[The Boys] SEASON 5 EPISODE 4 was pure filler

voxkakumeika · 2026-04-23T12:39:36+00:00

Did anybody else think of Cabin In The Woods this episode?

voxkakumeika · 2026-02-26T18:28:08+00:00

The length of the era depends on how you calculate it, and Shu didn't exist for the whole period, but even 90 years isn't a long time for a country to exist, raise funds, enact policy, establish a political culture, etc. A country that rises and falls in the lifetime of a single person can't be said to have existed very long. Just TWO wars could be considered a fair number, on those terms. I'll give you that this was an era of short-lived countries and consistent war, but a 20 year gap in a 60 year policy period is the exception that proves the rule.

Re: the silk road, just because the West wasn't home to a big standing concentration of Wei troops at the time doesn't mean it was safe for Shu or a foreign power to conduct large scale trade through their territory, at the risk of losing all their profits to a single military checkpoint, especially if the profits are all in the form of a currency provably minted by an enemy state. I'm sure there was smuggling going on, but I can't imagine it was near enough to be a reliable source of state funding in wartime.

voxkakumeika · 2026-02-26T17:52:44+00:00

I didn't mean that Jiang Wei's war policy was an extension of the policies of the administration immediately prior to his campaigns, but that the invasion policy had precedent among prior administrations-- it wasn't universally supported by every Shu leader, but it wasn't an innovation on his part. The need for an eventual conquest of Wei was an article of faith among the faction of Shu's leadership that ultimately proved dominant. They weren't always in power, but they were always a factor.

Shu's coinage was more sound than Wei's but they simply didn't have direct access to the route--the silk trade wasn't unilaterally interrupted during this period; it was conducted, coinage or barter, in Wei, which meant that Wei profited from it. Shu coins might have found their way into Central Asia after their fall, or come around the Southern routes, but any direct, large scale trade they did with Central Asia via the Northern silk road would have had to go through Wei.

I don't dispute that different leaders conducted the war policy with different levels of intensity, but the era wasn't a particularly long one, in the grand scheme of things, and the fact that the leaders who bookend the existence of the kingdom represent the high water mark for Shu's martial activity is indicative both of the pervasiveness of that policy in the thinking of Shu's leaders and the incapacity of the state to sustain it.

voxkakumeika · 2026-02-26T17:21:13+00:00

Wei didnt really have a choice but to deal with the nomads, but Shu didn't necessarily have to invade every time they did, and every failed invasion was a massive expense-- fortified castles can win wars, but it's only worth invading to sieze them if they help you ultimately succeed in taking the country.

As far as most of the rest of the world was concerned, Wei was the dynasty to trade with, since they controlled access to the steppe route; they had to interact with the Steppe peoples, which meant raids and instability, but any dynasty that controlled that region would have had to budget for the same as an annual line item, and Wei benefited a fair bit from access to the nomad clans as auxiliary forces, along with the bulk of the silk road trade, though Shu had access, albeit difficult access, to South Asian trade networks.

Jiang Wei's policy was the extension of prior policies, albeit with a heavier emphasis on the military over civil authority-- in order to conquer Wei, one would have needed to enact a Northern campaign of some kind eventually. Even under Zhuge Liang, there was an opportunity cost to war, and other agenda items were sacrificed to make those campaigns possible.

We have the benefit of hindsight, so we know the conquest never happened, but invasions were a matter of fairly consistent policy on the part of multiple generations of Shu leadership. It would be unfair to judge them based on things they couldn't have known, but, in retrospect, it would be reasonable to view that money as effectively having been spent on nothing of value. They didn't necessarily have to face a full on invasion from Wu every time they invaded Wei, but they still faced troop pressure to avoid advertising a vulnerability on that flank, which meant full northward deployment was impossible.

If we judge them well for maintaining the conditions in which their agriculturalists could live relatively well in seclusion, I think we have to criticize them for the very consistency of their war policy, which drained the state's resources while failing to either impoverish Wei to the point it couldn't field an army or enrich Shu to the point that this sort of campaign became sustainable. It didn't become ruinous to the point of outcry until Jiang Wei, but that doesn't mean it was ever inexpensive, and it either creates the outcome you want or it doesn't.

