible. you'll have to work slow, and subtle, but the more time he's away from this indoctrinating information the more likely it'll be that phase two is successful: beginning to essentially reeducate him. to do this, you need to find common ground and validate it, and then slowly turn his annoyance and opinions around to the real cause of it. it takes time and has little chance of succeeding, but unless he decides to throw it in on his own, it's his only chance.

he's still young, and while he's living at home his potential to cause harm is thankfully at least somewhat contained. be patient, work subtly, give him other options. try to keep him away from his incel friends, distract him with things that keep him busy and give him a sense of real accomplishment and satisfaction. build up his confidence, compliment him when he does something worth admiring, and try to avoid outright conflict. remember: common ground, and then gradual education. at the end of the day only he can make the final call, but these communities rely on total isolation so that even if somebody wants to get out, they've burned all their bridges and realise they can't -- they'll have nobody left. for as long as you're able, emotionally and morally, keep that bridge open for him. even having just one person to fall back on might be enough for somebody to find the courage to leave one of these cults.

[qqueenofhades]

So, it’s Friday evening, and it turns out I have more thoughts about things that happened this week. I almost never do Discourse on this blog, on whatever subject, but sometimes even your friendly local depressed historian gotta say things. If you’re not in the mood for a long-ass meta-y text post, just keep on scrolling, no hard feelings.

In the wake of the Notre Dame fire, which obviously a lot of us were upset about, and profoundly relieved that it did not end up being completely catastrophic, the usual spate of posts began to pop up, alleging that people only cared about Notre Dame because of the loss to Western/European/Christian history, that nobody had been this upset about the National Museum of Brazil or the outbreak of arson at three black churches in Louisiana in the same week, and so on. I don’t blame anyone for making those posts, because I know they cared about those issues and wanted to ensure that their importance was communicated, especially when something major like Notre Dame was getting all the airtime. However, I couldn’t help but notice how that followed the same pattern as all Woke Tumblr Discourse (tm). An event happens, people express reactions to it, and are then attacked or indirectly shamed for not expressing reactions to another event. Or there’s the usual cycle of “nobody will care about this because it’s not happening in America”-style posts, or passive-aggressive insinuations that “you don’t care if you don’t reblog this.” And -- I say this with the greatest kindness possible, because I know, I know you guys care -- it’s... not helpful.

The culture of Tumblr and other left-wing sections of social media often rests on enacting performative wokeness, on showing that you care about the most Progressive (tm) issues, or that you have thoroughly scrutinized your fandom tastes or political beliefs for anything Problematic and/or can prove yourself to an imagined moral standard (and there have been some great metas written on how this essentially replicates conservative evangelical purity culture, with the goalposts switched). This is why we keep having to circulate (and doubtless will have to do so with increasing frequency) those posts reminding the left not to eat its young and flame all prospective Democratic challengers to Trump in 2020 to a crisp before the right wing, which is only too happy to let us do the work of sabotaging ourselves, even gets a chance. This is also why you see the posts responding to said angry “nobody cares about this!” posts, in which people mention the fact that not visibly reacting to all the (vast and terrible) injustice in the world does not mean they don’t care. The world is a big place. So is the internet. I can guarantee you that people do care, and just because you didn’t see immediate evidence and response to it when you opened up your Tumblr dash is not proof of a collective nefarious conspiracy.

Take me, for example. I am a thirty-ish academic and historian who considers myself well-informed and literate in current events. I read national and international news every day to find out what’s going on (because I live in England, the answer is Brexit, and the status is Failed). And yet, there are plenty of things that I only hear about for the first time on Tumblr, often attached to one of those “nobody cares about this!” posts. And you know what? I do care. I care a lot. And I’m guessing that most other people do as well, because no matter how it may feel, the majority of individuals are fundamentally decent people with basic empathy for others, even if our whole system is a nightmare. But the urge to demand why nobody is Discoursing about this issue (again, among a vast and exhausting sea of them) needs to take a few fundamental things into account. 

First, the American media (as a large portion of readers are relying on) simply does not report this stuff. Look at what’s happening in that godforsaken country right now; does it really seem like the kind of place that’s eager to tell you about Brazilian museum fires or black-church arson? I’m someone who makes a conscious effort to read the news no matter how depressed it makes me, and I still miss tons of stuff, because it’s not there. The Western media reported on Notre Dame, people knew about it, and were upset. But when those of them who did not know about the National Museum of Brazil learned about it, they were also upset. We can definitively say now that the National Museum was a bigger and more irreplaceable tragedy in terms of what burned. But we were also apparently 15-30 minutes away from losing all of Notre Dame. You can be upset about both these things. You can express empathy for the history lost in both cases. There is not a greater moral value attached, and you’re not racist for caring about Notre Dame if you heard about it first (unless you’re only upset about Notre Dame for reasons related to race or perceived cultural superiority and are peddling vile conspiracy theories about Jews and Muslims intentionally burning it down, in which case you are a racist). Almost everyone who learned about the National Museum fire was just as horrified.

