hannah

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hannah @a-new-low4/23/2023, 3:53 AM

dante, personally @dante

dante, personally @dante4/23/2023, 3:38 AM

i love learning things about history that explain, for me, a bit more why Things Are Like That. this was my big takeaway from getting incredibly into The History Of Rome podcast, that it really explained why europe was like that.

i mean, that's too neat of an answer, obviously, but realizing that an entire continent basically went through multiple hundreds of years in the literal shadows of the megaconstructions of a dead empire really makes you realize why they became obsessed with recreating that particular type of globe-spanning empire afterward. a bunch of grungy white guys scrabbling in the dirt over petty resources and, idk, clan ties or whatever and looking ten feet to their right and seeing a fucking concrete temple from the fucking roman empire. the amount of shit that does to an entire continent's psyche is honestly mind-boggling. of course napoleon ended up Doing That Shit. of course america is like that.

an entire set of continental cultures with terminal inferiority complex, that happened to be on the resources/power/administrative upswing at the moment that a bunch of other nearby world cultures were not, and boom, the colonial age. fucking ridiculous. anyway i love learning more about history it makes me feel crazy

#history #european history

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in reply to @dante's post:

emma valkyrie @Ultra-Valkyrie4/23/2023, 1:21 PM

oh yeah, absolutely -- the HRE, the architecture of the Capitol buildings in Washington DC, the entirety of the Renaissance, the fact that generations of kings called themselves Caesars/Kaisers/Tsars, a lot of euro fascist rhetoric but Mussolini's in particular -- so much of european history is countries and cultures trying to declare themselves The True Inheritors of Rome

Philippa Cowderoy @flippac4/23/2023, 10:32 PM

The last three Assassin's Creed games are a hell of a lesson in that, too.

The first, Origins, is set in late Ptolemaic Egypt.

The second, Odyssey, is set during the Peloponnesian War ~four centuries previously, already an interesting comparison with the cultural state of Egypt in Origins.

Then Valhalla is set over a millennium after Odyssey and there are all these, well, literally ancient ruins all over the place (not to mention a bunch of places I've been well over a millennium again later). And they've got that Fantasy Ancient Ruin feel at least as much as the actually fantastic elements of the game, there's even a date scene that involves a ruined Roman tower.