the Hobbits pursued not greatness or destiny, but took the only path toward life available to them and then returned to let the rest of the world get on with living.

> good does not need to destroy evil; good needs only to resist evil, and when it does that, evil destroys itself

The only way the Ring was destroyed was by accident when Gollum attacked Frodo to claim the Ring. The Evil that the ring stoked in the hearts of those it touched is what ended up destroying it in the end, not the Good people who took it to Mount Doom.

> Tolkien in his letters insists that Frodo did not fail – that his captivity to the Ring was inevitable

> No theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.

The idea being that the evil that Melkor commits ultimately just builds towards the creators greater and secret purpose. It's kind of an attempt to deal with the "problem of evil".

(I’m not a Christian though so somebody please correct me if I am wrong)

Well, except for Aragorn, who turns out to be the true king of Gondor.

But it's also unambiguous that Aragorn, who was previously a nobody raised by elves, turns out to be the long-lost king and definitely does not just go back to whatever he was doing previously.

He absolutely does. Being the future king was a core part of his character, everything in his life was preparing him for it. The book version of Aragorn doesn't have the hesitance to accept his duty that the films portray, he doesn't have to be prodded into it: his whole life has revolved around his future kingship.

In a lot of ways the book Aragorn is just as superhuman as Gandalf is. He's an archetype, not a perspective character. The hobbits are the only normal humans.

But that’s just what all wizards are and always have been. It’s the only way to be a wizard. It isn’t, like, a hidden fact or anything. Wizard is a race not a profession. Like elf or dwarf or hobbit.

It really is, in-universe. Almost noone knows this save other maiar. The wizards are perceived as men by most people, them being maiar is far from common knowledge.

>the entire story is about a weak and almost completely unknown set of people who were "chosen" only by the most inexplicable series of events anyone could imagine.

I don't know what your point is.

Interesting to note that Peter Thiel has never named a company "Hobbiton"

And I think movie-LOTR-fans in particular are there at least as much for the Great Big Hero Chosen People Of Destiny aspects and battles as for the hobbits.

Anyway. my take of tfa: in discworld, the whole system is designed for pluralism and messy progress. in middle earth, the entire universe is designed for epic quests and magical solutions from wise old wizards.

frodo might be a humble hobbit, but he's still caught in a deterministic prophecy machine where the fate of the world depends on ONE RING and ONE QUEST

Oh come off it.

I've read all the Discworld novels. I've also read every other book that Terry Pratchett ever wrote [1]. All, that is, except for one that I've left for... later [2].

If Pratchett were still with us and heard anyone making such pompous statements about Discworld he'd slap the culprit in the face [3]. See, the thing to understand about Terry Pratchett is that he was quintessentially British, and by that I mean the good British [4]. As such his greatest fear was that someone might take what he wrote seriously and try to follow it like some kind of life advice.

Remember what he quipped when he was knighted for "services to literature":

  "I suspect the 'services to literature' consisted of refraining from trying to write any"

______________

[1] Yes, even "Where's my Cow?".

[2] Problem is, I don't remember which one so I'll have to read them all again to be sure. Hey, win-win.

[3] Gently. He was a gentle man.

[4] Think Lord Byron, not Lord Elgin. But without all the drinking and womanising, just the big heart.

I don't think he meant it as a criticism of LotR, more pointing to the wealth of other literature that you might need a bit of maturity to get into.

It's funny how some people idolise "the classics" and yet if you actually read them then mostly they're just the popular fun stuff from an earlier era. Poor old Terry, he'll probably be a question on an A-level English exam one of these days.

> At 17, if you don't think Lord of The Rings is the greatest contribution to literature there's something wrong with your head. If you still think that at 50, there's definitely something wrong with your head.

(https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/dec/09/jrrtolkien.sci...)

Him talking about "contribution to literature" instead of "best story" changes the quote for me. It makes it more about the craft of writing -- and I agree: LOTR isn't the world's best literature. But it's still a damn good story.

This guy Pratchetts.

(That was so good this Sunday morning. Thanks :D)

you dont seem to have a blog. please have a blog.

... I write stuffy academic papers?

But LOTR is about vibes not facts. Friendship, loyalty, hope, doing the right thing with what power you have, appreciating what is good and green and gentle in the world, etc.

