Can somebody explain today's Oglaf to me?

August 18, 2024 5:20 PM

I enjoy the (highly NSFW) webcomic Oglaf, but every now and then they'll post a strip that just baffles me. Today is one of those days.

What the heck is going on in this strip, entitled Biological Weapon? The king asks to prolong how long the invading troops have to wait to use the toilet, because he wants to see what they'll do. Huh? And then the king will only negotiate with the other side if there's a live ostrich in the tent, and the other king seems to assume this is some fiendishly clever tactic. Double huh? The scrollover text says "Wow, the fog of war really stinks," which doesn't clarify things for me even a tiny bit.

posted by Ursula Hitler to Media & Arts (17 answers total)

Not knowing anything about the strip, I read it as:
- the king wants to see how the troops are going to deal with the call of nature; the amassed troops have to obey it at some point...they can't just stand there the entire time; it may be an vulnerability if a bunch of them leave a gap in the surrounded-ness of the the castle
- asking for the live ostrich is just a hard thing to get, helping to drive the delay to see how the troops with deal with the call of nature
posted by chiefthe at 5:27 PM on August 18

You've pretty well got it. The King has come upon the "shower thought" of "how the heck DO 50,000 soldiers all arrayed in battle formation handle their bathroom needs?"

A quick calculation says that if everyone needs to go once every, say, 4 hours, that amounts to an average of over 200 soldiers per minute hitting the bathroom. So how DO they do it?

Presumably everybody can hold it for a while but then after 20 or 30 or 60 minutes or whatever, now you got literally thousands of tens of thousands of people all needing to do their bathroom duty all at once.

For some reason you never see this aspect of war in the neatly arrayed battalions in front of a seige (or in movies, books, etc).

The king has had the (at least mildly amusing) thought that they don't see how bathroom activity is working right now, but if they delay long enough they are going to find out in a big way.

This is amusing both because thinking about bathroom activities is kinda funny (whole premise of Oglaf), thinking about them in terms of a giant army arrayed in battle is even funnier and more extreme (same premise multiplied by 50,000), even more so because no one every really brings this up in any of the movies, books, and other talk about armies and wars, and most of all because when besieged by a giant army this is usually the very last thing you are worried about. Yet it is uppermost in the King's mind.

Ha! Ha!

Given the order, the messenger comes up with some bizarre and completely made up excuse to delay the negotiations for a while. This is mildly funny just because it is completely nonsensical and it is pretty obvious the messenger is just completely pulling it out of his ass. This also helps make the next part even funnier, because we know the ostrich business is just a steaming load of bullshit with no actual meaning.

Finally, when presented with the demand about the ostrich, and realizing that his army has the opposing king completely surrounded and at their mercy, the attacking king is completely befuddled and can only imagine that the besieged king has some completely unexpected, nefarious, and dangerous plan up his sleeve, because otherwise why would he be confident to make such a strange and difficult demand?

This is funny because the actual situation is the besieged king is obsessed about toilet matters and that is all there is to it (again one of Oglaf's obsessions - bathroom stuff). But due to the intervening chain of events it has made the attacking king believe the besieging king is some kind of tactical genius. Now he is scared about what might happen, assumes the besieged city is very strong and has something definite up their sleeve, and maybe will just pack his army up and run off rather than waiting around to find out the horrible thing the besieged king has up his sleeve.

And all that because besieged king is a weeny who is hyper-obsessed with bathroom stuff.
posted by flug at 5:38 PM on August 18

King recognizes that the surrounding troops have a major sanitation problem that will just get worse over time. Makes up something random to delay negotiation while time passes.

I find it very funny actually. I wonder how many real life sieges have ended that way?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:45 PM on August 18

I have a different problem with this strip. The messenger clearly works for the surrounding army - he tells the besieged king "Our legions have you surrounded". So why would he co-operate in the delay/ostrich scheme? Why would the besieged king even ask him to do so in a way that reveals the whole point is just to fuck with the messenger's boss?
posted by Paul Slade at 12:36 AM on August 19

Because he honestly doesn't know! And now he also feels the need to know.
posted by inexorably_forward at 1:01 AM on August 19

Some Oglaf comics have multiple parts. Is it possible that this is the first bit of a multi-post story?
posted by Nerd of the North at 2:14 AM on August 19

I wonder how many real life sieges have ended that way?

Very few, I should think. Presumably, one of the first jobs the besieging army tackled on arriving at the castle was to dig enough latrine ditches to cope with however many soldiers it had in its forces. Every group within the army is then allocated a certain time in the day when they can break ranks to go eat and take a shit. The next group doesn't get its turn until the first lot gets back and so on. Day shifts and night shifts take care of what happens after dark.

Assuming you organise your army into enough smaller groups, the soldiers remaining on duty never fall below the number needed to securely maintain the siege. I mean, I know nothing about medieval warfare, but surely that must be how it worked?
posted by Paul Slade at 4:55 AM on August 19

You may be overthinking this. It's Oglaf.

