This franchise has a somewhat oscillating tone to it.
The first one was wonderfully reactionary, the second was suffused with an action comic book aesthetic that I’m still not sure that I entirely groove to, and THE KING’S MAN? I dunno. It’s got Rasputin as a villain, as well as the obligatory Shadowy War Profiteers that supposedly started World War I*. Your guess is as good as mine.
Moe Lane
*Despite the fact that World War I can more easily be explained as a failure for everybody in Europe to understand that the introduction of barbed wire and automatic weapons onto the battlefield would completely upend their tactical and strategic planning. But what do I know? I’m just this guy on a blog.
“the introduction of barbed wire and automatic weapons onto the battlefield would completely upend their tactical and strategic planning”
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Even though the American Civil War made it clear that was exactly the case. But Europe didn’t really pay enough attention to the American Civil War since it was just those provincial bumpkins fighting amongst themselves. And what did they really know about fighting, anyway?
The trouble with all that is .. it retcons what Eggsy was told about the origin of the Kingsmen.
.
I’m sure it’ll be a killer retcon, of course, but still.
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Mew
Also, advancements in artillery.
(Foreshadowed by the ACW, as well.)
.
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Mainly, I want to gripe about hearing a song from my youth on the radio, going “I might still have that album, I need to listen to it”, and realizing after I got home that I was crediting the song to the wrong band.
(I do know I owned the album, though. And I still might. Once I figure out what prog-rock flavored pop band it was. I could have sworn it was Asia, but… And it doesn’t help that I forgot the bloody tune and lyrics once I put it in the wrong fricking pigeonhole!)
Pretty much everything “new” at the start of World War I – aside from airplanes (though there were attempts to use balloons to check the enemy lines during the earlier war) – was foreshadowed by the American Civil War. And pretty much everything else that wasn’t foreshadowed by the ACW was an attempt to break the deadlocks invoked by the things that the ACW had foreshadowed.
But the arrogant Europeans didn’t pay enough attention to what was going on in the Americas. They paid for it in blood half a century later.
I think it is a little to harsh on the euros to look down on them this much for not learning from the american civil war since we didn’t learn that much from it either.