War Is Hell: Difference between revisions

* ''[[Amazons Attack]]'' tries this. Ends up being one huge [[Face Palm]].

* ''[[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.''

* ''[[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. }}

* ''[[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.

 

== Films ==

* ''[[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 ==

* ''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.

* ''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.

* 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...

* 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).

 

== Live Action TV ==

{{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!

* ''[[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.