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Image: http://img.ponibooru.org/_images/0421bfdf75df8187f9a9ee182ec932af/38733%20-%20Artist%3AMoe%20Derpy_Ducreux%20Scrunchy_Face%20archaic_rap%20awesome%20derpy_hooves%20epic%20joseph_ducreux%20meme%20scrunchy.png
I will need to devote sometime to read this alas I have none 
Hmmmmm... The Plot of the story is pretty good, but its taking forever to pick up. Its just been 4 chapters of booooooring! And I know you need to get all the plot stuff out of the way, but you need to put little doses of action in between the plot development.
Good reading so far though, and I will continue reading 
[Spoilers]
I just read the whole thing and I'm looking forward to see where this goes. Juxtaposing children's cartoon characters with the horrors of war does make a powerful read. The author put them in all kinds of moral dilemmas and used their strengths against them. They all will be mentally scared for life. They'll probably be fighting PTSD, alcoholism, and will probably be on suicide watch when all of this is over.
The author set up pretty powerful moral dilemmas for the whole crew and was in the process of nailing down Rarity and Twilight Sparkle, as of to date their moral dilemmas appear to be not yet fully realized. The two were in a village where they were arguing about tithe for the troops. The village was already raided by the enemy and would not make it through the rest of the winter if the levy was paid. The outcome has not yet come home to roost unlike many of the other moral dilemmas.
Of all the dilemmas,I found Pinky's to be the most disturbing. Being the embodiment of laughter and fun, the author chose not to put her in a role of something more suited for her such as Moral Officer, but instead, in charge of a light infantry brigade due to her agility and speed. As a leader, she has to use her "party skills" to send troops to their deaths, whereby afterwards she has a hard time expressing her grief and pain, almost as if she has no vocabulary or frame of mind to do so. Those scenes were arguably amongst the most disturbing pros of the story.
Fluttershy's shyness translates into utter cowardliness--with the possibility of redemption as this is still a work in progress.
Rainbow Dash's ability to tactically out-think her superiors without regards to the complete strategy behind the battle gets her an arguably undeserved promotion and she will be forever guilt ridden and a diminished tactician who will be second guessing herself and will follow orders to the letter, perhaps to the point of suicide.
I'm not sure what Applejack's moral dilemma is. Maybe the author didn't make one yet. The plot line so far is that if she's proven by the Elements of Harmony to be the dependable one, but her troops were the first to break rank and flee. Compared to some of the other moral dilemmas this was the mildest by far.
Derpy though not part of the Mane Six is prominently featured. Because of her cross eyes,she was teased in childhood and she moved away in hopes of a new start, but that did not happen. She found that she was teased wherever she went--until she finally stood and fought. This character quirk in the time of war makes her morph into both a great and terrible resistance fighter and army leader where subordinates simultaneously respect and fear her. How far she can push her people to win the war without loosing her soul is the big question. She sits on a knifes edge and one wonders if she is at the tipping point, where not even Big Macintosh can pull her back.
It's fun to speculate on the future direction of this story. The most powerful weapon they have is of course The Elements of Harmony, but that only works when the characters realize their friendship. The story is set up such that the characters are so damaged and traumatized that it will be interesting to see how the author heals them enough for the weapon to actually work.
The story reads as if the author is looking for maximum character conflict. If so, if all the characters are damaged then they will all have that in common thus potentially lessening conflict. If the author leaves one of the characters alone--or less damaged, that can create conflict as the others can turn on her.
I would be interested in seeing what others thought of the story and what directions and twists they would like to see in the story.
*Spoiler*
Applejacks crisis came from the results of her total honest with her troops, including her uncertainty regarding the competency of her superiors, thus aiding in, if not causing the rout of unit. She takes this as a lesson that one must lie in war, or at the very least, be less than forthcoming with the troops.
*Spoiler*
Applejacks crisis came from the results of her total honest with her troops, including her uncertainty regarding the competency of her superiors, thus aiding in, if not causing the rout of unit. She takes this as a lesson that one must lie in war, or at the very least, be less than forthcoming with the troops.
