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[[File:trench suicide otto dix 9168.jpg|frame|Otto Dix, ''Suicide in the Trenches'' -- big toe on the trigger.]]
{{quote|''
''The fire and the bursting shell''
''While the very air is a mad despair''
''The throes of a living hell
|'''[[Phil Ochs]]''', "The Men Behind The Guns"}}
When this trope is in play, war is a [[Crapsack World|hellish, traumatizing nightmare]], and anyone who comes out of it alive will end up a [[Shell-Shocked Veteran]]. Those who take pleasure in it are [[Ax Crazy]] [[Blood Knight]]s or [[Psycho for Hire|wo]][[Complete Monster|rse]]. This trope gained its name by the famous quote from General William T. Sherman, "War is all Hell, and I have every intent of making it so." Most people quoting it [[Beam Me Up, Scotty|shorten it to the trope name]].
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* Parodied in ''[[School Rumble]]'' by being played completely straight...in a paintball war game/student film. The whole thing was ''supposed'' to be staged, but halfway through it seems like everyone forgot and started ad libbing. Note that the entire thing started over an argument over [[Serious Business|whether the class should do a play or a maid cafe for the school festival]].
==
* Often turns up in ''Rogue Trooper'' to offset [[War Is Glorious|the exciting adventures]]. Many a story ends something like this:
{{quote|'''Helm:''' Wow, that was harsh.
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* ''[[Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers]]'' runs on this trope, as a [[Deconstruction]] of a franchise that usually takes a [[Rule of Cool]] approach to its central [[Civil War]] theme.
== Fan Works ==
* ''[[Tiberium Wars]]'' is pretty much wall-to-wall examples of this, with graphic, savage, and brutal descriptions of soldiers being shot, stabbed, burned, and vaporized. And that's before we get to how completely nasty the battlefields are; one chapter has a group of Nod soldiers slogging through raw sewage, with one soldier getting it ''in a fresh bullet wound.'' In one of the latest chapters, we get to see the effects of a full armored assault with {{spoiler|Mammoth Tanks}} from the perspective of the receiving end. Its about as brutally terrifying as one can imagine. In Chapter Seventeen, a Nod officer {{spoiler|executes his own wounded}} to keep them from falling into enemy hands, because he believes they will be tortured and killed. Three weeks into the war, GDI has managed to fill ''a stadium'' with ''three hundred thousand body bags.''
* ''[[Dumbledore's Army and the
* ''[[Warhammer 40000 Trouble]]'' brought it to the [[Refuge in Audacity]] level with random nuclear strike killed people 8 times larger than the [[Alien Invasion]] themselves, only reason that keep [[La Résistance]] still able to fight is because of [[The Power of Trust]], [[With Great Power Comes Great Insanity|the rest is insane]] or [[Dying Like Animals|die]]
* ''[[
{{quote|Skitty screamed both from the pain of the impact and the indescribable agony that arose from the corrupted blood that coursed through her veins, destroying everything they touched. She fought through the pain, struggling to get up before anything could take advantage of her vulnerable state. She tried to get up only to have her legs buckle. Her strength left her as the Ariados venom in her blood began to slowly digest her organs.
She [Solidad] opened her eyes; the scene of her Lapras dying still replayed over and over again in her mind. No matter what she did, she could not erase the sight of Lapras's eyes bursting and her skin scorching as thousands of volts surged through her body, burning her alive. }}
* ''[[The TSAB -
* ''[[Winter War]]''. Aizen won, Gin [[Tyrant Takes the Helm|has control of Seireitei]], and the few surviving shinigami form a very weak [[La Résistance|Resistance]]... those that Aizen hasn't captured and [[Fate Worse Than Death|experimented on]]. The survivors have had to abandon most of their pre-war honor codes- they've given up on the one-on-one duels that they insist on in ''[[Bleach]]'' canon, and when a minor character begins [[Deadly Doctor|using healing kidou to kill in very messy ways]] the characters let him, even though in peacetime they would be horrified. The fic is not shy about the physical and mental costs of fighting a war, either. {{spoiler|[[Reverse Mole]]}} Hisagi in particular is well on his way to being a [[Shell-Shocked Veteran]], despite the war not being over.
