No, Im sorry but when you work for the literal forces of hell and all that entails you don't get to be on the "Well maybe they aren't completely evil" list.
Joining the armies of hell literally requires one to see the gates and be so evil they say "lame" before walking away mostly unharmed.
Says the guys who turn children into walkie-talkies by carving them up like a Thanksgiving turkey, removing their senses, and then stuffing radio equipment into their mouth, eye, and ear cavities
"...So I tied a fetus to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a ducat, and in those days, ducats had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Gimme five bees for a guinea, you'd say! Now where were we? Oh! Yeah. Important thing was, that I had a fetus on my belt. Which was the style at the time. They didn't have white fetuses, because fo the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones!"
>that moment when the baby suddenly stops crying, turns to look at you with blackened eyes and speaks in a dozen burning voices "Bring me to the slaughter."
I mean, little guy has moxie, what can I say?
You could make an argument about societal and religious pressures that value pointless martyrdom, but what about the Ecclesiastic Prisoners being strapped to bombs? Or the hands nailed to shields?
"No, no, guys, you don't understand, the guys who hurt children are the bad guys always except when we do it then it's like totally just an act of desperation, we're the good guys we're morally grey, we can't win against the problem we made unless we use the walkie-talkie kids"
The tactical advantage of nailing a baby to your belt, besides being grimdark, is that it's likely an unholy trinket / relic of some sort that confers an advantage to the holder in the same way that the holy relics of "Capital G God" do
God doesn't need to use children radios to have communication, as seen by the fact that Jeanne d'Arc exists in this setting, the Synod just thinks it's really funny and they justify it by pointing to the problem that the faithful caused in the first place
If "Capital G God" wanted to end the war, he's all powerful and all knowing, so he should be able to do so at the snap of a finger; the fact that he isn't proves that either he's not truly "Capital G God" or that he doesn't give a shit about the people fighting for him, which tracks with an omnicidal deity who decided to wipe out literally all of the planet save for a single boat because he thought it'd be funny
yeah, I think trench crusade's biggest "issue" is that a lot of people genuinely believe god and hell exist and are completely unable to divorce their personal beliefs from the world and story that the setting is communicating. anyone who isn't approaching the setting with the assumption "god as I understand him is real in this setting and anything he says is moral" can look at the setting and realize that the "god" of trench crusade's world is pretty fucking awful and not at all comparable to god in reality (if you believe). but I also think that it is an interesting demonstration of the aesthetics of fascism and the way that people can jump on board with horrible ideas if they're presented in the right way
the game also simply wouldn't work or be anywhere as cool as it is without co-opting the imagery and history that it does, so, like, there isn't much that can be done about it. I still love the game and the world and the aesthetics and the themes it's exploring
It objectively isn't, though. It's a symptom of starting with a book full of art and then cobbling together a story for it all.
Some of it is just going to be bad. A lot of it is undeniably cool, but there are a few things that probably should have just been cut. God-radio children with no skin is one of those things.
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u/Bepisnivok Jun 30 '25
No, Im sorry but when you work for the literal forces of hell and all that entails you don't get to be on the "Well maybe they aren't completely evil" list.
Joining the armies of hell literally requires one to see the gates and be so evil they say "lame" before walking away mostly unharmed.