It looks like the next episode will be. Beyond that, reply hazy.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

...

Jesus wept, those are laboured references even by my atrocious standards. =]

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

"... And whatever the hell YOU said, there's none of that, all right?"

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

The Sound Of Music
The hills are alive with the sound of Neuroi. Honestly, it kind of makes sense - the Von Trapp family, or at least their daughters, are about the right age for witch duty and generally Aiding The War Effort, and having Flandre and Meiling run into them might be amusing. I, er, also managed to get the name of the country wrong - they'd be from Ostmark, not Helvetia - which might have caused some confusion.

The Great Escape
This is a WW2-ish setting, but the Neuroi don't really do the whole "prisoners of war" stuff. So how do you have a POW camp? Easy: it's essentially a retirement home for witches who are in the process of losing their powers, to whom salvation has arrived in the form of the Von Hammer Method of Force Using. The staff, also old witches who've lost their powers, do their best to actively suppress the witches who've been losing them from learning about the method, culminating in a, er, great escape.

Chicken Run
You can't reference the greatest POW movie without referencing (in my opinion, at least) the greatest POW movie parody. It's a Great Escape-style film where almost the entire caste is composed of talking chickens made of plasticene; heroic protagonist Ginger is who I was referencing there. As you might already know, it was made by the same people who do Wallace And Gromit. Actually, Gromit might be a good choice for a familiar...

...

wait.

this was a dismissal, not a request for an explanation, wasn't it.

oh.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's
barren too, // "She's not
worth feed or hay, // "But
I'll give her this," - he blew
smoke at me - // "She was
something in her day." --
Garnet Rogers, Small
Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might
accept blatant porn involving
the cast of My Little Pony but
as God is my witness we have
standards.

You may take it either way as you like. I did get two out of three, missing the last one because I've never seen Chicken Run. :)

A mass breakout from the Old Witches' Home would be pretty amusing, although I find I can only picture Wilma Bishop in the Steve McQueen role. You know she'd constantly be getting herself thrown in the cooler.

Also, references to The Sound of Music always remind me of Phill Jupitus grumbling on the podcast he used to do with Phil Wilding about being forced to watch it. "'♪ How do you solve a problem like Maria~?' I'd send her to Himmler."

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

But yeah, I think that concept's got some legs to it. Disabled young people in the Forties and Fifties were treated much the same way as senile old relatives, sent to live in homes by the seaside to be bored senseless until they withered away into feeble little half-skeletons. A film I remember enjoying on that subject is The Best Of Men, a story about the founding of the Paralympic Games from a home for injured veterans. I can't help but feel that there'd be a similar sort of base for witches; all these proud warrior women being smothered and tightly controlled by well-meaning but very ableist nurses. It's meant to be a transitional area so they can return to the world without their powers, but it's... hell. Not your conventional hell, of course. Just a place of too many blankets and impenetrable restraints and a return to childhood powerlessness. The food's all pureed. The uniforms are all shapeless smock dresses. Everything is as bland and soft and clean and white as possible, and if you don't like it then you're just making a fuss about nothing. And so you sit there, choking on softness in a bright white dark.

I've been thinking about nursing homes a lot recently, so this got away from me a bit. The explanation's a bit... topical, so apologies for that. In the UK, there's currently a massive ongoing scandal regarding the Prime Minister that might genuinely force him from office regarding a garden party he held at 10 Downing Street in May of 2020. As an aside, it does rather amuse me that my cis compatriots are finding out just how long it takes to remove an unwanted Johnson in this bloody country. The point is, during the furore about it, I realised where I'd been on that day in May when Boris had had his little shindig. I was at my grandmother's funeral. We could only have ten people in the building for it, all strictly moved away. I couldn't hold my mother's hand at her mother's funeral. We all obeyed the rules, and all we got was laughed at by a braying scarecrow and his chums. So I've been thinking about nursing homes, and how they suck the life out of you, and how powerless they make you, and how powerless we all are in general, at the whim of the uncaring idle rich.

Sorry, that got a bit heavy and off-topic. Been on my mind, is all.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

But they're Places of Healing. No. Really. They promise.

(This isn't even going into the rampant theft and general bullshittery. I've personally been robbed twice.)

Well... it's an evocative image, but we've seen what happens to retired witches (at least in Britannia) both in OWaW and one of the manga series, and it's... not that. One of the stories in The Sky That Connects Us (the manga set between the first and second TV series, which as far as I know is still canon, unlike Maidens in the Sky) involves Wilma visiting Lynne in Paris not long after the first series, and it's pretty strongly implied that when she retired from combat the RFAF just sort of... kicked her out.

Of course, that has its own whole set of strange, kinda-unsettling implications--for instance, one of the artbooks maintains that she almost immediately married a former superior officer much older than she is and started having his children, which... doesn't sound like the Wilma from One-Winged Witches to me, but anyway—but it doesn't involve being confined to a sanatorium.