** There's also the fact that the shinigami aren't able/willing to do their jobs of keeping souls in balance and sending the dead from the human world to Soul Society. This means that the entire structure - Soul Society, the human world and the Hollow world of Hueco Mundo - is in danger of collapsing in the not-too distant future. So even if the war goes in favour of the increasingly damaged Resistance, it could yet be for nothing.
* The ''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]]'
== Films ==
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* ''[[The Patriot]]'': Benjamin Martin helps win the war but his home is destroyed, two of his sons are dead and the other two are forced to kill at a young age, irreversibly changing them both (one is scarred for life, the other likes it too much).
* In ''[[A Very Long Engagement]]'' a young, cheerful man is conscripted from his simple and happy country life to fight in [[World War I]]. After seeing too much misery he decides to self-mutilate in an attempt to get sent home, but his superior won't allow it, and ''his'' superior [[Complete Monster|tears up the pardon]]. So he's sent in the no-man's area between the two warring factions, gets shot up and ends up so traumatized he loses his memory. The whole film is interspersed with brutally realistic scenes intended to depict the hell of war even more powerfully.
== Literature ==
* ''[[Belisarius Series]]'': The title character knows perfectly well that no matter how skillful a general he is and how well he fends off Malwa tyranny large numbers of his enemies are innocent conscripts who will die miserably far from home, and that wherever any army marches including his own it leaves famine behind it. That is not to mention atrocities which he has to resort to ruthless terror if he intends to prevent his men from indulging in.
* ''Goodbye To All That'': Extraordinary wartime physical hardship. Constant exposure to danger and death. An unbridgeable gap between the experience of those on the front line and those on the home front
* ''[[All Quiet on the Western Front]]'': The enemy that a soldier kills and maims are not faceless targets but people very much like himself.
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* ''Three Day Road'' by Joseph Boyden: Native Canadian snipers in World War I. A fairly innocent young man snaps completely under the impact of the war and commits war atrocities. Graphic and nihilistic.
* John Marsden's ''Tomorrow, When The War Began'' series featuring a group of teenagers who become guerrilla fighters when Australia is invaded by an unspecified foreign power.
* [[Madeleine L'Engle]]'s ''[[A Swiftly Tilting Planet]]'' features a
* The ''[[Flashman]]'' series tends to lean this way, which is unsurprising given the setting. Flashy lives through some of the most terrible campaigns of his era including the retreat from Kabul and the Sepoy Mutiny, and in most cases he only survives because he is a lucky, cowardly, lucky, conniving, lucky, bastard.
* A brief, haunting moment in Lois Lowry's ''[[The Giver]]'' is when Jonas is given the memory of a young man dying in combat - and when we say young, we mean no older than [[Child Soldiers|thirteen]]. [[Utopia Justifies the Means]], indeed...
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* ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]''. Every side has thousands of soldiers being maimed or massacred, and the soldiers that do survive in one piece spend most of the time when they're not actively fighting rampaging through the villages, stealing, murdering, and raping as they go. The nobility try to hold onto a [[War Is Glorious]] mindset at first, but lose it rapidly as they start to suffer consequences too, and it's gone entirely by the time the Tully family takes Jaime Lannister as a hostage.
* ''[[Catch-22]]''. War is inescapable and insane. You can be promoted without doing anything and you can be arrested for breaking curfew while letting a rapist go free because he is on furlough.
* ''[[
* ''[[Animorphs]]'' does this with teenagers fighting an [[Alien Invasion]].