> the more seriously you take Middle Earth, the dumber you get about Roundworld

The more seriously you take the rules of LOTR, yes. But you can take LOTR seriously without taking the rules seriously - by taking the vibes seriously.

Monarchy makes for some of both the best and worst governments on record. The problem isn't that you can't get good results, but rather the extreme variance.

I’m in Australia and the Trump presidency will be the thing for the next century that we can point to and say that this is why we are not going to ever, ever, ever get rid of the king or queen, in favour of a local president. I suspect that Canada and other countries feel much the same.

The best monarchs were the ones deposed by the revolutionaries, or the ones who abdicated the real power. There are 2 problems:

1. _Nobody_ should be ruling for more than 8-10 years.

2. You can't have a real monarchy without feudalism. And feudalism _always_ sucks.

That apart, the "show" function is important, too. It separates the Head of State and Head of Government functions, which makes it easier to dismiss the Head of Government, without disturbing the stability of the State. The US system fuses the two, which (in my view) is part of what makes the Congress reluctant to follow through on impeachment. (To avoid recent examples: had Bill Clinton been (treated like) a British Prime Minister in 1998 he'd have lost a no-confidence vote among his own party, and Al Gore would have served out his term. I think that would have been a better outcome than what actually happened, and followed.)

Missed that part in your parent reply originally, you're right of course, cheers :)

King Arthur vibes. Royalty, wizards, magical objects, heros and villains, destiny, romance, fealty, etc.

But obviously dispensing swords from lakes is no sound system basis for government.

When Arthur pulled the sword out of the stone, he was remembering all the stuff that Merlyn taught him about the different ways that animals run their societies and how it informed how he would lead if he were in charge.

That might be TH White's flavoring to it though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_King_Arthur_and_H...

Pixar has some in-house rules for stories. One of them is:

Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___

That sums up a Chosen One story. Chosen One protagonists do not work their way up. They are special snowflakes.

Star Wars is an extreme case of Chosen One popular culture. So is the Marvel Overextended Universe. (Note that Star Trek is not. Starfleet people start at the bottom and work up.) The top 8 highest grossing films of all time, unadjusted for inflation, [1] are all Chosen One movies.

Overexposure to Chosen One stories predisposes people to look for a Strong Leader, one who is somehow special. This seems to be a problem. Historically, the United States didn't work that way, having rebelled against a European monarchy which did. But I digress.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films

The stories you are talking about, also known as The Monomyth, have been part of every recorded culture and civilization.

It seems that the Chosen One stuff is not a result of stories. It is a fundamental part of our species and that is reflected in our most popular stories. From ancient times all the way to today.

Take the Iliad. Where's the monomyth? Achilles is an asshole, he gets into a fight with his boss, causes his bestie to get killed and then gets killed himself. There's a wooden horse. End of story.

No monomyth there, guv'nor.

Nor in the Odyssey. Smart guy wins the Trojan war with impossile stratagem. He pisses off the God of the Sea and takes 10 years to reach home, losing all his companions along the way. A little massacre to clear the air and they live happily ever after. End of story.

No monomyth.

I could go on. But, you know, that's the Iliad and the Odyssey. Should be enough.

"I won't get into which book is better, today I am only evaluating these books according to a set of rules I am making up, to see which succeeds at something neither author set out to achieve, and which most readers don't know or care about, and which is ultimately just an analogy for something else. Intrigued? Read on!"

And that would give me cause to read no further.

Edit: for reasons expressed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43306581

It was a crazy, deeply dysfunctional city, full of crazy, dysfunctional people, but he obviously loved it, and the reader ends up loving the city, as well.

I think that's a fairly accurate way to look at the world around us.

I believe that Tolkien's depictions of Mordor and the Shire, came from his own personal experiences in the trenches of WWI, so I'd argue that LOTR actually has some fairly significant reflection on the real world.

(I’ve always been curious to what if any extent one influenced the other; Discworld is older, but Ankh Morpork gets fleshed out a lot later. Given how small a world UK sci-fi/fantasy is they’d almost certainly have been aware of each others’ work.)

