Overly Sarcastic Productions

x2. The timeskip in Fairy Tail is weird. Like the main group got frozen in time for years, the world around them changed (some Guildmates got married and their kids already grow up, some got older, new guild take over,....) while the main cast still remain the same.

Looking it up under the assumtion you were begin literal. It feels more like a Year Inside, Hour Outside scenario. In 2 out of three cases.

In today's Classics Summarized, Red and Blue summarise the Silmarillion.

april fools!

Forgot what day it was for a moment there. They got me good.

Curse you OSP![[/spoiler

In today's slightly early OSP AFTER DARK!, Red, Blue and Indigo are discussing about mentors and putting them on different tiers:

Love how Kratos is below the tier list on Cleo's pillow.

You know, them rating Anakin slightly higher than Obi-Wan does make a lot of sense.

The big reason Qui-Gon's death is such a tragedy is because he was the kind of mentor Anakin needed - Obi-Wan's Anakin's friend and like a brother, but he's not the right kind of mentor for him.

Meanwhile, Anakin is pretty much exactly what Ahsoka needed - they're very similar in temperament and there's also some level of "teacher learning by teaching" going on. Anakin becomes a better mentor by learning some level of self-restraint that he then imparts onto Ahsoka.

And as they point out on the stream, it makes what follows all the more tragic.

I'm sure they mention this in the stream (haven't watched it yet.. 4 hours, damn), but Star Wars: The Clone Wars really did do a lot to build Anakin back up after the prequels... had issues, let's say.

Pretty much one of the main reasons for Clone Wars' very existence is George Lucas' realisation that the prequels didn't tell the story as well as he would have liked.

Once I have access to a laptop, I'm definitely doing a TL;DW for this, and probably the other After Dark streams too.

Regarding Star Wars mentors, I do wish Kanan Jarrus had been mentioned, though.

Screenshot of the whole list◊

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Apr 6th 2022 at 4:56:17 PM

How did they fill four hours talking about mentors? I mean, I'm sure they had plenty of digressions, but that's still a lot of time trying to be on one topic. It makes sense when they have a livestream that runs for hours when it's just hanging out playing video games, but I can't see talking for more than 90 minutes about the same topic.

Okay, that's a lot of mentors to rank.

Edited by TParadox on Apr 6th 2022 at 11:18:42 AM

Is Mia Fey on there?

Based on the screenshot, yes.

In today's Miscellaneous Myths, Red talks about the myth of Actaeon.

In today's History Summarized, Blue talks about the history of Ukraine, something that he's planned for long time and initially was slated to summer, but due to current events, he decided to release it now.

Edited by jouXIII on Apr 15th 2022 at 6:12:01 PM

Okay so the whole section of this video on Ukraine under the USSR is...simplified and rooted in some outdated research, to put it lightly.

This is a very controversial topic but there is actually *not* a historical consensus over whether or not the Soviet collectivization and famine was a genocidal act against the Ukrainian people.

The genocide argument became part of mainstream historical discussion in the 1980's with Robert Conquest's book "The Harvest of Sorrow" (claims of genocide had been going around for decades, but they didn't become *mainstream* in academia until the 1980's). Conquest was considered (and to an extent still is considered) a major figure in writing on Soviet history, and his works were very influential at that time. But the 1980's was when the "revisionist" school of Soviet historiography began to grow thanks to the opening of the Soviet archives during Glasnost. J. Arch Getty, Terry Martin, Ronald Grigor Suny, and others began to analyze the archives and published their own works that strayed heavily from Conquest's research.

Conquest viewed the Soviet Union as a pure totalitarian terror with no mass participation and placed Stalin's alleged death toll much higher than the "revisionist" school did, whereas the "revisionist" school emphasized mass participation in events such as the purges (Getty viewed them as less "Stalin went psycho and killed his enemies" and more a mass campaign against bureaucrats and party corruption, though still with lots of death) and emphasized primary sources from the archives over Conquest's focus on anecdotes from emigres.