* ''[[Romance of the Three Kingdoms]]'' while it had its epic war moments, was ultimately a tale of tragedy as three kingdoms vied for the control of China and ultimately none were victorious. In terms of the fates of the characters, Shu fell as [[Wide-Eyed Idealist]] Liu Bei soon became jaded, learning virtue is not enough to bring the people together. For Wu, the Sun dynasty's fall heralded a new tyrant who was so hated that the people did not resist and for Wei, Cao Pi realized that ambition worked both ways.
* ''[[Johnny Got His Gun]]''. About a soldier who is [[And I Must Scream|left deaf, blind, mute and without any limbs]] as a result of a war that he didn't even volunteer for. He learns to communicate by moving ever so slightly, and repeatedly asks to be killed.
* Patrick Ness' ''[[Chaos Walking]]'' trilogy seems to be going this way,{{verify}} although the theme seems to be more 'war can be a necessary evil' than 'war is always bad'.
** Current{{when}} themes explored in the series so far include slavery, and later genocide, a [[Complete Monster]] of a dictator and how he manipulates the population into not fighting against him (this includes full-out brainwashing), [[Grey and Grey Morality]] with the resistance [[Utopia Justifies the Means|overstepping the mark to achieve their end]] almost as much as the Dictator does, torture of prisoners, the nature of terrorism, religious fundamentalism, and discrimination resulting in dehumanisation. There is also an [[Author Tract]] dropped against the idea that a real man is capable of murder. Yeah, it's a pretty heavy series. And all set within a small human colony in space, too.▼
▲Current themes explored in the series so far include slavery, and later genocide, a [[Complete Monster]] of a dictator and how he manipulates the population into not fighting against him (this includes full-out brainwashing), [[Grey and Grey Morality]] with the resistance [[Utopia Justifies the Means|overstepping the mark to achieve their end]] almost as much as the Dictator does, torture of prisoners, the nature of terrorism, religious fundamentalism, and discrimination resulting in dehumanisation. There is also an [[Author Tract]] dropped against the idea that a real man is capable of murder. Yeah, it's a pretty heavy series. And all set within a small human colony in space, too.
* ''[[Bolo]]'' - In the late days of Case/Operation Ragnarok, even the eponymous [[Knight in Shining Armor]] sapient supertanks are falling to bloodlust and slaughtering the enemy's civilians. When the sole survivor Shiva reawakens, he is horrified by the atrocities that he himself had not been above committing under the pretense of [[Punch Clock Villain|following orders]].
* This is brought up in ''[[The Book Thief]]'', as a young German girl and her adopted family living in Germany during [[World War 2]] and aren't living [[Perpetual Poverty|in the best conditions.]] What was particularly [[Tear Jerker|heartbreaking]] was when {{spoiler|the street they were living in was accidentally bombed and everyone except the little girl died.}} It's quite harsh when you realize that it was the Allies who did that.
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* [[Dale Brown]] tears strips out of [[Elites Are More Glamorous]] in his works. You may be a member of a top secret unit with the [[Bigger Stick]], but the numbers will always be on the enemy's side. Plan for every contingency, do your best, and at best the enemy will still get licks in. At worst, friends and trusted comrades will die. Succeed and no one will know your name; fail and at best you die, at worst you are disavowed, thrown to the wolves of public opinion as a sacrifice by uncaring superiors. War is never pretty even from behind a drone control station.
* The ''[[Horatio Hornblower]]'' books do not make any attempts to conceal the awfulness of British Navy life in the Napoleonic Wars. What with the gory descriptions of battle, hideous injury, worse medical care, brutal discipline, and foul food and water (this last is not [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking|inconsequential]]), the eponymous lead at one point thinks that the prison volunteers on his crew would have done better to stay in jail.
**Descriptions by other historians suggest this may be downplayed. The real Royal Navy according to this was often better than the merchant service (whose owners don't have a tax base), or just living in poverty with no prospect of relief. Combat was rare and usually the enemy got so little time at sea that the odds of survival were pretty good. Abuse of sailors too, was not as common as in the past. [[Your Mileage May Vary]] on that one.