I do remember thinking Kraken was a little Gaimanesque though so that suggests at least a transitive link to Pratchett, so perhaps ...?

btw your blog link in your profile doesn't work for me (we seem to have similar taste in literature so I thought I'd see what you've written)

Yes, and the general impinging of mechanisation and automation on rural life.

I’m currently on book 2 of Discworld and finding it ludicrously enjoyable. Its absurdity makes it feel like an antidote to many things.

It feels more fantasy than “hardest of hard sci fi” to me though? And I think the space suit was broken so is it a good model for tech?

Speaking of sci fi - have you read Strata and Dark Side? They're pastiches of Asimov and Niven and so on, but he has some really neat ideas in there as well. I particularly like his notion of vacuum tube technology taken to its limits in Strata.

If ever I needed proof of the non-existence of a benign all powerful god then the fact that someone who loved writing that kind of intricate and clever sophisticated humour would be so cruelly struck down with Alzheimers would suffice.

"A life with footnotes", the biography of him by Rob Wilkins is excellent and very moving.

I envy those reading the series for the first time!

One of the major recurring themes of r/discworld is that so much of the amazing ideas in Discworld were actually real things.

All the books were written over span of 30+ years and they changed over the time during this.

There are no lengthy stilted lectures (characters explaining stuff to other characters) as in some other books by other authors, and only few (and usually short) descriptions of what happens when and then this and then that and then something else.

Think of how the "Dread Portal" scene in Guards Guards! would play out on stage and one sees exactly what he means.

Tolkien also faced extensive criticism from Christians for a non catholic fictive world, something he easily disregarded as trite. He was a loyal devout catholic in every respect.

His biography by Humphrey Carpenter goes into all this.

J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography, 1977

Love that.

I love LoTR too. I would never feel the need to pick one OR the other. It’s not about WHICH. Much better to love BOTH. AND is the correct operator to place between these two great sets of works.

I think an under appreciated subset of Discworld is the Tiffany Aching series. If you really want to see Pratchett’s notions of “good morality” on display, these model it the best IMO.

Yeah, the author indicates he skipped them, probably because of the YA moniker, but honestly, _maybe_ Wee Free Men exempted, they're equally as mature as any other discworld books, with really the only YA thing about them being their underage protagonist.

> The Lord of the Rings on the other hand — the more seriously you take Middle Earth, the dumber you get about Roundworld.

> ...

> The thought I began with, that The Lord of the Rings, whatever its merits as a fantasy tale, is brain-rot for the technological mind, is one that I find so obvious it feels barely worth stating.

It's honestly hard to read the piece because of how clearly visible the author's sneer towards those who love Tolkien is.

People tend to mistake sarcasm and satire with realistic and valuable insight. If, for example, you want to understand something about war in our Roundworld, do not read LotR or Jingo. Read Thucidydes.

This seems very wrong. Discworld heroes value the power of legends, LOTR heroes live for everyday life and sillines. While different on the outside, the essence of these books can be quite similar.

The anti-LOTR has always been Dune, which Tolkien himself was aware of. It's one of the few stories he was uncharacteristically openly negative about.

Middle-earth is a fantasy history of England and we're in sixth age (or something like that) of it.

It becomes round with the third age.

The rest of it, I think, won't persuade anyone to read Discworld novels who's resisted them so far. Those who have and love them will find it a pleasant enough survey.

Oh and I personally think that Equal Rites is the best entry point to the series rather than Sourcery. But then I was reading them in publishing order anyway and eagerly waiting for each new one to come out. Damn I miss being able to look forward to a new Pratchett novel; he was a Wodehouse for my generation.

For the same reason, "Small Gods" is actually a great introduction to the series. I think it's really my favorite book in the series.

If you like “Guards! Guards!” or “Equal Rites”, then go back and start from the beginning. The first two novels are fun, but sound like Pratchett was channeling Monty Python and Douglas Adams. It took a few books before his own voice really shined through.

I understand the view, I just don't agree. It has lots of nice subtle jokes in it and was the first to have a bit more depth to the story rather than being a slightly scattered and episodic parody of thr fantasy genre.

But then I like Dark Side and Strata a lot too.

Edit to add: incidentally there are a lot of minor throwaway jokes throughout the series that require you to have read the preceding books to get them. That in itself is IMO enough reason to aim to read them in publication order. But you do you, he was very prolific, I can see why someone coming in after the fact might choose not to tackle the whole lot from beginning to end.

