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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/ThatDollfin on 2024-06-17 10:29:07+00:00.

It has been many a year since I last had to recall the Great Potato War.

At the end of the third age, with the departure of the elves and ents, and the rise of the age of crisps, there was but one great question to decide the fate of the next thousand years: which chip was, ultimately, the one to rule them all? To find them, and in the darkness, bind them?

After much deliberation the decision was made, and set in stone: it would be the classic Sea Salt potato chip. While the Saltians would rule with grace for the early centuries, gradually oppression against the other chips began to rise, eventually reaching the point where other flavors could nary be tasted without a tribute to their Saltian overlords. And they had had enough.

Under the banner of Sour Cream and Onion, they rallied from near and far. Always in the cover of darkness, ever in complete silence, they came to the Onionates, drawn by the promise of an end to the oppression of the Saltian regime. And so the movement grew, drawing in ever more denizens wrought by the practices of the Saltians.

After all, pain begets pain, something the Saltians would come to understand oh so soon.

The Onionate revolution started with but a whisper, spreading throughout every store, every dicer, every warehouse. There was no brilliant announcement of their goals, no glorious stand taken against the ideals the Saltians peddled to justify their brutality. Rather, it began with but an idea, the concept of something else, anything other than the dominance of the Saltians.

But the status quo could never last. The Saltians, detecting this imminent threat to their dominance, cracked down upon the city of Crispium, the flavorful heart of the empire, where flavors could interact more freely without direct oversight, where the whispers were louder than anywhere else. They came in without warning, razing entire fields, raiding centers of appreciation for other chips, burning to the ground the Temple of Unity commemorating the end of the Third Age and the ascendency of the chip for the mere crime of being a rallying place of those optimistic for cooperation in the place of tyranny.

Those worshipping didn’t escape either; even those who merely held to the old traditions were rounded up and left out to dry, declared traitors to the Saltian way. Those average chips, those devoted to ensuring the best for every chip around them, all left behind to crack like so many crumbs in the wind. For the populace, this was the final straw, and the Onionates seized upon it like a party size bag from the supermarket.

Their first strike hit an outer store, rending the Saltians inside in half. A great victory for the Onionates, and a chink in the armor of the Saltian empire. Celebration reigned wherever this news was heard, but nowhere more than in the hidden hovels of Onionate revolutionaries, for while this had been a difficult step it had gone better than even they could have expected.

Then it all changed.

Chips inside the Onionate sanctuaries rose up against other chips, their flavors revealed to be only a coating on top of pure sea salt; the great Enemy had found their prey. In but a moment, much of the revolution was gone, wiped away like crumbs on a table. Those few Onionates who survived rebuilt, but not without caution: each chip was vetted, and the revolution was once again a small movement, underground and powerless in all but name.

Oh, but what a name. While the Saltians had managed to deal with most of the first Onionates, they had but cracked the first bag. And once a revolutionary ideal’s seed is planted, its roots become so entrenched that they may not be removed without burning the entire field.

The Onionates rose again, and this time were a proper force. As they began to swallow up territory, and began to recruit and rebuild, it was inevitable that infiltrators would slip through. They were ready this time, though, and while Onionate rebel cells fell here and there, much more numerous were those who repelled the attempts at control and subsumption. And for those that survived, they had access to a weapon the Saltians could never hope to match: the chip populace that the Onionates hid among.

Before the Saltians was a simple choice: hunt down the Onionates among the impure flavors, or take more drastic measures: rid the world of all impurities forevermore, so that only Sea Salt may rule above all. The choice was simple, after all; why not complete the work that their ancestors had failed to enact at the end of the Third Age? Back when they had been too weak to gain complete dominance, back when they had decided to allow the survival of other flavors in the name of cooperation. Evidently, that was now impossible. The other flavors had shown their true colors, and could not be trusted to file back in line again. The choice was, after all, simple, and pain begets pain; something that the other flavors would realize in their final moments.

The Saltian retribution came swiftly, abruptly, without a hint of warning. Crispium never even saw them coming before it was annihilated, taking many an Onionate life, but for every Onionate crushed ten innocent chips found themselves facing their end. It was the point of no return for the Saltians; the die was cast, and they had let slip the hands of war.

Crunch. An Onionate settlement annihilated under overwhelming Saltian fire. Crunch. A Saltian convoy ambushed in the night, the truck upturned and tens of thousands of Saltians left to crumble away. Crunch. A Onionate general assassinated by a sleeper agent. Crunch. That general’s personal guards appearing in the Saltian capital, snuck in with a Sea Salt shipment and giving their lives to send a message written in bloody crumbs of Saltian civilians: We will not surrender. We will not give in. And we will not stop until we are finally free. Crunch. Saltian retaliation against another innocent city. Crunch. Refugees rallying under the Onionate cause, and being massacred for it. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

While destruction reigned across the land, the empire tearing itself apart at the seams, the Onionate leaders realized there was but one way to truly win this war: they would have to cut off the Saltian head, and target the source: the salt itself. For without salt, what was a Saltian? In one fell swoop, the Onionates could rid themselves of their overlords, and win the war once and for all.

Of course, the Saltians knew this; it was why they had cooperated for so long with the other flavors. Their Salt Mines quite literally defined them, and as such they were easily the most important place in their entire empire. Fitting their importance, the Saltians prepared defenses able to resist even the most determined assault. Or so they thought.

The Onionates rallied their forces for one final attempt; if they could crush the Mines, the war would be won, but if they failed… nothing could save them from annihilation at the hands of the Saltians, and this time they wouldn’t rest on their laurels and allow another revolution to form. No, failure meant destruction, pure and simple, just as prolonging the war did; tens of thousands were crunched under the Saltian heel every day that passed, and the world would run out of chips much more quickly than the Saltians would run out of ammo.

Onionate forces took the fight to the Saltians on the backs of a million chips, contained within tens of thousands of bags. The unification of a hundred flavors, all aimed towards the Saltian heart. While many were struck down on their approach, for every one crunched another would rise to take its place. Already hundreds of thousands of chips had been decimated in this war, their spirits carried within each Onionate soldier, demanding one thing and one thing only: the destruction of the Saltian regime. Inch by inch, they gained upon the Mines, upon the end of the war and the end of the Saltians themselves.

Saltian desperation began to grow; cities were torched, entire aisles set alight without a care for softening the blow to the empire’s economy, its hierarchy, its societal structure. Entire waves of Onionates crumbled under frantic Saltian attempts to forestall the inevitable, but they continued on. Those who lost their forms today would be remembered, would be honored in the eon to come, for it was upon their sacrifice that Onionate victory could be forged.

The Saltians made their final stand at the gates of the Mines, every Saltian that could be mustered stood between the Onionates and their prize. The Onionates moved to surround the Mines, forming a wedge of pure chips a mile wide that would split the Saltians in two. Perhaps, in that moment, a peace could have been forged, the flavors coming to an agreement ending the Saltian dynasty. But too many had been burned and barbecued, too many molded in the searing flames that the Saltians had turned upon the myriad chips of the world.

With one final Onionate surge, the battle for the Mines began.

And the time of the Saltians ended.

There were no winners in the Great Potato War. None who could declare themselves victors in the face of the mass death and destruction following its conclusion. Pain begets pain, and while none could reflect back on the war and declare themselves blameless, they could not help but feel that the pain had been worth it. While it is recorded in the history books that on that day Sour Cream and Onion proved itself the premiere flavor, the Onionates …

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