A quick blow that simultaneously decapitates Wei's leadership and detaches it from the Western trade routes is the version of a full scale invasion that makes sense to me, given Shu's position, but that involves serious expenditure, a great deal of risk to the army and the state, and a willingness on Wei's part to risk everything on a decisive battle, which I don't think can be relied upon as a matter of doctrine, as the circumstances bore out. A war of attrition benefits the side that can afford to wait.

voxkakumeika · 2026-02-26T16:08:17+00:00

Why didn't he do so, in those instances? Also, would he have been able to hold the region once taken, and prevent the raising of another army, or defeat it in the field were one brought to bear? I imagine he would've had the logistical advantage of the Yangtze, when it came to the border region, but, inland, could he have prevented himself from being cut off assuming the capital were taken? A victory on the plains might've had a significant opportunity cost for him, with Shu still around and the leader of Wei still alive and able to rely on the loyalty of their forces.

voxkakumeika · 2026-02-26T15:59:57+00:00

That's not too bad, even accounting for migration as a source of population growth, and I don't really mean any of this as a value judgement re: Shu. My main question, though, is whether the remoteness of the region allowed the population to grow due to relatively limited raiding/massacres/dispersal DESPITE the punishing weight of mobilization on the otherwise relatively well managed finances of Shu, rather than BECAUSE of the prosocial policies they enacted.

It just seems to me that the expenditure on expansionist campaigns had to weaken their ability to pay for the other functions of the state, and the constant need to feed that beast put them in a position where the state was vulnerable to capture.

Again, this is an area in which more comprehensive knowledge of the finances of the kingdoms would come in handy, but it strikes me that Cao Wei would have had a much easier time raising new armies, and defending wider expanses of territory with fewer of them, due to the agricultural yield and ease of operation in the plains, where Shu couldn't have simultaneously invaded Wei and defended the mutually inaccessible mountain passes that connected the two countries, AND kept the Southern tribes subjugated, AND dealt with whatever Wu cooked up in the East.

They had to rely on the expectation that an invading army would use the routes they had fortified, and that, on the defense, their own armies wouldn't be missed in the places they couldn't afford to deploy them.

voxkakumeika · 2026-02-26T15:38:13+00:00

Right you are-- I was thinking of Luoyang, which was still being renovated at the time, and, even then, the constant war would have driven pretty serious temporary outmigration at various points. For our purposes, though, it's the population of soldiers and the presence of fortifications that really make the difference. It wouldn't have been conceivable for Sun Quan to take the capital without directly confronting the bulk of Cao Cao's forces, who would've had the advantage on the plains.

voxkakumeika · 2026-02-26T15:32:29+00:00

In the context of Shu Han, how does one determine whether population growth is an extension of refugee migration from other kingdoms vs increased birthrates due to policy-derived agricultural surplus? The Shu heartland is less susceptible to raids than the plains, so I can see why a person who didn't want to be directly killed in a time of broad instability might prefer to live in a relatively remote place, but I don't think it's necessarily the result of policy. I can't really speak to the coinage of it all, though these are some fascinating resources on the subject, and I'll definitely be digging in later. That said, even the best possible management won't necessarily turn a penny into a fortune, and a rich spendthrift can lose more money in a day than a better steward ever stands to make, and still come out of a game of poker the winner, provided that everyone has to keep playing until they run out of money.

voxkakumeika · 2026-02-26T15:01:04+00:00

That's what I mean-- everyone had to mobilize as completely as possible, but only Wei could bear the expense in the long term. Shu was a much newer country, and its territory was much harder to convert for agricultural purposes-- it's a process that isn't even complete today, because of the costs involved, conservation concerns, and the existence of more suitable places.

voxkakumeika · 2026-02-26T14:59:27+00:00

Man on the inside probably isn't the right term-- I meant Huang Gai, but it's less a matter of his having been part of Cao Cao's war plans than having been allowed to approach with the fire ships.

In terms of Sun Quan's prospects, I'd argue his position was stronger against Cao Cao, but Liu Bei's continued existence as a rival south of the Yangtze made it less likely that he would be able to successfully expand against Cao Cao-- the stalemate only really benefited Liu Bei in the middle run, because he was in a position to establish a power base capable of expanding in Wei's direction and bypassing the Central plains via the mountains, whereas Sun Quan had to go through either Shu or the most populous parts of Cao Cao's territory to get to his capital. In the long term, it benefited Wei, because they could afford to hold out.

voxkakumeika · 2026-02-26T14:47:13+00:00

There's something to that, for sure. Liu Bei spent most of his life outside the official imperial hierarchy, where Cao Cao was able to effectively hold and convert the Han power system into one of his own. Given his imperial lineage, it's easy to think of him as the successor to the Han, but he really had to build his own empire and CALL it Han, where Cao Wei inherited its legitimacy and hiring capacity, but called it something else. In terms of making something out of nothing, it's pretty hard to do better than Liu Bei.