This brings us to the famine. When Conquest published "The Harvest of Sorrow", the "revisionist" school criticized him for relying heavily on emigre stories, and for supposedly "adding" to the crimes attributed to the Soviet government. The "revisionist" school believed the famine's deaths were due to bungling at the hands of the government accompanied by the massive economic changes brought about by mass industrialization and the First Five-Year Plan, that the deaths were many and the famine was horrible, but that it wasn't a special targeting of the Ukrainian people with genocidal intent, nor was it even limited to Ukraine (Kazakhstan was the worst-hit region and even Stalin criticized how collectivization was carried out there). There is no denial of deaths in the millions, but there isn't much to prove that Stalin or the Central Committee of the CPSU went out of their way to specially target the Ukrainian nation for collective punishment.

The "revisionist" school of Soviet historiography is very influential in academia and has debunked a lot of popular myths about the USSR under Stalin, but its research has yet to be brought into the mainstream, which is, frankly, annoying. But the topic of the 1930's famine as a genocide is not actually a settled question in academia, compared to many other historical genocides.

> but there isn't much to prove that Stalin or the Central Committee of the CPSU went out of their way to specially target the Ukrainian nation for collective punishment.

It just so happened to massively effect the Ukrainian population more then anyone else ,so when you have millions of people dying in a man made famine I don't really blame people for calling the Holodomor a genocide,it's not an unreasonable conclusion to reach.

Edited by Ultimatum on Apr 15th 2022 at 5:04:46 PM

Ukraine wasn't even the region most affected by famine, Kazakhstan was.

The question of genocide is whether or not there was active intent to wipe out the Ukrainian people. Genocide requires open intent to exterminate an ethnic or religious population, in whole or in part. The revisionist school of Getty et. al. do not believe it was genocide but rather several factors merging together during the "revolution from above" of this time. Ukraine, as a heavily agricultural and feudal region at the time, experienced massive socioeconomic upheaval due to the First Five Year Plan (plus falsification of data by local party cadres), and it had an adverse affect on the population that left millions dead.

Edited by Diana1969 on Apr 16th 2022 at 3:29:08 AM

Its like not Stalin was above murdering people in his country,remember how he had purges in his own party?Remember how he had gulags? As far as I am concerned it was a clear cut case of a genocide,you said you needed to show that they were intentionally trying to wipe out the Ukrainians,Stalin was ruthless as well as wreckless enough to purge people on mass,he created a famine through his collectist policies that would kill millions,and he likely did not care if his 'a million is a statistic' quote is anything to go'

He never said that, actually. That's one of a great number of quotes falsely attributed to Stalin.

I never disputed that there were mass deaths in the Soviet Union. I can point to the deportations of ethnic minorities during WWII as a horrible crime on par with (and perhaps even worse than) the internment of Japanese citizens in the United States during that same time. I literally said millions of people died during the famines, that is not under dispute.

What is under dispute (and I must emphasize this is an *academic dispute* that has been hashed out by people who are far more well-read than I am, who have written on this, been to the archives in Russia, have published this in accredited historical journals and the like) is whether the famine itself was a genocide specifically targeting the Ukrainian nation.

There is a difference between the claim that the famine was the result of severe socioeconomic and political upheavals borne out of the Five-Year Plan and the transition from the state capitalist economy of the NEP to a planned socialist economy, and the claim that the CPSU was deliberately targeting and starving Ukrainians with the purpose of wiping them out, in whole or in part. The school of scholars such as Conquest and Medvedev (the "totalitarian" school) would answer in the affirmative, that it was genocide. The school of scholars such as Getty, Wheatcroft, Kotkin, and Suny (the "revisionist" school) would answer in the negative, that it was not genocide but it still constitutes a crime against humanity.

I would recommend reading "The Years of Hunger" by Wheatcroft and Davies for further analysis of the famine. It's the fourth of a seven-volume work on the economic development of the Soviet Union from the end of the NEP to the onset of World War II. As a matter of fact, despite it being from the "revisionist" school, Robert Conquest gave it high praise.

Edited by Diana1969 on Apr 15th 2022 at 11:35:27 PM

New Trope Talk with Red discussing Magical Otherworlds.

Thanks to Silent Hill any time I see the word 'Other World'I associate said world with horror

And I associate it with Dragon Ball Z's version of Heaven.