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Case ([personal profile] case) wrote in [community profile] fandomsecrets2025-05-11 02:38 pm
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[ SECRET POST #6701 ]


⌈ Secret Post #6701 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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[Our Flag Means Death]



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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 30 secrets from Secret Submission Post #958..
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
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(Anonymous) 2025-05-11 06:53 pm (UTC)(link)
It's also because it's a lot harder to know what is either a huge number, but also what could be realistic.

On the other side of the spectrum, I've read canons where the death toll from a galactic war is cataclysmic: Ten out of Thirteen worlds consumed by the bioplague and burnt! All Outer Colonies glassed and the Capital left in ruins! Only a few millions left! Population was left near extinction!

... Come the sequel, civilization magically rebuilds back to its former status, and even better. Nevermind the fact to replenish those numbers you'd need either stupidly excessive automation, or stupidly excessive breeding in a stupidly short amount of time.

(Anonymous) 2025-05-11 07:39 pm (UTC)(link)
People in general aren't very good at scale, and I count myself in this too. It's hard to know what sounds legit as a casualty number that also doesn't come off as ridiculous, plus figuring out if a population can recover from whatever war or calamity hit it can be tricky as well. It's not easy to do so a lot of creators opt for big sounding but safe numbers.
flibbertygigget: (Default)

[personal profile] flibbertygigget 2025-05-11 07:56 pm (UTC)(link)
Not me writing a fanfic where I wanted a character to accidentally adopt literally every kid on the planet through a combo of plot convenience and alien culture stuff and having to balance "what would be a realistic population for an isolated but fairly established colony planet" vs "how many kids can I have this guy accidentally adopt before the numbers get comical" 😆😆😆

I wound up going with a population of around 110k on the planet (it's INCREDIBLY isolated, so that felt like a,,, half-decent number) with around 20k adopted kids (this was me looking up stats for usual kid percentages of populations and rounding down because I was specifically going for kids kids and not just under-18).

(Anonymous) 2025-05-11 08:05 pm (UTC)(link)
600 million from a population of 9 billion is absolutely not peanuts. The estimated number of deaths directly or indirectly resulting from World War II was 70-85 million from an estimated 2.3 billion world population, over 3% (direct is estimated at 50-56 million, over 2%). That was the deadliest military conflict in history, and it was devastating. 600 million from 9 billion is over twice that at almost 6.7%. If three-quarters of the people who contracted Covid (775 million confirmed cases) died instead of the 7 million reported deaths (or even the 18-33 million estimated), many people here on Earth would not consider that a small number. I know I don't.

(Anonymous) 2025-05-11 09:09 pm (UTC)(link)
I was going to SAY! That sounds like a reasonable scale.

Many of the dead in even a world war would be a.) soldiers and b.) some targeted cities. It makes no sense to kill off half of the planet, because most wars involve land AND population conquest and having subjects under your control if you win is part of the point, too. Piles of ash don't pay taxes/tribute or produce anything.




(Anonymous) 2025-05-12 01:01 am (UTC)(link)
Yes! And for every one of those deaths, you have hundreds more injured/displaced/orphaned and many more at risk of starvation and disease in the following years. That's a huge number!

(Anonymous) 2025-05-12 05:12 am (UTC)(link)
A number being a large amount is not enough. You need to put it in the proper context. Six hundred million is a large number, every death a tragedy etc, but in the context of destroying the whole pre-war paradigm, rendering the concept of the nationstate useless, requiring the literal intervention of aliens to fix, etc, it is not large enough. It is a recoverable number, especially as it is canonically said, by a main character no-less, to be the total Global death toll. That is a recoverable number, even today. That would not destroy the whole pre war order.

A more reasonable figure, every death a tragedy etc, would be two-three billion. A third of the the world. Even then, that is not a complete game changer depending on how evenly spread the destruction was.

Ironically, the franchise that gets this right is Neon Genesis Evangelion. They killed Three Billion in the backstory, and made a massive chunk of the world uninhabitable. Yet the world continued, a bit crappier, and with harder work to eke out a first world living in, but it was doable. And that was when we only had six billion on the planet. They killed half the world, including a lot of first world nations, and civilisation went on nonetheless.

A large number is not enough. It has to be large enough in context. Six hundred million in context of the changes it wrought and the population it started with, is just not large enough. YOU have no sense of scale.

(Anonymous) 2025-05-12 08:10 am (UTC)(link)
ayrt

If you say so. The secret said the number is peanuts, I say it is not peanuts, but a significant amount. Is it enough, along with what the hell else might have happened during a third World War, to cause the necessary changes? I couldn't say with any sort of certainty, but I wouldn't have said it was outside the realm of possibility, even with today's numbers.

But because I got annoyed, I went and looked up shit on the Memory Alpha wiki, and actually they say that war lasted 27 years (2026-2053), that 600 million people was 30% of the population (I'm not sure where they arrived at this percentage - in 1966, when Star Trek first aired, the population was 3.4 billion, so that wouldn't have worked, maybe The Second Civil War and The Eugenics War were been factored in somehow), that there was the extinction of six hundred thousand species of animals and plants, most of the major cities had been destroyed and there were few governments left, and the post-atomic horror lasted until 2079.

(Anonymous) 2025-05-12 12:40 pm (UTC)(link)
The two real-life World Wars destroyed the pre-war order, despite involving a fraction of the death toll you believe is necessary to do such a thing. Several empires fell; the nation-state gained full supremacy; new countries formed, and others ceased to be; the balance of power shifted strongly in favor of the US; a global order focused on cooperation and economic integration developed; etc. The world as we currently know and understand it is a direct outgrowth of those wars, and would look very different had they not happened.

Yes, proper context is important, but I think you're overestimating the size and nature of a world-changing conflict.
feotakahari: (Default)

[personal profile] feotakahari 2025-05-11 09:22 pm (UTC)(link)
I think the series for you is Warhammer 40K.

(Anonymous) 2025-05-12 12:09 am (UTC)(link)
The death toll of Starkiller Base destroying the Hosnian System in The Force Awakens ran into the billions so they got their numbers right later on.

(Anonymous) 2025-05-12 12:14 am (UTC)(link)
Six hundred million is a catastrophic number. It's almost unimaginable. And I doubt the deaths stopped after the nuclear strikes. Hundreds of millions, if not billions, more died during the aftermath, which likely lasted for decades.

(Anonymous) 2025-05-12 01:05 am (UTC)(link)
A lot of the comments on this secret are protesting that 600 million is absolutely a catastrophic number, and it is. But I think your point is that it isn’t catastrophic enough in the context of, say, planetary annihilation, and I agree. If the Empire vaporizes a major industrialized planet, the casualties should be well into the millions or billions. Even a planetary collapse less dramatic than outright destruction should have a tally in the millions if it takes place on one of the highly populated hub worlds. As awful as the examples in our own history have been, they don’t hold a candle to the sorts of events seen or described in Star Wars. Or Trek, to a lesser extent, though I agree that the counts seem understated there as well.

(Anonymous) 2025-05-12 01:20 am (UTC)(link)
Okay I agree that the scale in Star Wars can feel like it wasn't given much thought, but how exactly is 7% of the world population dying implausibly LOW??
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