Horrible elves, Granny at her best (and Nanny), Magrat the killer queen, Morris dancing, stupid wizzards and lots of other stuff - what's not to like?

Probably just because it's my fave. But you can read them and enjoy in any order.

(Along those lines I would also recommend Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell” which builds its own parallel history set in the early 1800s Britain, with Fairies taking the same role as elves in discworld.

Mustn't grumble though, it's not like Jonathan Strange was a pamphlet!

Yeah, more or less. The “elves/fairies are nice, or at least _good_” thing is a fairly modern creation (owing a lot to Tolkien, really).

Besides, it introduces Granny Weatherwax, who is IMO one of his two greatest creations (the other being Vimes of course).

Edit: Oh, by the way, if you're just now working your way through them then (a) I envy you and (b) I recommend reading the Annotated Pratchett File for each book - after you finish each of course: https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/

Sadly, it’s pretty sparse or non-existent for the later books, but the TVTropes pages on them are usually very good, and cover a lot of the same ground.

I was a bit surprised by the change in tone in a way I probably wouldn't've been if I'd read chronologically.

It and Light Fantastic are both fantasy-parody travelogues, which are mostly about the protagonists moving through a sequence of largely disconnected pastiches of other fantasy works. After this the series rapidly switches to fantasy as metaphor for real-world situations, with the fantasy elements being more broad tropes rather than specifics references.

I generally recommend starting with Wyrd Sisters, since many people are familiar with Macbeth.

He must have liked it; he rewrote it later as Good Omens.

I find it hard to see Good Omens as a do-over of Sourcery, but I guess they do have something in common.

He’ll amuse you, sure, but he won’t tell you that things are great just the way they are or that they’re hopeless and there’s nothing you can do. He’ll tell you that you — yes, you — should make them better.

And then he’ll do something even more radical. He’ll make you think you can.

-- randombrethren, Tumblr

[0] Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

1 - why not both?

2 - via MST3K “If you're wondering how he eats & breathes, And other science facts...(la! la! la!) Then repeat to yourself its just a show, I should really just relax...”

2) I don’t respect the bald claim that all chosen ones are bad, or the implicit claim that we can somehow avoid them. Universals always have exceptions. If we’re being “real” here about our agential change, we must admit that species evolve by natural selection we might say genetic chosen ones. And anyway I do think there are some special people so sue me.

3) consider the names of Peter Thiel’s companies: palantir, mithril. Thiel, I’m sure ironically, named his companies after objects possessing exactly that moral ambiguity that the author claims does not exist in Tolkien’s world. Thiel is telegraphing it straight to you via Tolkien: do not trust me, I will use these objects for my own gain.

4) Discworld can afford to be light and playful because it was written in easy times. In one preface, Tolkien wrote that all the world’s great powers would obviously have tried to turn the ring into a weapon if it really existed.

LOTR makes its theme and conceits explicit - it is about the appeal of power to the ego. Industrialization is an expression of that will to power, and its ability to magnify man's already-present distorted relationship with nature. That industry relies on technology does not make technology the central topic or even the target of critique.

Bone-headed take.

In fact, Alice in Wonderland relationship to ettiquette, both at a tea table and in royal court, is a curious theme.

No, it’s really about taking either universe at face value, which is the problem. And with Discworld, its overt absurdity and humor forces you to think about it more deeply.

LOTR doesn’t make an effort to explain what it is about. But knowing just a little about history and the author goes a long way.

It also feels a bit like the false dichotomy arguments from my teenage years, where you could like either Star Trek or Star Wars, but not both.

But honestly KJ Parkers novels are better again.

Where I hesitate is that I'm not sure Discworld's humour will land with everyone. It's a very dry form of absurdist British humour - if you enjoy Douglas Adams, you will probably get along with Terry Pratchett.

Discworld is a very funny place - I'm sure you would enjoy it.

What? Do words even have meaning anymore? How is that anything to do with being "woke"?

That’s exactly where it fails for me: it is too cute, like a longer than necessary joke.