The parts with screwball throw me off abit, but then again, I haven’t read that story, but probably will now.
As for the story as a whole, I’ve really enjoyed it in a masochistic sort of way. I would say I am much more than a casual war history buff and feel that I am as familiar with the trials and horrors of war that one can be from reading it on paper, watching it on film, and hearing about it from those that where there. Reading as these ponies are exposed to the horrors of total war takes something I normally equate with joy and happiness and plunges it straight into hellish conflict. It hurts more than a little to read, but then again, that fact that it hurts shows that the author has managed to pull on some emotion from me and keep me interested and reading, even though I know it will only get worse.
So in keeping with the theme of masochism I eagerly await you to hit me in the face with the next chapter.
Holy crap, that was sad. Be assured, had this was a true story, I would be rolling on my bedroom floor, bawling my eyes out.
Especially this part:
[Pinkie popped up again with a start. "Why...why isn't everypony laughing? Don't they see? Look at Peachy, Bubblepop. Look at her. We told her she'd be fine. We told her that her wound wasn't that bad. We told her she'd be okay. And she believed us, Bubblepop! And now...oh God isn't it awful?" She stroked Peach Cream's hair again. "And now she's cold, and she's stiff, and she'll never laugh or smile or do anything but stare dead ahead, straight ahead, looking at nothing, feeling nothing, being nothing, nothing, nothing how can a pony be nothing that doesn't even make sense does it Bubblepop? Does it?"]
I really wanted to cry at that. Amazingly profound writing sir, you have made me feel the pain six imaginary ponies woulf have felt
Five bucks says that the identity of the Grey Mare is going to totally mess with Twilight's head; after all, she still thinks of Derpy as the muffin-loving mailpony who dropped the anvil on her head, not the morally conflicted warrior who's emerged from inside the Occupied Territories.
Hmm...First I thought the king was mad. But....its true. We really don't understand how Equestria works.
I remember when I first watched "Bridle Gossip" and I got a chill watching the ponies get a chill describing a perfectly normal ecosystem like on Earth.
And then I realized. "Oh my. This is whats going to happen when we first met aliens. Our two species are going to creep the shit out of each other."
Of course, speaking of speculative Science Fiction, we might actually have this problem someday in the future. If someone's vision of paradise involves terraforming a planet in a way the goes much, much further than just making it inhabitable, but to make the weather always perfect or something...and this has fallout that negatively impacts this other colony which is trying to keep a few endangered and fragile species of animal alive on said planet and they need a specific temperature to be this dry and this hot so the ecosystem can sustain...
....actually, I have no idea what would happen next. But all wars really are fought over land, after...
"Luna and I will retire to the capital and stay under heavy guard; our lives are imperative."
Story logic dictates that she's going to going to get assassinated.
speaking of assassinations, who thinks that sneaking into Canterlot to shank Celestia would be the coolest Assassin's Creed mission ever?
I have a question for the author: Where and when did you deploy? Either you have been a student of war for a long, long time or you've personally experienced it. And I really suspect the latter, there are emotions and feelings present here that would be hard for anyone but a soldier of the line to conceptualize, let alone put into words. Also, you're concepts of leadership and its requirements are spot-on.
Trust me, I've been on the line, and war is hell.
This is a damn good story, hell, change it to humans and you could probably publish it! (Not that you couldn't publish as is, it's just that bronies are kind of a small market!)
But what the hell happened to Spike? Is he off rallying support with the dragon government or something? Cause, you know, every good war needs dragons.
Thank you for your vote of confidence, but I've never served, and my experience with war is limited purely to history books, old training manuals I bought in used bookstores, and things my father--a navy captain--told me when I was young. And to be honest, I haven't ever studied war seriously; I'm no expert. If I get anything right about the emotions of war, it's either unconsciously cribbed from a letter from a 18th/19th-century soldier I once read, or it's a lucky guess from my incomplete knowledge of the demands, the conditions, and the day-to-day life of Napoleonic warfare. If I get anything right about leadership, I probably cribbed it from a letter some general officer wrote in the early 1800s, or from something my dad once told me. And, of course, when I get things wrong, it's because I'm a linguist/teacher in his 20s who ultimately knows very little about war. To paraphrase a common saying in academic writing: this paper owes much to the work of many people. Any faults are, of course, the author's.
