So is 'war porn' a thing now?

It's just a general thing where video exists. It will make the TV news often, when if there was no video, it would never be considered worthy of inclusion in the radio news.

sex sells, and war is very sexy!

This has been around for years. The only change is the sheer amount of material available now.

It 100% is, especially amongst 'the Sun' clientele.

They seem very happy to have found people (Russians) whose deaths can be officially and without impunity cheered on together with the vilest insults. Plenty of that type around here too. Just have a look at all those couch toy soldiers in the Russia thread.

I think it's a mixture of things and I doubt that feeling "joy" about seeing a human die is part of it, at least for the vast majority of viewers or commenters on that type of content.

For one thing, the Ukraine war in particular is probably the most "open-source" war in history. Up until just a few years ago, most information that got out about a war was highly curated or censored by both sides, with things like gun camera footage from aircraft or tank sights only released sparingly and often years after the fact. Nowadays, were living in an age that is a paradise for OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence), with soldiers often having their smartphones with them even in battle. Recording and uploading a video takes only a couple of seconds, and with both sides in the conflict operating militarized civilian drones, mostly from DJI, which are controlled by smartphones, this is probably very tempting especially if the drone operator manages a particularly noteworthy bomb drop (through the branches of a tree into the open hatch of an APC underneath, for example). That goes beyond just "combat footage", by the way. People tend to record anything that's out of the ordinary, which leads to military convoys having their progress documented often in real time.

It goes even beyond that. Newspapers, and even individuals, have access to resources that would have made any general green with envy even as recently as the early 2000s: Flight & ship tracking websites like marinetraffic.com or flightradar24.com can allow remarkable insight into aircraft and ship movements, whilst anyone can get a satellite image of any part of the world that is at most a few days old (weather permitting) using websites like Sentinel Hub. I only have a superficial interest in OSINT, and even for me, the amount of information available is dizzying.

Secondly, a lot of social media users these days grew up around the likes of Battlefield, Call of Duty, ArmA or strategy game like World in Conflict or even the old Command & Conquer series. Gamers of my generation also likely experienced the first wave of "hardcore" military simulators from the late 1990s that simulated things like the F-16 or Eurofighter with such a level of depth that you'd wonder why the ministries of defense in many countries didn't raise hell with the developers. For a lot of these people, seeing their FPS games, sims and strategy games play out in real life is undoubtedly fascinating. I'll be honest, for me, this is definitely the case, as horrifying as the human and humanitarian toll of this senseless war is.

I was imagining a young Famke Janssen lookalike semi-clad in army uniform getting a good rogering inside a T72

A trench outside Kyiv with a few youngwans bent over a large wooden post and a queue of soldiers puffing away on their fags as they await their turn

An orgy taking place in the back of an army truck with strategically placed ammo boxes

Open-Source Intelligence

That sounds like a contradiction in terms 😂

I get what you mean though and your interest in the subject, but I think what the OP is referring to are the kind of people who enjoy the opportunity to dehumanise human beings and enjoy watching their “enemies” suffer.

It’s not new, and calling it ‘war porn’ is a euphemism for the fact that it is nothing more than propaganda, no different than “open source citizen journalism”, that goes back as far as recorded history - once humans can be stripped of their humanity, that makes it acceptable to regard them as though they’re not human, which makes it acceptable to derive a certain satisfaction in their suffering and still feel righteous about it.

We did see have a post on another thread showing a Russian soldier getting head from another Russian soldier on his knees before a Ukrainan drone dropped a grenade on them,

War porn ???

Even before that, many armies had dedicated war artists, sending back sketches and paintings from the battlefield.

With the advent of film, they soon tired out trying to keep up with drawing explosions at 25 frames a second in real time.

oops meant to save draft but was actually in a send post window. wrong thread too ffs

To be fair they are getting paid relatively well by the Russians to die in their droves.

You obviously haven't looked at any Russian accounts,

But no surprise there comrade

Unfortunate Russians? I thought they were all subhuman "Orcs"? If you are going to dehumanise, please be consistent.

The Sun.

That's where you went wrong. Right there.