It’s just not my cup of tea to read and think “oh yeah, I see they inverted the thing, very cute, they even have the elephants and the turtles”. It’s ok but maybe for a short essay or a comic book only.

The 4th book, Mort, is Terry dealing with the fact that he has a successfull series running, so he might as well start writing his own stories. He's not primarily reactionary at this point. This is for me the first 'real' discworld book.

In fact, I find the first 3 books a string of stand alone gags if you don't see them as critiques of the genre. Funny but shallow. Small Gods has real depth, but the author still stands at the sidelines. The Truth or Nightwatch are even deeper, and I suspect they are both autobiographic and cathartic on some level.

It's perfectly ok for them not to be your cuppa of course; my Mum and I loved them but my Dad never got into them despite trying quite a few times. Funny because generally our tastes intersected quite thoroughly.

(To be honest I'm lying, the standalone book I prefer myself is Pyramids, but the one I'd recommend to others is Small Gods.)

So many good gags in that one. I love the cinematic flashback scenes while Pteppic is falling off the wall. Plus it's where the "Pterry" nickname comes from of course.

If you like Death, Hogfather is my first recommendation.

> As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical

Tolkien himself in the foreword to fellowship

This person needs to cool it with the pseudo intellectualism and let people enjoy things

Also, the author does a disservice to Small Gods (also, oddly names the god Om as GamesStop, was that humor?), but this novel is one of the best ones in my opinion -- self-contained and both humorous and strangely moving.

To each their own, but to me the Tiffany books definitely felt weaker and felt like Terry Pratchett was restricting himself in terms of worldbuilding, human complexity (which Discworld usually portrays very well), and narrative. I hadn't knownn they were meant as YA fiction, but looking back, that would explain the mild feeling of lack-of-Discworld-richness to the books.

They aren't bad books by any means - just today, I was thinking about the "third thoughts" idea from one of these books and how interesting a mental model it is - but they certainly have a different feel from the rest of them.

agree that it's one of the best

'you don't know what they mean / they know what they mean'

Memestocks get their value not through some form of fundamentals but how many people believe in them.

Also, I find it slightly distasteful to refer to works of literature I like with the fad term du jour.

I can't say I liked this article overall.

what

Man this dude sure has a definition of “woke” that is completely alien to the roots of that term.

> I read one Pratchett novel (Thief of Time I think) in college, but I’m glad I didn’t properly get into it till my mid-forties. These are books you cannot really appreciate if you’re too young. I read through the lot around 2017-19, during the first Trump admin, when I was in my early forties.

what

Dude they are comic fantasy, yes Pratchett has Things to Say about the world in them, more and more as the series goes on, but I picked up Equal Rites soon after it came out when I was eighteen and the series was a constant delight through my college years and beyond. Yes there are things in Discworld that will zoom right by a kid and only land when you come back to it as an adult. That’s part of why they’re good books. There’s things like that in Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Cycle (Book of Three, Black Cauldron, etc) that hit me like a ton of bricks when I pick up those little books forty years after I first read them as a kid and completely missed those parts. Stories can speak to multiple ages on multiple levels.

I read Colour of Magic when I was 13 I think. It might have been a year or two later; a friend's mother had heard the Radio 4 "Woman's Hour" reading of Equal Rites and recommended them to me as she knew I liked Douglas Adams.

Adams and Pratchett had this in common - they had sufficient layers of jokes in them that they could appeal to both me in my early teens, and a friend's mother in her 40s (roughly). I missed a huge number of gags on the first read through. I like to re-read familiar books, though, and I used to get a few more each time through.

Until I read the APF there were still a bunch of historical gags or similar that I was missing by a country mile! I'm sure there are plenty more that have still gone over my head.

I honestly think that Pratchett was a better writer than Wodehouse, even though that's practically heresy for a Brit.

Pratchett wrote good kids books earlier in his career too

That comment also raised some eyebrows when I read it. Discworld is pretty "woke". The female dwarves are a bunch of LGBT analogues, a huge chunk of the watch series is about racism, Night Watch and Jingo are both pretty anti-populism.

And it has become a convenient shibboleth: anyone using the word that way has nothing of value to say to me on any topic.

If you mean to restrict it to the Biblical usage of pronunciation, it generalized past that centuries ago.

