The Saga of Tanya the Evil - Vol. 14 Ch. 38 - Trial by Fire IV

[x754]

@vivit
The Geneva convention seems to depend on external legal definitions of weapons. In most countries, any object can be treated as a weapon if it is held in a hand eg. an improvised club, or if it is larger than a given size eg. a 6-inch knife, or if it fires projectiles exceeding a given mass eg. a slingshot. In some countries, combat training such as martial arts is also considered a weapon, so if a martial artist attacks another non-martial artist it might be treated as armed assault instead of regular assault.

So if people want to be treated as civilians, they should be careful not to pick up any improvised weapons in front of enemy soldiers.

 

[NAUL]

Damn the manga is better than the anime

 

[Yautja]

It's strange how beautiful the graphics were when their content was pure carnage.

She needs really needs to put that stock through his skull. Dude is a moron. There's nothing as annoying not only a moral narcissist, but a hypocritical moral narcissistic.

 

[arghhhhhh]

Francois republic mages are baiting me with chekhovs minigun. I don't think they ever fire a single bullet from them, what a waste.

 

[RaifuWizard]

fighting in a war without a uniform? oof
have fun being considered a criminal and not a POW under the laws of war.

remember kids. if you see leaflets dropped on your city warning that it's gonna get bombed, it's best to move out.

 

[Le_Dook]

This chapter is a certain, grim reminder of just how dark this manga can get. They haven't attempted to sweeten or glorify war, it is what it is.


@NAUL That's been my opinion of 99% of Manga adaptations since I started reading instead of watching

 

[Shyning]

@Dibella French soldiers from pre-occupation in WW II beg to differ.

 

[KitsuVonKraft]

Kaiser92 eh, it's war. Wether you kill them with a justification or not, that kind of thing does happen during wars. You don't need to state the obvious during a discussion about the methods.

 

[beepboop1]

Such a shame the later chapters arent translated yet

 

[Epicredeemer]

D A M N

 

[FIippy]

Amazing, the manga really do try to follow the LN

 

[Oculunus]

One of the cathedrals in burning Arene looked like Notre Dame from Paris. Coincidence? I think not.

 

[N0Mi0]

Well, guys. This is not sad, not anymore. It's just tragic now. Watching these panels literally made me teary-eyed, even though I knew exactly what was going to happen.

You know a firestorm is extremely intense when you literally have two whole pages with nothing but large flames.

Actually, I want to point out just how good this manga is in relation to the novel itself. You see, the thing is that in the novel, we rarely see any actual battles from the Wing 203 point of view. 9/10 times in any actual battle we switch to the Empire's enemy's side. And the actual battle is basically everyone being confused and crushed by some ominous force (the Tanya's rapid reaction force team). But here the situation is reversed, and not only this is basically new material from the author (most of the battle dialog are not present in the books), it actually complements the main series very well. Keep in mind that usually LN adaptations are there just to advertise the original material and they follow the usual formula of straight adaptation with maybe some half-assed fillers and cutting the juiciest stuff off.

For instance, the whole Arene ark in the book was basically Tanya discussing that 'last resort' method with the brass, then we switch to the 60's Londinium and get a TV-show documentary report about the sad burn of Arene, and then we get to the end of the battle with Tanya kicking Grantz into the mud and issuing the attack order. So, this whole dog-fighting these past few chapters? It's completely manga-original, which would've sucked if not for the Carlo Zen himself being the manga writer. This way, it actually is legit additional material.

@gaigous @Le_Butters
Well, personally, I was pretty moved by that grim panels' series of a beautiful city being burned down to the buildings' structural frames. The church (which actually was the main place of events in the novel) was the icing of the cake.
A lot of other people seemed moved too, so I guess it kinda works? And considering how serious manga editors can get, the possibility of it being there just to fill out the pages is very small. Every page is made sure to benefit the series.

@JennyTals @Dezaki
The anime watered down pretty lots of stuff, but the worst part is it's character design. The LN illustrations are very good; I am pretty sure that if the anime adaptation were given an actually proper and serious, and beautiful, look that the LN (and later especially manga) has, it would get a much much more favorable critical response. And that's considering that it was damn popular as is.

@Euphaire
What international humanitarian laws? These people are literally half-educated farmers and workers, they don't know a lick of all these things. All sane educated people and city's elites have long left it during the initial evacuation. But thanks to the Francois propaganda all the easily influenced people (i.e. most of the world population prior to modern compulsory education systems) a lot of people stayed to 'fight'. They don't think of these 'imperial' prisoners as of POWs, they see them as 'enemies', not of the state, but of themselves. And add on top of that the fact that they're all frenzy, out of their mind due to the extremity and chaoticness of the situation. That's actually what the whole author's contrast between militia and a regular army is. Meaning, what half the chapter is about.