* The [[Vorkosigan Saga]] plays with this trope a lot. For a Military SF series, there's not a whole lot of actual warfare going on; instead there's tons of low-level skulduggery and spy versus spy shenanigans to ''prevent'' full-scale wars from breaking out. The very few times some real mayhem occurs, we always get to see the [[Tear Jerker|consequences]].
* This is one of the main themes in [[Andrey Livadny]]'s ''[[The History of the Galaxy]]'' books, especially the books that take place during the First Galactic War, a 30-year bloodbath started when the dictator-ruled [[The Empire|Earth Alliance]] destroys the Dabog colony as a lesson to the other Free Colonies, sparking [[The War Of Earthy Aggression]] that eventually resulted in the total defeat of Earth and the establishment of the [[The Federation|Confederacy of Suns]]. Since the novels are focused on characters, we get to experience the full extent of the horrors of war, especially, as the author calls it, the "technogenic" war, in which rapid technological progress has resulted in more ways to wipe out your fellow man than one can count. The full extent can be seen in novels featuring [[Humongous Mecha]] fights (of the [[Real Robot Genre|Real Robot]] kind). The novel ''Serv-batallion'' as it shows a group of teens from Earth being conscripted to fight a war they don't support and, essentially, sacrified by their commanding officer in order to get a Colonial [[Wave Motion Gun]]. Other novels involve war vets trying to adjust to living in a post-war galaxy.
* Almost any ''[[StarCraft]]'' novel where the main characters are soldiers will have this as one of its themes. The notable examples are ''Speed of Darkness'' (in which a forcibly-conscripted Confederate marine takes part in one of the first engagements with the Zerg) and ''Heaven's Devils'', featuring Jim Raynor as a fresh Confederate recruit who bought into the [[War Is Glorious]] propaganda before finding out for himself that it's far from it. The latter case actually takes place ''before'' the game's storyline and features the war between the Confederacy of Man and the Kel-Morian Combine, with both governments being full of corruption and greed. There is plenty of both heroic and senseless deaths (such as one of the main characters' [[Love Interest]] being suddenly shot [[Eye Scream|through the eye]] by a sniper).
* Similarly and even more the case for being unfortunately [[Truth In Television]], ''[[The Winds of War and War and Remembrance]]'' does indeed regard war as horrific, but not without [[Screw the War, We're Partying|some]] [[Band of Brothers|compensations.]] By contrast the totally non-military behavior of Nazis who wear [[Bling of War]] but [[Miles Gloriosus|do nothing more belligerent]] than bully slaves around is far worse. Danger and hardship are shown from war. Concentration camps emphasize humiliation and helplessness as well. There is no question that the author thinks tyranny pushed to an extreme degree is even worse than war.
== Live
* ''[[Band of Brothers (TV series)|Band of Brothers]]'': you will cry the day you lose your friends. This one is contrasted with its main theme of [[True Companions|a circle of unbreakable friendships]].
* ''[[The Pacific]]'',<ref>[[Spiritual Successor]] to ''[[Band of Brothers (TV series)|Band of Brothers]]''</ref> is [[It Got Worse|worse]]. Made brutally clear by Eugune Sledge's father, who tries one last attempt to persuade his son from enlisting:
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{{quote|"War is hell, Wally Gator, isn't it? We know about hell and we know about war, right?"}}
** It should be noted, he was talking to ''a baby crocodile.'' And he ''still'' managed to make it sound deep. [[Dwight Schultz]] is just ''that'' awesome!