Spike is alive. He will play an extremely minor role in what I hope will be a rather important moment.
Well, I'm sure things are not as they seem. It would be a bold move to kill off a main (mane) character, and with a story this powerful, you could probably get away with it. BTW, I tried putting the foreign language in Google translate, but to no avail. It translated a few German words but that's about it.
This is good also i am surprise you do not have the diamond dogs (Though i can see them being neutral on this, considering it just a terran war and has no concern for it sense they live underground (Though i see there leaders willing to make a deal for either in exchange for topside land)
btw there supposedly based on gnoll
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnolls
PS i see all three crusaders change during that (With sweetie belle questioning whats the point of this war if good people die cause of it.)
I gladly would, but...this is my first attempt at writing creative fiction of any sort. Well, I mean, other than high-school English-class projects, obviously. I'm afraid I don't have a back catalog of any sort to point you to, unless you'd like to read my findings regarding whether corpus data of children's preposition use supports the Chomskyan view of parameter-setting as regards pied-piping, but frankly the battle scenes in that one were amateurish, and the Evans Corpus/Garvey Corpus shipping was just embarrassing and I have stretched this joke way too fucking far.
Anyway, perhaps it was a bit silly to attempt a hundred-thousand-word war epic starring ponies for my first stab at creative writing, but it's been fun.
Old Equestrian is Anglo-Saxon.
Gryphon High Tongue is Old High German.
The few bits of Old Equestrian that have survived to this draft is accurate--or as accurate as I could make it. The High Tongue fragment is just a line from a poem, because I couldn't be arsed to labor through a translation into a fifteen-hundred-year-old dead language only specialists can read. I cut out most of the Old Equestrian thrown in there because it was just linguistics wankery and who gives a shit. I did think Twilight's linguistics geekout was reasonably in character, so I scratched that itch there. By the way, it is somewhat accurate for the relationships between the two languages, but I changed a few things for reasons that are boring as fuck let's move on.
Equestria Total War: Come for the blood and thunder. Stay for the pony rambling for paragraphs about geminate consonants.
Now that I've gotten up off the floor and stopped laughing, let me reassure you that your writing is not silly. The subject matter here may be... whimsical, but if that's what inspires you than so be it. As someone else has said, if you were to change the characters to humans versus hmm... lets say elves, you'd have a decent work of modern fantasy here.
She's basically considered a hero by everyone who's not in a leadership position. To punish her would look bad. It's all political so her real punishment is going to be having to personally talk to all the dying ponies who she's guilty of causing to die.
Far more common than I've made it out to be. It wasn't until the advent of mechanized warfare that a soldier was more likely to die of a gunshot wound than to die of infection, disease, exposure or starvation. The most famous example is Napoleon's invasion of Russia, in which half a million men set out and only 120,000 survived--most of them prisoners of the Czar. Over two thirds of the losses were due to starvation and typhus, despite numerous battles.
I've had people message me asking me why I created a 'war story' that was largely ponies starving, marching, sitting in camps, and generally being miserable. That's what war has been throughout most of human history. My portrayal of war is still quite romanticized; it's just less romanticized than many. The story I wanted to tell isn't heroic ponies kicking ass in glorious war (though there is a place for heroic asskicking), but rather how ponies cope with the fact that war really, really sucks and that heroism is difficult in many ways.
I noticed a few grammatical errors as well. You might want to look this one over again.
And I personally think Twilight should have bucked Rarity in the face. What she dosent realize is that the whole point of an army is to protect the citizens. Letting the civilians die to protect the soldiers...well you might as well bring discord back again.
But if the soldiers die, who's going to protect the civilians?
If the civilians die, who is there to protect?
