[Haha, it's totally true about Japanese high schoolers. I was 'accosted' on the street in Iwami by a group of high school boys leaving school who were SO EAGER to talk to me. I'm fairly sure I was the only native English speaker they'd ever had a chance to talk to and they all wanted to practice their English skills. Japanese are very happy to help western tourists overall though (we had two old ladies pull over and spontaneously offer us a ride when we got caught in the rain). You absolutely can manage without reading any Japanese, but personal opinion, I think hiragana was so helpful (more so than katakana). Not reading kanji is nbd (we picked up some while we were there), but hiragana helps for like figuring out what filling is inside an onigiri. If you have time it might be worth familiarizing yourself w/ it.]
The understanding Aurus was garnering of this history was necessarily piecemeal. There was simply too much he didn't yet know about this world. He had no concept of industrialization as such, so he of course could have no concept of the shock which accompanied industrialized methods being turned towards the extermination of people on a mass scale. The mechanisms of war in Tyria, despite the engineering innovations of the charr, did not contain the imagination or spirit of modern warfare. He also, frankly, would not have understood the conspiracy theories and persecution complex that held sway in Germany to enable the Nazi rise to power. All of these things had no analog in his own world as he now knew it, and the best he could do at the moment was admit to that.
"I'm not sure I understand. This was a war between the free people's of your world and one faction, these Nazis--a kind of cult with a brutal charismatic leader? And the Jewish faced him and lost before the rest of the world took up arms against him and his allies and eventually won?"
He was trying, as he had done earlier, to make sense of all this through the framework of the White Mantle and the Chosen who they had slaughtered. And when that didn't work he tried to think of it in terms of the first Guild War. And then in terms of the charr siege on Ebonhawke. None of them honestly seemed to help him very much.
no subject
The understanding Aurus was garnering of this history was necessarily piecemeal. There was simply too much he didn't yet know about this world. He had no concept of industrialization as such, so he of course could have no concept of the shock which accompanied industrialized methods being turned towards the extermination of people on a mass scale. The mechanisms of war in Tyria, despite the engineering innovations of the charr, did not contain the imagination or spirit of modern warfare. He also, frankly, would not have understood the conspiracy theories and persecution complex that held sway in Germany to enable the Nazi rise to power. All of these things had no analog in his own world as he now knew it, and the best he could do at the moment was admit to that.
"I'm not sure I understand. This was a war between the free people's of your world and one faction, these Nazis--a kind of cult with a brutal charismatic leader? And the Jewish faced him and lost before the rest of the world took up arms against him and his allies and eventually won?"
He was trying, as he had done earlier, to make sense of all this through the framework of the White Mantle and the Chosen who they had slaughtered. And when that didn't work he tried to think of it in terms of the first Guild War. And then in terms of the charr siege on Ebonhawke. None of them honestly seemed to help him very much.