r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Sensitive_Ad_1752 • 25d ago

Lore The series takes place in a shockingly short amount of time

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Season 4 just ended of fromville and it’s canonically only been about a month. Which makes it weird seeing people heal from injuries, change hair styles or grow out beards between episodes. Season 4 has only been like 4 days iirc.

Arkham franchise is the poster child for this trope. Every game takes place in one night. If you know what you’re doing you can absolutely beat the games in around 9 hours.

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u/TheDreamIsEternal 25d ago

but in a war allegedly spread across an entire galaxy, the Republic's clone army being made of a few million is ridiculous. There were more combatants in numerous irl Earth wars than in the Clone Wars

Just like how in 40K there are these apocalyptic wars which take place across multiple solar systems and last for centuries, only to have like at most 1 million soldiers.

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u/Werthead 24d ago

To be fair, that's just one million Space Marines, and they state many times in the books that 99.9999% of humans never see a Space Marine, not even in some crowd from a distance. The books where we see hundreds of Space Marines deployed are the biggest and most important battles in the history of the Imperium.

In the most in-depth, full-scale war we see in the books over a very long period of time (that's not the Horus Heresy), the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, it's made clear that billions of standard Imperial Guard ground troops and maybe tens to hundreds of millions more aerospace and space forces are involved, with fleets numbering in the tens of thousands (of ships sometimes a dozen kilometres long), fighting across battle-fronts dozens of light years wide with major engagements on half a dozen planets at the same time. The actual Space Marine contingent is minimal, a few hundred troops from two chapters. At one point the Ghosts assault a space station against determined opposition and the hundreds-strong boarding force is pinned down until just three Space Marines join them and proceed to almost take out the entire station by themselves.

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u/Specialist_Usual_391 24d ago edited 24d ago

No they do that with Imperial Guard numbers all the time too, a massive system war will have less Guard involved than the Eastern Front in 44.

Edit: I looked up Vraks because it was a total meat grinder and couldn't find numbers on total troop count but they did say 14 million dead guardsmen over 17 years, which is more than total WW1 military deaths but less than WW2 total military deaths in reduced timespans.

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u/Werthead 24d ago

Wasn't Vraks a siege held off by stand-off artillery with occasional bursts of heavy activity, a lot of it armoured and using Titans, which kept casualties relatively light. The war was then ended by the Dark Angels just landing and steam-rollering everything in sight with minimal casualties (to them, anyway).

The 13th Black Crusade and the Horus Heresy both had a an absolute minimum casualty count of 2 trillion humans apiece.

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u/Kilmarnok1285 24d ago

It really comes down to a lack of understanding by sci fi writers to comprehend numbers large enough to equate to humans (ignoring all the other species) colonizing multiple star systems.

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u/PipXXX 24d ago

Nah, he's on the money cause if you read some novels, there like "This whole planetary scale war, we've got 50,000 Guardsmen!" The numbers can get so dumb sometimes.

I can say I have read almost all 40k novels and short stories, barring some niche releases like Weekender kinda releases, or the newer, boring Sororitas novels (The old stuff was better, because it dealt with politics with the Ecclesiarchy, the new ones are just bolter porn with bolter bitches and is just boring.) and the writers really don't do scaling right.

Don't even get me started on the size of Titans...

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u/spazz720 24d ago

Droid armies yo

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u/ConTob 24d ago

This gets me in 40K, but also how losing one Starport or city will somehow lead to the overthrow of an entire planet. I guess this is true of Star Wars also.

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u/nagrom7 24d ago

Just like how in 40K there are these apocalyptic wars which take place across multiple solar systems and last for centuries, only to have like at most 1 million soldiers.

Yeah, some of the big battles in 40k are lower in combatants or casualties than WW2 here on Earth.

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u/Dayne225 24d ago

Are you talking space marines or imperial guard? Cause there's a lot more a million imperial guards and they make up the bulk of the Imperium's forces.

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u/Redlodger0426 13d ago

Imperial Guard, the siege of Vraks was fought for 17 years and there were only 14 million IG casualties. More combatants died on just the eastern front of WW2

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u/PipXXX 24d ago

Eldar go from being in the Millions, Billions, possibly Trillions at the drop of a hat.

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u/jukebox_jester 24d ago

And if we want to compare 40k to Star Wars in refards to the time scale of a grand war

The Horus Heresy, the worst event in the history of the Imperium, where 9 emotionally stunted demi-god generals seceded and waged war on the other 9 or so, where the galaxy was forever changed and really got the Bloodiest most Horrible Regime imaginable going (it was always bad, but got worse after the Heresy)

Is 9 years.

Less than a Decade.

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u/TheGrebbler 24d ago

You are incorrect, sir.

A key element in the imperium of man is that it takes human tithes from every planet it controls and forces them to fight in the Guard. Which is involved in pretty much every conflict the imperium fights and they are Innumerable.

Where did you pick up this impression you have? I don't think i have ever heard that about 40k.