Rage Review: Resist and Bite (Chapter 6) · 5:18am Mar 23rd, 2020
Chapter 6: Heading to the Kirin village
In the very first paragraph of Chapter 6, we learn the following:
In Canterlot. Twilight Sparkle and her friends have been captured and arrested by the invaders in green suits and black chest armor. And they are now being lead to the throne room by three of them, and they were carrying the same brutal black metal weapons.
Okay.
First, though I know the Show itself has violated this principle (for example, when Cozy Glow captured Starlight), it's bad to have important and powerful characters be overcome offscreen and the fact merely related in summary. Even if General Metal Plates is a wu xia supervillain, his minions aren't, and a Mane Six plus group aware of what the enemies' weapons can and can't do could probably overcome a random patrol of MP's.,
Secondly, I still don't see how the Chinese PLA is restraining them all sufficiently enough that three random soldiers are casually leading them to the throne room. Yes, the soldiers are armed. But small arms aren't Magic Death Curses, and each of the Mane Six (and Spike, and Starlight Glimmer) has at least one (sometimes more than one) superhuman ability. They shouldn't be that easy to hold.
"Don't attempt to make a reckless move." One of the invaders warned them, but they all replied by rolling their eyes in irritation.
NARRATOR: The Ponies' eyes rolled all over the floor like marbles, and the guards' feet flew out from under them! The Mane Six took advantage of the distraction to seize their weapons and make a bold break for freedom!
No such luck, sadly. Though Discord could have done literally this: I wonder how they captured him?
Once they made it at the entrance of the throne room, two invaders pushed them open and the ponies saw the leader of the invaders sitting on a wheel chair in front of Twilight's destroyed throne.
Dear Author -- A "wheel chair" is a chair on which crippled people wheel themselves or are wheeled by other people around. I think you mean an "office chair," which is to say a "chair with wheels." That was the point of my earlier joke about the Chinese PLA being "handi-capable."
Twilight Sparkle attempts defiance but Jin threatens her with his combat knife, and informs her that he's already killed some other Ponies. Jin then dispatches her to the "enormous basement dungeon."
An MP reports the following:
"Sir, apparently our scanners detected an infiltrator in the land. And the infiltrator is working with this escaped fugitive Luster Dawn."
Scanners? To make this even stranger, he continues:
"Our scanners said that the infiltrator's name is called Charlie Lam, and he is an eighteen years old teenager from Australia."
How? Seriously, how would the Chinese security "scanners" (I would suppose videocameras, or such) tell them the name, age and nationality of the Human involved?
I can speculate. I would guess that perhaps the Chinese system could be connected to a visually-searchable database of most of the people in the world. That would even be possible today (it wouldn't have been just a decade ago), within some limits.
Still, this seems mighty convenient that the Chinese have this specific capability available to an advance base far, far away from home.
Well, even though we do not have a clear location of the teenager. But we do have a location of the escaped fugitive Luster Dawn. And she is with the teenager, and if we follow Luster Dawn's indicator on our tracking device. We can bring her and the teenager in.
How? Have they planted radio tracking devices on all their captives? This would be possible, and might even explain how they found where their previous captives were hiding. It wouldn't be that easy or standard procedure, though, and there might have been ways
Twilight and her group have detected, countered or prevented this.
Charlie wakes up in the cave next to Luster Dawn. He finds that they have wound up with their faces close together. Charlie is ridiculously embarrassed, and tries to back away.
Luster Dawn wakes up before he can do so and over-reacts even more absurdly:
"Uggh, what time is it?" Luster Dawn said quietly while rubbing her eyes. And when she got her visions, she saw that she and Charlie's muzzle's were very close to each other as if they were kissing, then she let out a tumoultous scream.
"AHHHHHHH!" She screamed as she pushed Charlie away from her and stood up on her hooves.
"Charlie! Why were you near me?! Were you trying to make a move?!" Luster Dawn said as she sent him a glare.
Okay.
I write a fairly prudish Equestria. My working model where sexual mores are concerned is "Victorian to Interwar Era, but with full acceptance of LGBTQ and polygamy." So, yeah, my version of Luster Dawn at this point would almost certainly be virgin. Furthermore, if she woke up disoriented, sleeping next to someone she had barely met, face close to face, she'd be embarrassed.