2019 is a hard and monstrously unfair and tremendously difficult place to live. The internet has made exposure to both all the information and no real information at all simultaneously possible. Not everyone can display active engagement and empathy with every tragedy everywhere. People have jobs, lives, kids, work, school, other commitments, mental and physical health to look after and even when they read the damn news, there’s no guarantee whatsoever the news is going to report it. If they haven’t made the conscious effort to search out every scrap of terribleness that exists in this hellworld, they.... really should not be shamed for that. If they don’t care even after they learn, that’s another debate. But again, in my experience, most people do. But if they are first exposed to it by someone claiming they won’t care, that makes them less likely to engage with it, and to want to enact meaningful change. Firing wittily sarcastic takedowns at easy targets on echo-chamber liberal Twitter is one thing. We all enjoy a good roast and venting our frustration at times. But as a long-term engagement strategy, it’s going to actively backfire.

I talk a lot about being a teacher, and my experiences with my students, but it’s relevant again, so here goes. The kids in my classes come in believing some pretty strange things, or they flat out don’t have a clue even about what I consider basic historical knowledge. If my reaction was to shame them for not knowing, when they have expressly come to me to learn better, I’m pretty sure I’d be a bad teacher. My strategy, whenever a student can actually be nudged to answer a question, is to pick out whatever correct thing they said. Even if the rest of the answer is wrong and we need to work through it, I start by highlighting the part of it that was right, and to build their confidence that I’m not just going to tear them down when they respond. Freshmen are scared of not knowing things and to be made to look like an idiot, so I try to assure them that I’m not going to do that and I will constructively engage with their contribution and treat it seriously. You can then move to dealing with the other parts of it that may not be right, or even Mmm Whatcha Say side-eye. It is a long and often frustrating process and sometimes after reading their essays, you wonder how much of an impression you made. But if you actually want to get people to care about things, you can’t mistake Ultimate Wokeness or Look How Progressive/Anti-establishment/Enlightened I Personally Am for the simple requirement of being a decent person. You can have the greatest and most necessary beliefs or value systems in the world, but if your response to people is to lash out at them even before they begin the conversation, you’re setting yourself back. And I know that’s not really what you want to do.

This should not be interpreted as some wishy-washy “everyone just needs to be nice to each other!!!” kindergarten-playground-rule. I frankly think the whole system could use a good nefarious dismantle, and you sure as hell don’t get there by mistaking insipid moral equivalence for necessary action. But accepting the existence of people different from you, and considering how you want to engage with them, and understanding that issues are complicated and people are flawed, is a fundamental part of being a mature adult (and this has nothing to do with chronological age; there are 15-year-olds who are plenty more mature adults than 50-year-olds). I honestly do love the desperate desire to make people care, and that, for the most part, is why people who identify as liberal or left-wing do so, because they want to (and they do) care. But it’s also why they can be bad at winning elections and getting into meaningful positions to enact this change. The right wing stays on message and sticks together. Even if they absolutely hated Trump, plenty of Republicans held their noses and voted for him anyway. The left did not do that. The greatest virtue of liberal thought, i.e. its determination to include multiple perspectives, has increasingly reduced it to smaller and smaller camps where only the purest survive, like some kind of ideological Hunger Games. It might be great for making yourself look good to your hall of mirrors, but.... not so good for actually doing something long-term.

Once again, this is not to blame anyone for being upset and worried about things, for wanting people to know about them, and so forth. But I am gently-but-firmly suggesting, in my capacity as old, salty, queer spinster academic aunt, that perhaps you consider how you start the conversation. Once again, it’s my experience that most people want to know and want to care, but there are countless factors that mean not every bad thing in the world will be acknowledged everywhere by everyone at all times. You can care about different things for different reasons. That is okay. You can care about something because you have a personal connection to it. That is also okay. You can not care about something because you just don’t have the capacity and are emotionally exhausted and there’s so much shit in this world that you have to compartmentalize and set boundaries. That is also okay.

For example, I was obviously very upset about Notre Dame, and still am, though I’m relieved it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Am I happy it’s going to be restored? Yes. Am I unbelievably angry that a half-dozen of the elite uber-rich could just suddenly throw billions of euros at it for its restoration, when it had to struggle for years to get funding for crucial renovations? Yes. Do I feel as if that if the vaults have suddenly been opened to restore one major European Christian landmark, it’s incredibly heartbreaking that that level of instant capital just won’t be addressed to actual endemic, long-term issues like global warming and social inequality and the Flint water crisis and whatever else, and that this is a sad and troubling message for our society in many ways? Yes.  All of these things exist together. And I imagine most people feel the same way.

In short: I realize this is the internet, and therefore just is not designed to do that, but maybe we can give each other a little bit more of the benefit of the doubt, and think about how we would like to educate and engage those we come in contact with, whether virtually or in reality. We can do it wherever and whoever we are, with anyone that we meet, and I wonder what it would be like if we did.