* ''[[M*A*S*H (television)|
* ''[[Blackadder|Blackadder Goes Forth]]'', otherwise a tongue-in-cheek comedy set in the trenches of WWI, dives into pointedly chilling satire at the end, and {{spoiler|ends with [[Bolivian Army Ending|the implied death of the entire main cast.]] Worse, before that, [[Tear Jerker|the characters express their extreme fear to each other in the face of inevitable death.]]}}
* ''The Last Great Time War'' is said to be this in ''[[Doctor Who]]''. In keeping with the show's stance on all violence being bad, it turned the Time Lords into bad guys, forcing the Doctor to kill them all.
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** "A Good Day" - the horror of being stuck in the middle of two warring armies.
** "To Helicon and back" - gunpowder is used for the first time in battle and the result is horrifying.
== Music ==
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** Also his song, ''No Man's Land''.
{{quote|''But here in this graveyard that's still No Man's Land
''The countless white crosses in mute witness stand
''To man's blind indifference to his fellow man
''And a whole generation who were butchered and damned'' }}
* "Mama", from [[My Chemical Romance]]'s ''[[The Black Parade]]''.
{{quote|''"But the shit that I've done with this fuck of a gun
''You would cry out your eyes all night long...'' }}
* "Godspeed" by The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
* "Hero of War" by [[Rise Against]]
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* "Eve of Destruction" written by P. F. Sloan and most famously performed by Barry McGuire.
{{quote|''"If the button is pushed, there's no runnin' away.
''There'll be no one to save, with the world in a grave."'' }}
* "The Patriot Game",
{{quote|''"And now as I lie here, my body all holes,
''I think of those traitors who bargained in souls
''And I wish that my rifle had given the same
''To those quislings who sold out the patriot game"'' }}
* "One" by [[Metallica]]. ([[Filk Song|based on]] ''[[Johnny Got His Gun]]'', covered above) Also "Disposable Heroes", "For Whom The Bell Tolls", and arguably "Hero of the Day". They're pretty big on this theme.
* [[Iron Maiden]]'s "2 Minutes to Midnight"
{{quote|''"The body bags and little rags of children torn in two. And the jellied brains of those who remain who point the finger right at you. As the madmen play on words and make us all dance to their song. To the tune of starving millions to make a better kind of gun."''}}
** Given their
* [[Black Sabbath]]'s ''War Pigs'' and especially ''Electric Funeral''.
* [[Sonata Arctica]]'s "Replica", especially the older version
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* L'Arc-en-Ciel's "Hoshizora" is about both the aftermath of either the Tokyo firebombings or Hiroshima and dedicated to the children of Iraq.
{{quote|''Flickering hot air is the remains of a dream,
''a town that fears the darkness goes to sleep
''A small happiness above the rubble, I was born here,
''I who watches the stars. nobody knows. nobody cares.
''I have lost everything to bombs.'' }}
* ''Some Mother's Son'' by [[The Kinks]]
* ''Hell is a War'', by [[Annihilator]]:
{{quote|See the people suffering, watch the children die
''Doesn't it make you wonder why?
''Money and power, the television's red
''One by one, they collect the dead
''Hell is a war - hell, what is it for? }}
* [[Muse (band)|Muse]]'s ''A Soldier's Poem''.
* The discography of [[Galneryus]] up until 2009 is pretty equally split between this trope and [[War Is Glorious]]. Some of the best for this trope would be "Blame Yourself" and "Stardust."
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** "Cliffs of Gallipoli"
{{quote|''"How many wasted lives
''how many dreams did fade away
''broken promises they won't be coming home
''Oh mothers wipe your tears
''your sons will rest a million years
''found their peace at last as foe turned to friend
''and forgive"'' }}
** "Angels Calling":
{{quote|''"Hell on earth, the trenches mean death, better keep your head down low
''Charge their lines, the ultimate test it's a synchronized sacrifice
''Get the wounded after dark
''Left alone in no man's land
''Maddening chaos at the front
''Dream of heaven. Angels are calling your name"'' }}
** "A Light In The Black":
{{quote|''"Leaving home, set to sea
''Was this really meant to be?