I could see something like you describe happening to witches who had to retire prematurely because of some line-of-duty injury, probably extending to the kind of thing that happened to Mio in Strike Witches II (where the last of her magic was wrung out of her in the most traumatic fashion possible by the Operation Mars Yamato refit's core), but it doesn't seem like it would be the usual approach taken with those who had to hang it up because of slow burnout. They just get pensioned off with a letter of thanks and, usually, a lot of not-so-subtle social pressure to get started on the next generation.

Keep in mind that, at this point, most of the world still assumes that's a natural process and not the result of a chronic metamagical injury; only Zauberschule initiates really understand that part yet. That is to say, witches who suffer the traditional "Witch's Fate"-style progressive magic failure aren't thought of as "wounded" by the establishment. Their superiors, the official doctors, and even a fair number of the superannuated witches themselves think that's what's supposed to happen.

That said, it does provoke thought, and I may get a chance to look more closely at the themes it deals with later on. It's certainly something to keep in mind as the Zauberschule movement spreads and the rest of the world does or does not adapt.

>We all
>obeyed the rules, and all we got was laughed at by a braying scarecrow
>and his chums.

I'm sorry you had to go through that. It's crossed my mind more than once that these times were already strange and terrible enough for anyone before the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.

>So I've been thinking about nursing homes, and how they
>suck the life out of you, and how powerless they make you

Mm, that's been on my mind a fair bit too. That, and the whole getting-old thing. I might muse on this tangent a little more elsewhere, or I might not, I'm not sure. For now, and for here, suffice to say I get where you're coming from.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Ah, right. I'm not at all familiar with the Strike Witches canon beyond UF's version of it, so I wasn't aware there was actual proof of "what happens next", so to speak. Apologies for the error and for the unnecessary bleakness. You're right, too: the stuff with Wilma being married off to a RFAF officer to blast out the next generation of trouser-averse child soldiery for the next Neuroi War or whatever is extremely Yikes.

>I could see something like you describe happening to witches
>who had to retire prematurely because of some line-of-duty injury,
>probably extending to the kind of thing that happened to Mio in
>Strike Witches II (where the last of her magic was wrung out of
>her in the most traumatic fashion possible by the Operation Mars
>Yamato refit's core), but it doesn't seem like it would be the
>usual approach taken with those who had to hang it up because of slow
>burnout.

Yeah, that makes a lot more sense if you wanted to include a setting like the one I described. If anything, it's even bleaker if you use it as an institution for witches who have been seriously injured, which makes the escape angle a lot more convincing. It also has some serious stakes - these witches might be experienced and battle-tested, but it's been a long time since they've used their powers, and stuff might go seriously wrong if they burn out their magic again. It also makes the villains of the piece (the home operators and nurses) at least a little sympathetic, though now I have the image of the hospice administrator funding the place by using it as a marriage arrangement agency for rich industrialists and/or military bigwigs to find young and biddable wives and now I made myself really angry.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

It's the noise of the rocking chairs. Creak, creak, creak. All day long. Like old doors closing, over and over, forever.

But then I imagine Hannelore and the other still active veterans learning about it. The crater is probably still pretty impressive. :)

Yeah... I could see that. She would probably even describe the place in rhetoric similar to Traitor's.

There were a few people in the government and high military circles of Karlsland in those days who, by 1920 or so, could not wait for that troublesome witch von Hammer to lose her magic and learn her place. Wilhelm II himself may well have been among them—there certainly seems to have been no love lost between them, if her remarks to Fritz in episode 6 are any indication. Some believe she knew that, and never did out of sheer spite.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

The question in my mind, though, is whether he truly understands that at root this is his own damn fault. That Minna didn't try to work with him like a brother officer because he'd never extended her the same courtesy. Maybe he's learned something, or maybe he's too set in his ways to change. We'll just have to see.

-----
Iä! Iä! Moe fthagn!

Indeed. I'm curious as well, but Minna is polite and capable of dealing with the brass in a proper way, or she wouldn't have been a general. I have a feeling that, after a stab at reconciliation no one ever saw coming from LeMay, she'll be trying to meet them halfway.

After all, this is the kind of behavior she wants to reward. In general, respect for her and her team as equal partners in the war effort. Despite SHAEF's best efforts, maybe they CAN be taught!

I think the biggest factor can be traced to Perrine giving LeMay the speech about how they're not being given the basic respect the men have received for centuries. By itself it may have not moved LeMay, but after he's seen how they will simply sidestep the chain of command, perhaps their legitimate grievances took on a new, practical light.

The biggest sidestep, though, may have been Zauberschule. We've discussed before that the witches are seizing the means of production. I think the prevailing attitude up until that point has been that they're young, inexperienced, and should be coddled but kept in the dark for their own good. And for some time they may -have- been inexperienced, but now they have been separated from society so thoroughly that they're not just developing their own subculture, but their own magical power, in a way the governments of the world cannot control and which will, in time, eliminate the inexperience that's used against them. Forward-thinking conventional people might be realizing that the witch leaders of tomorrow need to be emotionally invested in the culture of today...or they will simply overwrite it when they gain political power.

------
Authors of our fates
Orchestrate our fall from grace
Poorest players on the stage
Our defiance drives us straight to the edge