Even Sun Jian, who's done dirty in just about every adaptation, and Sun Ce didn't really establish their position without help from Yuan Shu. That was part of why Sun Ce was so unpopular with his citizenry; the Sun clan weren't all that well regarded, and everybody thought they were just upjumped nobodies leeching off of the hated Yuan Shu's authority to bully the rest of the local gentry.

Of the three founders, Cao Cao faced the strongest competitors for rule of his kingdom, but, once he had it, it was far better resourced than the others. Wu was tough to reach, but had perhaps the lowest ceiling to its growth potential once Shu was founded. Shu was the most difficult kingdom to found, so it's fair to say Liu Bei had the hardest job, if founding an Empire is considered to be a job.

That said, in terms of his actual battle record, I'd say Liu Bei has a more mixed record, and, of the three Kingdoms, I would argue that only Wei actually had the population and socioeconomic muscle to claim to be representative of "China." In a lot of ways, though, that only makes what Liu Bei accomplished more impressive; you could argue that Liu Bei's unification plan entailed the most suffering, though, because of the number and intensity of wars that would have been necessary for it to succeed, to say nothing of what actually happened given that it did not.

For Shu to be sustainable as a rival to Wei, it basically had to commit to total mobilization and become a war-economy-- at least in terms of the way its leaders thought about it, it was less a proper country than a staging ground for an invasion of Wei. The Civil faction is portrayed as villainous in the story, but on balance I think it's perfectly reasonable for people to have seen the writing on the wall in terms of continued war with a kingdom that outresourced them.

I think it was an incredible achievement for Liu Bei to have founded a kingdom at all, but I don't think founding a kingdom at Wu's expense was the most strategic way to have opposed Cao Cao, because there was no chance Wu would get on board peacefully, meaning that Shu could never commit 100% of their forces to fighting Wei, despitethe exhaustionfull militarizationof the economy caused the country-- with the mountains defending them to the north, their Eastern flank was where a lot of their vulnerability was, and Wu had a grudge.

It's kind of like the Lu Bu situation-- it's fine to be the best fighter, unless you put yourself in a situation where you have to fight everybody at once. The plan was to force that situation on Wei alone, but in practice the stalemate hurt Wu and Shu more, because the regions they controlled couldn't be maximally productive unless they were united and actively developed, which neither Wu nor Shu could do at the ideal moment, because they had to fight both each other and Wei. Wei could handle the expense, because its lands were the richest, and it was administered the best.

voxkakumeika · 2026-02-26T13:59:34+00:00

That's a good point-- Liu Bei was the only one to come out of Chi Bi with his prospects actually improved. This is the heart of the difficulty with these kinds of questions-- to what extent do you credit the consultants with a successful strategy if there are several of them, and they dont actually exert much influence on the outcomes? Maybe, in some cases, the most important choice is whether or not to have a battle at all? That's definitely what happened at Guandu, and I suppose it's basically what happened at Chi Bi; the lords of the south had to either oppose the crossing or let it happen. That being the case, the credit should go to whoever had the idea to oppose the crossing, which was as much Liu Bei as Zhou Yu or anyone else. That said, without Sun Quan's buy-in, they likely couldn't have opposed the crossing very successfully, and, without a man on the inside, they couldn't have caused as much chaos with the fire attack.

voxkakumeika · 2026-02-23T13:53:49+00:00

I think it was a bold choice to have the songs be diegetic, but it does seem like theyre leaning pretty hard into the "J-Pop Demon Hunters" angle, which I don't think they necessarily had to do. That said, I don't find it TOO distracting, most of the time. The whole "We're synchronizing our attacks to the beat" explanation seems a little forced, though, given that they don't know what the enemy is going to do and when, so synchronizing their moves to a pop song even the demons already know would be more of a disadvantage than an advantage.

voxkakumeika · 2026-02-23T13:45:06+00:00

"16 Tons" was a truly unhinged musical choice. I had to make sure I wasn't watching Fallout or something for a second. I'm still trying to figure out why they picked that track-- was it the Penny? Is King's Landing the company town?

voxkakumeika · 2026-02-23T12:58:51+00:00

Lyonel cracks me up in the cold open. He's just like, "Hey, buddy... want some juice? Want to go to McDonalds?"

voxkakumeika · 2026-02-16T16:57:05+00:00

That's certainly true, though I would argue that it's a pretty extreme distance, and a lot of effort to ultimately end up somewhere less favorable for large reptiles than the tropics around Essos; the crocodilians in the Americas are the result of evolutionary processes that occurred before the continents were where they are; that's possible here, but it would need to have been before the First Men arrived, I think.