''See the shore of our home fade away
''Facing blood, facing pain
''Have our brothers died in vain?
''Many lives has been lost on the way"'' }}
** ''The Price of a Mile'' (over on the [[War Is Hell/Quotes|quotes page]]), about the bitter stupid bloody battles of [[WW 1]].
* Benjamin Britten's ''War Requiem'' sets nine poems by Wilfred Owen to music and surrounds them with [[Ominous Latin Chanting]]. The standard text of "Agnus Dei" in the Requiem mass replaces the line "Dona nobis pacem" (Grant us peace) with "Dona eis requiem sempiternam" (Grant them everlasting rest); the "Agnus Dei" in the ''War Requiem'' uses both.
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* "This Is Why We Fight" by [[The Decemberists]]:
{{quote|''"Come the war, come the avarice
''Come the war, come hell
''Come attrition, come the reek of bones
''Come attrition, come hell"'' }}
* "Masters of War," made famous by Resistance 3.
* [[Billy Joel]]'s "Goodbye Saigon", about the Vietnam war, is well known for its realism and the many [[Tear Jerker|hearts it broke.]] To give an example, ''these'' are the opening lines.
{{quote|''"We met as soul mates on Parris Island
''We left as inmates from an asylum
''And we were sharp, as sharp as knives
''And we were so gung-
* This is a common theme used in the [[Gorillaz]] anti-violence ballads, but "Dirty Harry" (namely the rap solo) is an especially good sample:
{{quote|''"I got a ninety-days digit and I'm filled with guilt
''From the things that I've seen
''Your water's from a bottle / Mine's from a canteen
''At night I hear the shots ring, so I'm a light sleeper
''The cost of life, it seems to get cheaper..."''
* [[Smile Empty Soul]] has a few of these such as "This Is War" and "God's Army" where they make their opinion on the subject extremely clear. }}
* Toxic Holocaust use the exact phrase in
* "Still Spinning Shrapnel" by [[Skyclad]].
* God Dethroned released a concept album based on the battle of Paschendale. They did not skimp on the details.
* Thrash Metal band Warbringer seems to invoke this trope more often than not, especially the song 'Forgotten Dead', below. YMMV, as they tend to toe the line between condemning and glorifying war with their explicit, visceral lyrics.
{{quote|''"The whistle blows, you are forced to advance into oncoming machine gun fire
''Caught in the blast as the mines detonate lifeless bodies hang from barbed wire
''Stabbed through the gut by a bayonet, blood chokes your scream
''Another dying sould is laid upon the altar ofmankind's greed"'' }}
* [[Avenged Sevenfold]] has the song "M.I.A."
* "Born in the U.S.A." by [[Bruce Springsteen]] is a lament about the Vietnam War's devastating effects on American troops and the treatment of Vietnam veterans upon their return home:
{{quote|''"I got in a little hometown jam
''And so they put a rifle in my hands
''To go and kill the yellow man...