Those are actually some of the better ones among the later books though! If you're going to skip, skip the Moist von Lipwig books. They're substantially worse than the other books in the series, IMO. Not too big a fan of the Watch books after Night Watch either (Night Watch was definitely peak Vimes though!).

> These are books you cannot really appreciate if you’re too young.

Other than maybe missing one or two sex jokes, not really?

> The only story revolving consequentially around gods is Small Gods, about a meme-stock god named GameStop, whose power crashes, and who ambitiously plans to pump himself back up to a new high.

Did an LLM hallucinate or is this supposed to be a joke? The god's name is Om.

There's only one Discworld book I don't like, and it is unseen academicals - the football one - I struggled to finish that, and it's the only one I've read only a single time. Every other discworld book I've read numerous times over the past 20+ years.

The one thing I'll fault the Moist books on is they're sort of the same book 3 times if you're in it for the story. If you enjoy the post/finance/rail exploration, that's enough to get past it, and I certainly did, but I can't blame others who didn't.

For eg., Going Postal and Making Money have the same basic setup, and a one-line story description would sound very similar. But Going Postal is about themes of past and future, regret and risk, connecting to the past while bringing in the future; while Making Money feels like a constant tug-of-war between order and chaos, and hence ultimately about balance.

There's a point where you get a lot of rather similar monologues from his characters. I presume these are from the period after he had to dictate as he couldn't write directly any more. If so it's amazing that they're as good as they are.

What an embuggerance (as he said himself).

Such entities have a special existence on Discworld.

More power to your elbow if so, but I didn't. Fortunately the broader slapstick and parody was right up my alley and I grew into (at least some of) the rest.

You’re basically basing your whole technology worldview off a fantasy world created by a single person

Lewis wanted beer and belches. Strange how his own sermonising is so boring.

> What I have a problem with is people trying to live forever as part of a Chosen One script which involves them trying to carve up all of the world into the dead empires of a dystopian Great Game world run according to a totalizing script.

I'm confident Tolkien would agree.

I also think any evaluation of LoTR should take into account Tolkien's background as a veteran of the trenches in WWI. In 2025 America, maybe that makes LoTR seem less relevant to our world. To someone living in Ukraine, it probably feels like a much closer fit.

I'm sure you didn't intend to start an off-topic political argument but that's often what happens when references to stronger/more intense topics get casually dropped in.

You may be right, but is it a better fit? Is there any hope left when you face overwhelming hordes of evil orcs that cannot be negotiated or reasoned with, especially when there's no convenient ring to throw in a volcano?

The black-and-white starkness of LotR is what makes it unfit for use as an analogy to the real world! There is very rarely ever a situation in which Good vs Evil is a correct or useful framing, even if it may be a comforting and inspiring story to tell ourselves.

> You may be right, but is it a better fit? Is there any hope left when you face overwhelming hordes of evil orcs that cannot be negotiated or reasoned with

"The world changes, and all that once was strong now proves unsure. How shall any tower withstand such numbers and such reckless hate? ... I will not end here, taken like an old badger in a trap. Snowmane and Hasufel and the horses of my guard are in the inner court. When dawn comes, I will bid men sound Helm’s horn, and I will ride forth. Will you ride with me then, son of Arathorn? Maybe we shall cleave a road, or make such an end as will be worth a song – if any be left to sing of us hereafter.

'I will ride with you', said Aragorn"

-The Two Towers

Seems like it fits to me...

Little known fact: a while ago Russia doubled the sign-in bonus fot contractors to approximately $4.5k to keep the flow of people going. With Trump taking office this produced a wave of recruits who are betting on the chance that the war will be over before they finish training and actually arrive to the front.

Some of them are already there and the results are not good (for them).

I'm not saying the situation isn't difficult, but it doesn't serve the free world to see Russia as this unstoppable force, as it paints efforts at helping Ukraine as pointless.

To use the example already given, how about Ukraine? I have a very hard time not placing that in a good vs evil framing.

It’s true that Ukraine isn’t perfectly good, and Russia isn’t purely evil, but it’s pretty damn close.

Here’s a nation that was just keeping to themselves and growing closer to the ones that didn’t want to annex them (surprise surprise) and the evil overlord thought that was too threatening and decided to pre-emptively annex them.