Another Way To Breathe

I kinda wanted to just put the first page of issue 5 as a response, but I decided that’s too far out to spoil yet.

Spoilers for all of Uber V1 follows…

The question of luck is an interesting one in Uber, as well as a read of the successes and failures of the war so far. There’s two angles I’d like to talk about.

Firstly, the question of luck. 

I think there’s a tendency to overlook how lucky the Allies have been. The majority of the Allies “luck” has been front loaded. Stephanie being in deep cover for ages without being uncovered and stealing the secret of how to generate superhumans and getting it to the allies in time to generate an army? Without that, the Allies lose in two months. Less pure luck, but Hitler killing the only person who understands to properly use the Ubers? Without that, Nazi victory in 4-6 months. And, of course, the most powerful Uber in the war is on the Allied side. Lucky.

There’s certainly gambits that the Allied have tried that have worked (THE SECOND BATTLE OF KURSK, The first HEAVY vs HEAVY fight jump to mind). There’s gambits that the Germans have tried which have ended extremely badly (THE BATTLE OF KIEV). That the germans have no remaining Geltmensch alone says that gambits aren’t unreservedly successful.

Equally, in areas of R&D everything that goes wrong for the Allies has also gone wrong for the Germans. The Allies fuck up the development of Leah? Well, look at Battleship Zero. The allies problem is that they are dealing with the R&D issues now, when Germany did theirs before the war. In many way, that’s the actual story - the allies attempt to catch up.

Put it like this: Uber is a “Nazi Germany gets the bomb first” story. Without a lot of luck and author intervention, that story immediately leads to The Man In The High Castle.

As Uber tends to lean materialistic, means that gambit and counter-gambit play hard. I haven’t done anything which is actually real-world examples of luck at all, which is where the materialism actually makes it less realistic. It’s obviously narratively unsatisfying for an attack to just fail randomly due to shit weather, as true as that is throughout history. Uber does set up every time anything is going to happen which is a reverse of expectatio, and give reasons why things succeed and fail.

I will also say materialistically, Germany in Uber is a glass cannon. I want to spend some time over there soon, just to show exactly how fucked Germany is in the story. After the obviously USA-centric start of Invasion, we’d do that, which should stress how utterly pyrrhic this all is. And, just as we’ve restarted the comic, we do have to restress its theme and mood, which is exactly what we’re doing.

Anyway - that’s all factual. I think the more important thing is the second line of thought is just generally about WW2, and speaks to Uber’s intent.

Imagine you were alive in WW2. On the ground. You can read the papers, but that’s all you know.

At which point would you know the Nazis were going to lose? Up to which point would you think the Nazis were winning?

With hindsight, we can easily point to places where “this is where Germany lost the war.” This is actually the one comforting thing about WW2. As bad as it was, the Allies won. You can even make an argument that Germany lost the war the second it started the war.

This is not the experience our ancestors went through. 

I’d think that most of us would have thought the Axis powers were winning the war until Stalingrad. Historically we look at the 1942 offensives as a failure, and clearly could never have worked… but imagine what it felt like to look at it. At first glance, it seemed as invincible as those initial offensives earlier in the war, at least on the ground. The lessons of 1939-1942 would have told our ancestors: The Nazi empire is enormous! It’s crushing armies at seeming will. Obviously they’re winning..

Imagine that despair. Imagine how much they wished the good guys could get a break. Imagine the horror when they didn’t. 

And imagine fighting anyway. 

At least in part, that’s what Uber tries to evoke.

(I find myself thinking about what Uber WW1 would look like - which would be the whole middle 70% basically being big allied offensives with slowly evolving tactics on the western front… all which all failed, completely. That would be even more crushing than Uber, I fear.)

So… to go back to the question I posed you, at the earliest 1942, and most likely 1943. And what the army had done before 1943 will be lingering in your head. I’d think it was 1944 before you’d be confident we were going to win, and after everything earlier, maybe not even then. So, assuming 1943, for at least 50% of the war, you’d have been “FUCCCCCCCKKKK!”

In short: we clearly haven’t reached Stalingrad yet.