The king has identified a major logistical and hygienic issue for the besieging army. Rather than focusing on how to turn this to his advantage and save his skin, he's a proper pervert and is instead delighted by the opportunity to indulge extremely particular fantasies. The enemy commander assumes this is a ruse, wildly misreading his opponent.
posted by figurant at 8:07 AM on August 19

I wonder how many real life sieges have ended that way?

In the ancient and the medieval world and even the early modern era, armies were frequently swept with epidemics of dysenteric diseases. They were already frequently endemic in most large cities. The Romans understood the importance of public sanitation better than many - they build the Cloaca Major, the main sewer under the city of Rome quite early in their history. But Rome was one of the very few cities that had proper sewers to carry off effluent. The fact that they built their city on a swamp may have clued them in to the necessity of drainage and waste management early. Many cities and military camps ended up foul indeed. Sewers and latrines were not standard features. There is a reason why War, Famine and Death have a fourth sibling, named Pestilence. At a classic siege War arrived first, then both sides ran out of food, and then both sides, with too many people crammed in a small space, ran into severe public health problems.

Great military tacticians of the past do not seem to mention digging latrines. I think the main reason for this would have been that wherever an army went it would have been surrounded by filth - they were famed for it. It was almost always easier to simply walk away from it. You didn't want to stay in one place unless it was a spot critical for you to defend. You kept your soldiers moving, walking them from one source of provisions to the next. That was much more efficient than bringing the food to them. So if your army stayed in a place for two or three days, they didn't dig latrines, they just stepped far enough away from the place they were going to be sleeping and used that, in the open air, on the surface, for a latrine instead. Once your army had eaten up every bit of food they could find and the town and surrounding area was stripped bare you took up marching again, and marched only to the next location where you could re-provision.

So armies had a tolerance for the waste that always appeared around them and didn't go to much trouble to bury it. After all, digging latrines was unlikely to be any use at all from the point of view of preventing dysenteric diseases - open pit latrines didn't reduce flies, while also bringing the waste matter closer to the water table and making your effluent harder to recover and carry it away. But local creeks and streams could be converted into open sewers which meant you didn't have to sleep near that stench. If you were occupying enemy territory you might even choose to deposit your waste into wells. The local shallow wells in the area of an army were almost inevitably going to be tainted when an army came through even if you didn't do it on purpose. Armies avoided disease by keeping moving. If they dug latrines they ended up spending longer in the location than if they just stepped off the road and left their waste in the nearest convenient location.

To give specific examples of problems involving public health and sewage during sieges, the siege of Harfleur was short, but both side suffered badly from dysentery. The 30,000 men on the besieging English side were reduced to as few as 12,000 despite there being very few open clashes and no significant pitched frontal assaults. Dysentery was the main killer. A little later during that same war, the field commander, Henry V of England himself caught dysentery at the siege of Meaux and died in 1422, passing away some weeks later. (Dysentery often kills over a period that can be counted in months, as you basically starve to death once you can't keep your food inside you long enough to digest it.)

King Louis VIII of France died of dysentery in 1226, believed to have been contracted at the siege of Avignon. You could make a long list: John, King of England, dead of dysentery contracted while on campaign, 1216; General Lord Raglan in the Crimea, 1865; Carl von Clausewitz, the master strategist in 1831... If you hung out with armies you expected to get a bad case of excessive mobility in your lower digestive tract on a periodic basis.

It wasn't until 1854 that someone finally made the connection between horrible epidemics of disease and bacteria from sewage getting into the water supply and convinced other people to pay attention to the theory. Until then people didn't treat sewage disposal as a public health matter of life and death. Effluent was so critical to their agriculture, you see. Not only was animal manure essential to producing crop yields high enough to sustain the population, but human waste was also, as it provided an invaluable source of fertilizer. They saw the main problem with the massive sewage production of cities as one of transportation. How could they get that valuable fertilizer to the fields? It was being wasted! Our ancestors, seeing fields surrounding a previously besieged town now foul with excreta, would have not been entirely disheartened - sure, the next couple of years the nitrogen content of those fields would have been too high for hopes of a good harvest, but wait a bit and the next few years after that? Magnificent!

Hookworm and pin worms were expected as a matter of normal life, not seen as a reason to avoid touching that newly and crudely fertilized earth in the fields around the besieged fort, which would have been seething with them after a few hundred infected soldiers had moved their bowels there, - and if you DID get a slight touch of diarrhea - that wasn't a bad thing, as it helped expel those worms. Everybody had worms. That was one of the reasons they survived at all, because having worms seems to be great training for your immune system. Back then, if you didn't get a bout or two of "summer dysentery" every year, you would be well advised to take a purgative and arrange for a full, exhausting and dehydrating evacuation of your entire digestive system. In eleventh century Norwich the infant mortality rate was over 60% and the vast majority of them died of dysenteric diseases. Our ancestors pretty much considered periodic diarrhea inevitable, because it was. Worms and the runs - one kept the other in check.