''I had a buddy at Khe Sahn
''Fighting off the Viet Cong
''They’re still there, he’s all gone
''He had a little girl in Saigon"''}}
== Tabletop Games ==
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{{quote|{{spoiler|Leggett}}: Well, this looks familiar.}}
* ''[[Halo]]'' - While they were serious from the start, it wasn't until the third game it became clear that this is the main [[Aesop]]. Yes lovable main characters were killed in the first game, and the second game became more uglier about the situation, but that was out-shadowed by [[Do Not Do This Cool Thing|awesome playstyle, story, weapons and a badass player character]]. But by the time of third game, all of that were thrown right out of the window. ''Halo3'' was not afraid to show how shitty a [[Melee a Trois|three-sided war between Humanity, a galactic empire made of genocidal, fanatical aliens and a parasitic species of undead monsters]] [[Deconstruction|would be]]; [[Anyone Can Die|Anyone can (and will) die]], even main characters as {{spoiler|Sgt. Johnson, Miranda Keyes, 343 Guilty Spark, Prophet of Truth, etc}}, cities are burned to the ground, billions are killed, even the most [[Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain|Ineffectual Sympathetic]] [[Mooks]] become [[Took a Level in Badass|ferocious]], [[Taking You with Me|bloodthirsty]] [[Not-So-Harmless Villain|warriors]] after they had been through wars long enough, people suffers from psychological damages of the whole thing, and not just biological creatures but also supposedly unliving machines such as Cortana ({{spoiler|whose torture at the hands of Gravemind almost breaks her into a depressive [[Empty Shell]]}}), 343 Guilty Spark ({{spoiler|whose isolation for the last 100,000 years and status as the canon [[Scrappy]] becomes to much for him to handle and snaps into a dangerous, literally, killing machine}}), and Mendicant Bias ({{spoiler|whose 100,000 years of overwhelming guilt because of his treason against the Forerunners cause him to sacrifice himself to help Master Chief}}), and Master Chief, [[The Hero]] of the story, {{spoiler|ends up in no-ending space without any way to get back to Earth}}. Not to mention about that great civilization that was destroyed due to the 300 years war against the said undead monsters, which forced them to kill themselves in a massive sacrifice in a attempt [[Taking You with Me|to take their enemies with them]]—only it was [[All for Nothing]].
** And that goes without mentioning Halo Reach, all the other main games had the knowledge of the Halo rings as hope, or at the very least a game changer, not the same old stalling against an unstoppable more technologically advanced horde of intergalactic aliens who deem your entire people heretical. Halo Reach is that, each subsequent mission just makes it more and more clear that despite Reach being the most advanced colony and the one with the greatest military presence it will still repeat the same fate of its bretheren, and all you are doing is trying to save the most people you can/and or kill the most Covenant. The last two missions you do in a way find out about the rings, and you give it your all and sacrifice almost of Noble Team (meaningful name) to take it on the last transport leaving Reach. Yay you did it, all those missions, all those kills, all the obstacles passed by a hairline, now you get your long deserved reward right? Except somebody needs to fire the gun. You are left on Reach, with scattered unorganized resistance as its being glassed. And no matter how hard you fight, you will die. Halo Reach is game that shows that even if you give your all and be a good soldier hope is not guarranteed... Well for you :)
* While it never outright says it, [[Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45]] never flinches from the fact that combat was often short, terrifying and brutal.
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* In ''[[Knights of the Old Republic|Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II]], it is shown that the war in the previous game has had absolutely devastating consequences for the Republic. Most of the playable characters, including the protagonist, are [[Shell-Shocked Veteran|Shell Shocked Veterans]] who have lost family, friends, limbs, and sense of self. Throughout the game you meet refugees, embittered ex-soldiers, and traverse planets that are still physically and culturally ravaged five years after the war's end while the galactic government collapses slowly.
* ''[[Eternal Darkness]]'' features a chapter set in a [[Creepy Cathedral]] used as a field hospital in Amiens, France, during the Battle of the Somme, with all the gruesome sights and sombre atmosphere that one might expect of such a setting. It is even implied that Pius and his acolytes manipulated events towards the war just so that there would be more death to harvest. Mind, given that this is a [[Cosmic Horror Story|Lovecraftian horror story]], there are far more horrific things than war in the cathedral...
== Web Comics ==
*
* ''[[Angels 2200]]'' has its entire plot built around this, with [[Face Heel Turn|very]] [[Break the Cutie|dire]] [[Anyone Can Die|consequences]].
* ''[[The Order of the Stick]]'' has a speech [http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0417.html here] about this given to Haley regarding Xykon's imminent attack on Azure City.
* ''[[Subnormality]]'' has a few, but this one is [http://www.viruscomix.com/page541.html particularly poignant.]