War changes people. You can sit there and talk about what you'd do all day, but I'd venture to guess that you'd have made the same decision were you in her position. It's all about survival, yours or theirs.
This story has begun to become very sad. Almost every chapter now I feel unusually strong feelings of grief and depression. At the beginning of some chapters, it looks as if things will get better, but they just end up sadder than the last. One step foreward, two steps back, emotionally.
All the characters appear to be in complete denial right now. Twilight sparkle is beginning to be shown the cold shoulder by her friends, sometimes even anamocity. Rainbow Dash has a massive cloud of guilt over her head, which at this point, seems like it will never leave. Rarity is beginning to become cruel, taking village's last bits of food to feed the army, not realizing that the whole point of an army is to PROTECT the civilians. Pinkie Pie is slowly becoming insane, possibly not even physically able to truly express her sorrow for her fallen comerades. Applejack has basically decided that honesty is no longer part of her policy, and seems hurt by the fact that her soldiers were the first to break and flee on the battlefeild(she seems to have the least charactet development by far). Derpy has reaized that she is repsected and honored by her soldiers, but not loved, which seems like what she wants above all. She realizes that she cant be the leader she is and be loved as she is, and I felt the saddest reading her parts.
The only character that is actually happy is Fluttershy, who has desserted the army and has been living in a cave with her animal friends, and is completely aware of the fact that she is unaware of anything happening in Equestria, and she really dosent care. Unfortuneately, I feel she is largly out of character. Noting her behavior in "dragonshy", where she stood up to her fears to save her friends, I can only feel that she is acting nearly completely opposite to canon Fluttershy. However, seeing as the writer seems so knowledgable about the characteristics of each pony, I'm betting he did that on purpose. Perhaps she has just "lost her way", and she will eventually realize what shes done, and return to her friend's aid.
Overall, an amazingly well written story, one that I will be impatiently awaiting for the ending.
I haven't left my dorm in like 6ish hours. (save running out for food once or twice.) tis now 1am, and i've hit this (as of now) last chapter. i've read some pretty captivating fics in the past, but this is just... i dont even know. i've never been into the dark, war type fics, but this just completely enthralled me. i look forward to much much more. this honestly is now in my top 2 or 3 fics. X3
Notes: Rarity is an idiot of the worst sort: the sort of idiot who thinks that she's smart. The problem with that sort of idiot is that her illusory wisdom is a light leading them to perdition. Five bucks says that she'll end the war with her empty little head still attached to its shoulders thanks to Derpy and still not have the brains or class to be grateful.
Curses Fluttershy, thou hast to redeem thyself. Army of deadly animals sounds about right. And for me I can understand why the Mane 6 are acting like they are, but honestly. Rarity, war changes people. Get over it and get the job done. Applejack, your allies were cowards when the fled. Pinkie, war is hell and no matter how much you laugh, no matter how much you try to cover it up, there will always be pain and there is no right way to fix it. Rainbow, ooo Rainbow you are the only one I see as being completely believable. Don't get me wrong, I am LOVING this story, but so far of the Mane 6, Twilight and Rainbow are the only two characters acting within the realms of probability. Rarity would never threaten somebody, Applejack would never hold back, Pinkie would find a way to deal with her pain and return to normal. But perhaps the biggest thing is Fluttershy. Fluttershy is a coward, she does fear conflict, she only wants peace, but she would NEVER abandon her friends like this. But maybe that's why I like this story, it shows them breaking from who they are. The story is amazing like I said, but it pains me to read this because it has me interested in who these ponies are becoming.
Unfortunately, war can and likely will change a person - or pony - in such a way...
I understand what you're getting at, however, in the fact that, in normal circumstances, this seems unlikely.
Don't get me wrong, I am in no way bashing you, I'm just... trying to stir up conversation, I guess? 
The "point" of the fic, so far (insofar as a fanfic can have a "point") is that extraordinary circumstances force people to change in order to cope. Twilight is the only one of the pony characters who is recognizably the same as when she began. I like to think my Rarity is still recognizably "Rarity," even though she doesn't act like Rarity at all; what she believes and does is different, but something of her identity remains.