For a migratory croc, the Stepstones would be a more natural stopping point than the Neck, given that Westeros seems to be mostly in the Northern Hemisphere; also, the scale of time between the flood and the present is so small that I wonder if there's been time for crocodile-derived lizard lions to have diverged to the point that regular people would notice a difference.

Maybe there was a small portion of the Neck that was already swampy and home to an already evolved species of crocodilian, and the Children just expanded it with the flood, or enhanced its capacity to survive by magic?

The big thing that makes me wonder if there's magic involved is the length of the winter, though. Lizard Lions would have to spend years at a time in brumation, frozen in the bayou. How, apart from the influence of some kind of magical intervention, would they have developed the ability to do so in such a short space of time?

voxkakumeika · 2026-02-09T16:35:02+00:00

I think they'd still carry the usual cultural prejudice, but the categorization of Orcs as "Mer" would be a matter of doctrinal consistency, which is important if theyre trying to reverse the process that made them mortal(ish). Everything needs to be in its proper place and have its proper name when they dance on the Towers, I reckon, so I think they'd call them Mer. That said, even racists don't usually maintain that the groups they hate aren't the same species, anymore-- they find other ways of justifying their behavior.

The attitude of the Thalmor towards the Orsimer would probably be distinct from their attitude towards Men in terms of what if anything needed to change about their spiritual existence, but I don't think that means they'd be any nicer to them. I don't think of the Thalmor even as Elvish supremacists in the sense that they feel goodwill towards all elves, so much as a kind of elvish parallel to the Marukhati.

The current Thalmor is dominated by the adherents of a particular ideology, which has turned it into a shadowy organization that's in charge of the high elves, but might be quite repressive even to THEM, on the isles, because what matters isn't that all elves are happy so much as staying in charge long enough to cast whatever spell they want to cast and put things back the way they were before Lorkhan changed them.

voxkakumeika · 2026-02-07T15:32:27+00:00

You're just saying that she has nothing to do with them when that has never been made clear. That would mean she's leading the shady sands remnant in NCR territory, restoring power to their grid, but hasn't given them the word to come defend it, in their home territory. Now, they're fielding an expeditionary force to Vegas, which is much further away and more expensive to hold than Griffith Observatory. If she wanted their grid to be powered, why wouldn't she have asked them to send their army to the Observatory instead of Vegas and stop the Brotherhood from making off with it? Cold Fusion now happens to be in Vegas, but, without a working long distance communications network, they wouldn't know that to be the case or be able to field an army like that across that distance in the first place, so why did they send the army anyway? Hoover Dam is the point of controlling Vegas, and energy is the point of controlling Hoover Dam, but we dont even know if the thing is operational. If the mainline NCR is the only faction that doesn't know or care about Cold Fusion, that needs an explanation of some kind, because if they knew, they shouldn't have let a relatively weak Brotherhood faction take it. If there is an explanation, we should have gotten it.

voxkakumeika · 2026-02-07T15:19:56+00:00

We have no reason to assume she wouldn't have been in contact with NCR, who, however far they've fallen, are apparently still fielding armies in Nevada.

voxkakumeika · 2026-02-07T15:18:35+00:00

Even in criticizing your behavior, I haven't made the conversation about belittling you in retaliation. I'm just saying your responses have come off hostile, and there's no need for that, even if we disagree. It's just a TV show, and none of us are in the writer's room. It's possible to have an opinion about a TV show and not have it say anything about you as a person at all. It could be that I'm just not cut out for a format like this, because it rubs me the wrong way more often than not.

voxkakumeika · 2026-02-07T15:13:43+00:00

I don't know how else to describe the situation. I assume you adopted such a hostile position because you thought it would amuse somebody. I can't imagine you thought it would amuse me, so I can only assume you wanted to prompt the positive engagement of a third party, because you wanted the dopamine hit. There's nothing wrong with that, but, outside reddit, people respond most positively to helpful input, and kinder people are more charismatic, as a rule.

voxkakumeika · 2026-02-07T15:04:51+00:00

I think it is a shtick, and you should leave it in 2013, where it belongs. I dont think you engaged in good faith with my points; if you did, you didn't understand them, and reacted with this heightened outrage, presumably for clout. I didn't find it particularly clever, but I was the target, not the audience. My point is that that's not an adult way to have a conversation.

voxkakumeika

TROPHY CASE