== Web Original ==
* Works by Stuart Slade, such as ''[[The Big One]]'' and ''[[The Salvation War]]'', make a point of portraying exactly how horrible modern military weapons technology can be, mostly as a reaction to how underestimated or cavalierly such weapons often get treated in much fiction. It helps that the author is a professional military analyst, and he [[Shown Their Work|shows his work]] by refusing to shy away from excruciatingly detailing exactly what modern weapons—from the "lowly" assault rifle to weapons of mass destruction—can do to people. In [[The Salvation War]]: [http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?t=118769&highlight= Armageddon], for example, the forces of Hell learn first hand the horror of modern, mechanized total war. One of them even remarks that the battlefield they were fighting on was a human-made hell. Quite a rude awakening for the army in question, {{spoiler|especially as they were at bronze age levels of technology.}}
* In the sequel to ''The Salvation War'', ''Pantheocide'', we get "treated" to {{spoiler|the angelic army being hit with a nuclear initiation. The description of the results is chilling.}}
== Western Animation ==
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** ''[[Exo Squad]]'' also wasn't shy at all, depicting people dying on all sides, civilians being starved, [[Offstage Villainy|indications of genocide]], [[Body Horror]], and many examples of [[Nightmare Fuel]], particularly later in the show.
* ''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]]'' explores the prolonged effects of Imperialism, foreign occupation, and even genocide as much as it can while still being viewable for children. One episode has the commander of an Earth Kingdom fortress show our heroes an infirmary, and then mentions that those soldiers are the lucky ones, because they came ''back''. Everybody has their lives affected by the war: the main character is the last of his kind because every single one of his people were massacred a hundred years earlier, and two of his companions lost their mother to a raid. They also meet many people whose villages were burned to the ground, with most of them losing their families in the process. One even blows up a dam to try and clear out Fire Nation soldiers, knowing that the flood will kill innocent civilians as well. They even meet a woman who was taken from her village simply because she was a waterbender, who then spent years learning how to manipulate the blood in people's bodies and now [[He Who Fights Monsters|blindly seeks revenge]].
** And this is before we get to ''The Tale of Iroh'' in the "Tales of Ba Singh Se" episode, which shows the quiet but powerful sadness of a father losing his son to the war. [[Anvils That Needed to Be Dropped|It hammers home the message of the inevitable personal consequences of war, and why it should not be entered into lightly.]] If there's a way to show this trope responsibly in a kid's show, ''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]]'' is probably the best example that you could possibly find.▼
▲And this is before we get to ''The Tale of Iroh'' in the "Tales of Ba Singh Se" episode, which shows the quiet but powerful sadness of a father losing his son to the war. [[Anvils That Needed to Be Dropped|It hammers home the message of the inevitable personal consequences of war, and why it should not be entered into lightly.]] If there's a way to show this trope responsibly in a kid's show, ''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]]'' is probably the best example that you could possibly find.
* ''[[Peace on Earth]]'', a very [[Anvilicious]] anti-war cartoon made just as World War II was beginning in Europe, is about a post-apocalyptic world where humans have killed themselves off through war and the world is populated by [[Ridiculously Cute Critter]]s. Features some [[Nightmare Fuel]]-inducing rotoscoped animation.
* ''[[Star Wars: The Clone Wars]]'' does this a lot to contrast itself to the first, Tartakosky series which was "[[War Is Glorious]]". {{spoiler|First shown in ''Rookies'' where a group of clones tries to retake an outpost...only two survive besides [[Mauve Shirt|Rex and Cody]]. Its really hammered in hard during the Kaminoian Invasion where 99, a defective Clone is killed. And finally in the latest Umbara Arc? Its so hellish (and the Jedi General is a [[Complete Monster]] since he was defecting), the Clones are ''tricked to killing each other''.}}
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]▼
[[Category:Military and Warfare Tropes]]
[[Category:World War I]]
[[Category:Stock Aesops]]
[[Category:No Real Life Examples, Please]]
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