Stockholm Syndrome

During the Thousand Days, the single most devastated theater on the Scandinavian mainland was the city of Stockholm. (Visby was probably hit even worse, but it was much smaller by comparison, and the Visby Campaign didn't last nearly as long as the Battle of Stockholm did.) It was the world's first experience with industrialized urban warfare; it epitomizes the horror of violence in the era in almost exactly the same way that Verdun epitomized the Great War.

Götaland was probably the first time that any developed nation outside of Russia saw machine guns used in urban warfare. (The Russians beat the rest of the world to it by about ten years.) It was definitely the first place on Earth to see rocket warfare on that large a scale. And for more than two years, it never ended.

The age of industrial warfare introduced a new malaise to the soul of humanity: combat stress disorder. It's been known by many names: shell shock, the thousand-yard stare, battle fatigue, apparently kontuziya in Russian. It was the madness that was born of the trenches.

IRL, those were introduced in the trenches of Flanders. In Andalusada, that malaise will hatch in the alleys of Götaland. Scandinavia will be the first place to see bloodied people with dead, unfocused eyes. People with no scars who, years later, shatter when they hear a fireworks display or a car backfiring in the distance. The phenomenon will be traced back through history, and some people will be posthumously diagnosed with it, and there will be interesting taxonomies of what manner of disorder it is. But the world will call it by its name:

"Stockholm syndrome."