I'm afraid the Deku Scrub caption was taken down, so I may have to get stricter with filtering these things. My apologies; I don't like having to blur everything but it is what it is I guess ☹️
I might have to maybe set up an external web page for the controversial ones.
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World War Three. The War to Start All Wars. The Transmutation War.
Looking back at the smouldering rubble that is the 21st century, historians still struggle to determine exactly when WW3 began, if it ever did at all. Certainly there never was any formal declaration between states, since, for the most part, the war not fought by them. The progression of cloning, including the introduction of Single-Use-Bodies into bio-drone warfare, deeply impersonalised combat, while allowing war to be prosecuted on global scales by small-scale, amateur operators so long as they possessed a 3D bio-printer to manufacture an army, and protein feedstock. Additionally, developments in memetic and genetic alteration meant that new recruits could often be sourced by the forced conversion of opponents. Towards the latter half of the century, programmable implant-wombs became the barracks of choice, allowing petty warlords and warladies to scour battlezones for worthy genetics, creating and deploying soldiers from their own bodies, to be birthed and die on the battlefield.
Right vs Left. Pink vs Blue. Anarcho-syndicalists communists vs corporatist proprietarians. Trans, transhumanists, and tradhumanists. Religious zealots and political radicals of every flavor. Idealists and bare-faced opportunitists. In the ever-mutable warzone of World War Three, there were not two sides, but seven billion, each man fighting his own petty cause. The traditional nation states simply held on for dear life in the hopes of living out the century. Ultimately, the biological weapons of war themselves slipped their leashes to fight for their own existence, adding to their chaos, their hundreds of tiny fiefdoms nibbling at the edges of existing borders. The world map of today, with its 1̶2̶,̶8̶7̶6̶ 12,910 sovereign nations, would make little sense to a person of the 2020s, or perhaps, to someone from a week ago, as it must be updated hourly.
The September 2034 Hormone Bombing is often cited as the start of the slow slouch into war, when terrorists flooded the first parliamentary assembly of the breakaway Republic of Uralia with exstrogen, a potent estrogen analog. It was the first use of weaponised hormones against civilian targets, and the images it generated are seared into the public consciousness, as politicians transformed into quivering breast-mounds live on television. The theorised payload contained enough exstrogen to feminise the population of North America and still, to this day, a 10-mile exclusion zone remains in place around the area within which no male organism can survive, fought over by gynocratic warbands, and haunted by the siren wails of ambulatory ovaries.
The perpetrators (nothing more than a three-man group of anti-secessionists) were quickly found and brought to justice. Much of the horrifying footage was destroyed. But an uneasy feeling remained. The sense that the age old certainties of war were a thing of the past.