So the king being besieged in the Oglaf comic appears to be following an age old, often successful defense. Keep your enemy as close outside your walls as possible, for as long as possible and let Famine, Pestilence and Death take care of as many of them as possible. Delay actual battle, because every hour you delayed meant that the besiegers would slowly be ticking through their supplies of safe drinking water (or wine or beer), and food. Twenty four hours could make a big difference, because your local populace not already inside your fortifications would be scrambling to get their livestock and food stores hidden or carried away. The more men lined up outside your walls, the more time it gave your own populace to survive, get away, and if grimly intent on making things very hard for the besiegers, to poison their own wells, set fire to any grain fields they couldn't harvest, and slaughter any livestock they couldn't take away with them.

Once the besiegers had to send a portion of their forces away from your walls seeking for a place to squat that they wouldn't have to stand in, and for food and water, the siege was going in the right direction from your point of view. Every day they would have to send a higher percentage of them out foraging, and those men would have to go farther away and be away for longer. In a week and a half, half your besieging army could be either unfit for combat due to debility from diarrhea, or else thirteen miles away roaming a wooded area poking spears into the banks hoping to find caches where the local peasants had hidden their planting seeds...

Any chance your cousin the Duke of Oglafarien would be up for raising a small force and sending them riding hard to the area in order to harass the small parties of soldiers your opponents send out foraging? A couple of hundred men on horse can cause a besieging army a world of hurt. They have to go out in force to forage, but when they do that they are now slow enough and visible enough that byres can be well alight, and livestock running lose in the woods before they get there.

Every delay you can get works in your favor when you are under siege in your own territory. There have been historical cases where larger force besieged a smaller one and took casualties much higher than the number of defenders - and the defenders, upon surrendering, were allowed to go free, and took no casualties at all. If you lose two hundred men to take a small hill fort with just twenty men in it have you actually won? But if you don't besiege the fort it remains a stronghold organizing the local populace to resist you... And if you don't offer them favorable surrender terms you could end up losing four hundred men instead, and there are still seven other small hill forts that need to be taken... Maybe you better offer them their lives, weapons and anything they can carry out of the fort in return for a promise to go far, far away? The stench outside this fort is getting baaad. And now my tummy hurts.

How long does it take to find an live ostrich? Sounds like a delaying tactic to me.
posted by Jane the Brown at 9:44 AM on August 19

Dang Jane the Brown, this turned out to be a surprisingly educational AskMe for a question about Oglaf.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:00 PM on August 19

Figurant, I know Oglaf well enough that my first assumption was that there had to be some kinky shenanigans going on. But the king's curiosity just seems kind of detached and academic, he doesn't have a pervy gleam in his eye, and he asks the messenger if they can prolong how long the soldiers have to wait. It doesn't seem like he's pushing the other side into a humiliating situation, so much as he's asking them to do this just to see what happens. And then the messenger goes and tells the other king that the first king wants a live ostrich in the tent while they negotiate, which has nothing to do with this toilet business.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 1:01 PM on August 19

Some Oglaf comics have multiple parts. Is it possible that this is the first bit of a multi-post story?

That was my assumption.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 5:47 PM on August 19

I doubt it's the first part of a series. I think it's just a joke that doesn't work, and it doesn't work in ways that are so puzzling it seems like there's got to be more to it.

Having sat with it a while, I think the joke is something about how the king gets fascinated by weird, random things. Faced with an invading army, all he can think about is this question of how the troops manage to go to the toilet. He wants to experiment by prolonging the process, just to see what happens. Later he sends a message that he's willing to negotiate but he wants a live ostrich there, because now he's curious about what will happen if a giant, flightless bird is there when the two kingdoms are trying to work out a truce. The other king assumes this is some sort of devious strategy, but no, the first king just wants to see what happens again.

Assuming that's what Oglaf's creators were going for, it's a strange, convoluted premise that's not executed very well. Oglaf is quite good most of the time, but every now and then they'll come up with a real baffler like this one.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 1:00 AM on August 20

You can tell if an installment of Oglaf is the first part of a multi-post story because the lower right corner is not cropped off. When the corner is cropped into that angled bevel, that means the story has come to an end. This comic has the cropped corner and is therefore not continuing.
posted by ejs at 4:16 AM on August 20

I think it's just a joke that doesn't work

I'm really straining to see how people don't get this.

"You've got me surrounded? A huge army, you say? Let's see what happens when I drag this out and you all endlessly shit your pants." The ostrich is an absurd delaying tactic to achieve this end.

That's it. That's the joke. It's in the title of the strip. It's also in the mouse over.
posted by some little punk in a rocket at 3:58 AM on August 22

I think you're assuming the king has more power in this situation than he does. The other side is ready to attack at any time. He can't force them to wait. He politely asks them to wait, because he'd like to see what happens if they do. He seems much more curious than calculating to me. I'll admit that the title seems to support your read, but this isn't as stupidly obvious as you seem to think.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 1:17 PM on August 22

I'm assuming the king wants to drag this out because he wants people to shit their pants, because that's the punchline. It's not a study of diplomatic relations in asymmetrical warfare, or psyops as a siege tactic. It's not asking for deep insights into the relative strategic positions and objectives of the characters. It's Oglaf.
posted by some little punk in a rocket at 3:28 AM on August 23