I loved the Discord arc that S2 began with, and this is obviously similar. However, I'm not trying to invert their personalities. I'm trying to pervert them. Rarity was always a haughty, no-nonsense type beneath the surface; it was just tempered with her extraordinary desire to give what she had to others. I tweaked her belief that it was good to take from herself and give to others by putting her in zero-sum situations with life and death as the stakes, wrote what I thought she'd do one line at a time, and found to my surprise and delight that she became cruel and supercilious. In my mind, that's something Rarity's always had the potential to be; it's just that war has demolished the counterweights that made her a delightful friend.
Fluttershy is something of the opposite. She's always been nervous, but able to serious up and face the facts when her friends counted on her. I'm fairly satisfied with her early desertion. I was disappointed when she deserted as early as she did, since I wouldn't be able to write much with her (and I envisioned using her as a "wait this war business is cruel as fuck" reader mouthpiece), but really I didn't see her sticking around. Not purely because she was afraid for her own safety, but paradoxically because she was afraid for her friends'. Fluttershy is a sensitive pony that can overcome her fear of danger when her fear of her friends' danger is greater. But when both are maxed for extended periods of time...well, either she'd shut down or she'd break. Breaking seemed more in character to me at the time, but a strong case could be made for her sticking with it and simply becoming emotionally dead--not because it's more in-character, but because it's a very common actual response to emotional trauma (throughout history suicide has always been a leading cause of death among soldiers). Of course, for obvious reasons I'd rather write--and I suspect you'd rather read--Fluttershy in denial in her happy place instead of Fluttershy attempting or committing suicide during the winter.
Anyway. The reason I'm butting my authorial head into this conversation is to say two things. First, yes, the characters are moving away from their canon personalities, and have been since the very first moment they appeared. Second...keep in mind that the Mane 6 are still literal avatars of virtue, and that no matter what happens, as long as we're in Equestria, Friendship is still Magic.
>>32765 So long as its not like the one about the cupcakes. Although...damn, Nopony was expecting THAT reaction from Sweetie Belle.
Apple Bloom: Um, Fluttershy? When ya said yah were goin' to tell us a nice story about cupcakes, we weren't really expectin' that. It was a little...um...
Image: http://imageshack.us/f/21/creepysweetiebell.png/Sweetie Belle: OH MY GOSH, FLUTTERSHY, THAT WAS WONDERFUL! Mom and Dad and even Rarity NEVER let me read or watch anything violent and scary! It's the best story EVER!
Scootaloo: *hasn't moved an inch in any direction. since the end of the story*
dammit, why didn't it post?
Image: http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/5082/creepysweetiebell.pngI can't wait to see how you get Pinkie back. Of all the characters she seems the most PTSD. I can't imagine any speech that Twilight can give will take away the horrors that she saw. I'm guessing she is going to have to loose her memory or something. She really needs to be on suicide watch.
The Flashforward is a pastiche of several of Napoleon's speeches, including one given to the Army of Italy and one given to the Army of Egypt. The speech to Ponyville is original. The funeral oration is original. The Valley Foal speech is heavily inspired by The Crisis, read to Washington's troops at Valley Forge. Her speeches to the courtroom and to the townsfolk of Draughtsboro are obviously original, and aren't intended to be particularly 'good.'
You know, among the Mane 6, Fluttershy was obviously a bad choice for a lieutenant. But I was worried about Pinkie too. And it kept building until my worries were completely justified.
But seriously, Light Infantry? It seems like some kind of entertainer or something would fit her AND her element better. It might not protect her from all the horrors of war, but in the mean time, she could at least have a job trying to raise the entire army's morale. She'd still be on hand and travel with the army.
I don't have much of an objection to the other ponies' roles..(at least, when you keep in mind Celestia's reasoning for putting them in peril in the first place.) Although, at the same time, I have to agree that Fluttershy kind of made the right decision.
For her, I mean. And if the Elements are ever important, maybe for Equestria as well.
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