**DUDREDA** — Tensions in the Strait have reached a cultural breaking point.
The ongoing blockade in the Strait of Dudreda has entered what military historians are calling “the propaganda phase,” which in EVE terms means both sides are now producing posters, banners, and elaborate in-character manifestos accusing the other of crimes ranging from the mundane to the metaphysically impossible. The conflict, which began as a dispute over a Medium Navicitas Refinery in a system nobody had thought about since 2019, has now generated more community art than most actual wars.
The defending coalition released a propaganda poster this week depicting the attacking fleet as a nest of shrieking space rats emerging from a crack in reality, overlaid with the text “Dudreda Is Ours.” Stylistically ambitious. The problem is that close inspection of the poster reveals the background image to be a still from the 2019 EVE Online cinematic trailer featuring a Titan fleet over a planet that is definitively not Dudreda. The CCP logo is visible in the lower right corner. Several members of the attacking coalition have since set the poster as their desktop wallpaper, which the defending coalition has described as “ironic.”
The attacking coalition, unwilling to be outdone on the propaganda front but seemingly allergic to visual communication, responded by publishing a 4,000-word document titled “The Legal Status of the Strait of Dudreda Under Historical Maritime Law and Its Implications for Contemporary Sovereignty Disputes.” The document cites the Treaty of Westphalia, three different interpretations of UNCLOS, and a 14th-century Icelandic water dispute that the authors appear to have discovered during a genuinely extensive Wikipedia session. It does not contain any images. It does contain a footnotes section. It has been widely praised by people who have not read it and accused of being “unhinged” by people who have.
Both sides have called for a diplomatic solution. Neither side has explained what they are actually fighting over, which at this point may be the blockade itself. A follow-up propaganda poster featuring the opposing fleet as tax collectors has been announced but not yet released, pending legal review of whether “tax collector” is historically accurate enough to avoid the CCP promotional video problem.