@ShaiHH
You would be surprised to know just how intense the supply system of a stalemate trench warfare is. This equilibrium is not kept because 'no one can advance', it is kept precisely because both sides are literally non-stop shelling and disrupting each other 24/7. By that point they are literally putting in all of their affordable materiel trying to overpower the other side, which ends up in almost real time consumption of the arrivals. That 'just one day' of lack of supplies would not only result in thousands of hungry and cold soldiers, it very well could result in the fall of the lines due to rapid loss of effectiveness.
The Arene region railways are not located in the Arine city itself, but the city is the key strategic point of the region, meaning that by controlling the city you effectively control the railway system around it. The problem of this situation is that the partisans raised a rebellion in the city. A regular army, you can fight. A disorganized mob, you have to smoke out. And the only real effective way of doing it is shown in this chapter precisely.

@SakamotoDeath
Actually, the Geneva Conventions have been around since 1864. it's just that the pre-post-WWII ones didn't really deal with creating firestorms in urban areas as an act of waging a war. So the only legal problem the Empire had to workaround was killing non-combatants.

@x754
Many thanks for that insightful piece of info.

And yeah, in some countries the self-defense laws go as far as to tacitly state that anyone with a martial arts experience in a steer brawn can't be applied to the whole idea of 'self defense', which is very sad, since in reality no martial artist can 'control' their strength the way legislators think they should be able to.

@ultimatehaki
It's high time to remind everyone that this is a manga with a beautiful charismatic blonde blue-eyed loli MC, and that both the illustrators of LN and manga and the author himself seem to really like the whole concept of captivating petite young women. What I mean is, 'That must smell really nice bro' is what we all must have thought seeing this panel.

@Kirin-kun
The artist is known to mix up different European cities of that era to create the backgrounds. I.e. that cathedral wouldn't actually pinpoint the city around it. The Arene city is located at the border area around nonGermany and nonFrance and consists of people from both nations, which pretty straightforwardly points to the Alsace-Lorraine region and it's capital Strasbourg.

@Oculunus
Yea, especially when you consider the time this chapter was originally published. The author's clairvoyant! He has psychic abilities, go esper! /s

 

[gaigous]

@N0Mi0 That opinion piece was beautifully written, now get off my lawn!

 

[daxude]

Tanya did nothing wrong.

 

[MarquisBlack]

I have to admit, this manga actually highlights some of the most pressing and concerning issues with international law in the starkest, most morally horrifying manner possible. A lot has been said already about whether or not Tanya and the Empire were "wrong" in carrying out the massacre, but the fact is that, insofar as the laws of war are concerned, such moralistic handwringing is essentially pointless. This is because international laws, like all laws, are fundamentally amoral. While they are often founded upon moral concerns, laws are notoriously slow in keeping up with changing moral standards, such that, more often than not, what we think is illegal and what is illegal are two very different things. This is particularly true about international laws.

In this particular case, the Empire's exploitation of the law (as suggested by Tanya) actually highlights one of the biggest flaws in international laws -- the fact that they are often infuriatingly vague or prone to loopholes. This happens on purpose, as states often deliberately leave these loopholes with the intention of finding a way to skirt the rules in the future. This is not a past issue, either, but a current one that continues to cause moral, political, and public relations issues. For instance, did you know that you could theoretically be persecuted and exterminated large-scale on the basis of your economic class or political affiliation and it wouldn't legally count as genocide? That's because, under the Genocide Convention (1948), genocide is typified by the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Instead, any large-scale campaigns of extermination against groups not covered by the Convention would result in, at best, charges of persecution and mass murder, but not genocide. And this is during peacetime. During the brouhaha of war, when misinformation campaigns would reign, it's even less likely that such mass murder would even be prosecuted if committed by your allies because they're against the enemy and technically don't violate the convention.

It's not just the Genocide Convention, either. The Geneva Conventions have loopholes, too, and are often skirted through vague reinterpretations.

All of which does beg the question, as some have implied in these comments: do we even really need these laws, then, if we're just going to ignore them? Of course we do. The point of international law is to keep each other precisely in check because in the actual absence of these laws, nothing would hold states to account. And I'm not talking about international tribunals -- I'm talking about domestic resistance to war crimes. Imagine, for instance, that no Genocide Convention existed -- on the basis of what, then, would domestic groups sue or criticise their own governments for such actions? Ratified treaties become domestic law. Thus, they are necessary not just for the sake of looking good internationally, but also for the sake of domestic accountability.

 

[Xerain_House]

I have not seen such an idyllic scene since the Burning of Prospero.

 

[HansNacht]

 

[Shaw42]

well it not a war crime if the non-combat turn into combats.

 

[_vibe_]

damn that was intense