But that's all.
Charlie hasn't made any sort of "move" on Luster Dawn. She should be quite aware that people sleeping in close proximity, on the same surface, may move about in their sleep and wind up in compromising-looking positions. Unless she's seriously shy around stallions, she shouldn't be going full "You pervert!" mode at this point.
Charlie and Luster Dawn argue about this a bit until Luster Dawn admits it was more her fault than his. Meanwhile, I'm wondering what sort of hyper-prudish culture Luster hails from, that merely waking up next to him makes her feel so dirty. (Hint: the actual Victorians were nowhere near that bad!)
They start discussing where to go next, when the Talisman of Plot Convenience starts glowing and beeping.
He was going to say something else but then the diamonds on attached to the talisman on his chest began to glow which attracted both Charlie and Luster Dawn's attention.
"Whoa, what's happening?" Charlie asked while looking at the glowing diamonds.
"It's like they are trying to tell us something." Luster Dawn said, then she came to an understanding on what they mean.
"Oh I get it now! The diamonds are telling you all of the continents of Equestria."
"Continents?" Charlie asked and Luster Dawn replied with a nod.
"Yep, the purple diamond means Equestria, green means the changeling kingdom, blue stands for the dragon lands, white means griffonstone cloudsdale, and red means the Kirin village." She told him.
Um ...
"Equestria" might be a continent, but is more properly described as a nation or empire (I frequently call it "a continent-spanning empire"). The Changeling Kingdom is on the same continent as Equestria, according to all the official maps. The Dragon Lands are an (extensive) lordship either on another continent or another subcontinent on the Equestrian continent. "Griffinstone" and "Cloudsdale" are two different places, the first a mountain city in fantasy-Greenland if Equestria is fantasy North America (Hyperborea, which is a Shout-Out to Classical Mythology) and the second a floating city in the Equestrian Realm. "The Kirin village" is a place which may or may not be on the same continent as Equestria.
So of the five (not four) places named, only one is even remotely a whole continent, and the others are small kingdoms to small towns.
I have absolutely no idea how LD deciphered this, but perhaps there's some sort of Equestrian lore associating the positions or gems or colors with the aforementioned places. Why not?
Charlie asks LD to which location they should go first:
"Well, I wouldn't suggest us to go to the dragon lands first because it is quite far away near the changeling kingdom. Griffonstone is not that far but ot is near Kirin village. And obviously we cannot go to the diamond dogs place because all of the diamond dogs have been arrested and captured by your kind. So I would recommend us going to the Kirin village first." Luster Dawn said.
1. Dragon Lands and Changeling Kingdom far away, check.
2. Griffonstone is both in canon episodes and on the canon map quite far away.
3. Cloudsdale is quite close; it's a Pegasus cloud city, and one place the Chinese would have difficulty subduing or occupying, though they might be able to bombard it with aircraft or SAM's.
4. The Diamond Dogs "place" (really, there's probably more than one of them) was not on LD's original list. What's more, I have to wonder just how the Chinese invaders rounded up all the Diamond Dogs in the local mine -- the Diamond Dogs are subterranean creatures, and know a lot more about their mines than would General Metal Pads.
5. But sure, fine, it's the Kirin village!
Both Charlie and Luster Dawn have been following the red stream to the Kirin Village for five minutes now and Luster Dawn got hungry.
That wacky Luster Dawn! No endurance at all!
When Charlie noticed this, he supplied her and himself with a sweet potato and Luster Dawn ate gratefully.
From where did he get a sweet potato? That's a rather odd ration to bring on an expedition to save an alien empire from Chinese aggression. But sure, why not?
But suddenly, his goggle scanners picked up a hazard again, and then it warned him.
/!\Proximitity Alert/!\
How does this work? Are we supposed to believe that his goggles can do 360-degree scans? This sounds suspiciously like a videogame dropping the party into an encounter.
Hold on, my scanners detected a hazard." Charlie said as he took off his backpack.
Luster Dawn got baffled by the word scanners. She has never heard of the word/contraption scanner in her life.
Well, I've "heard of the word/contraption scanner" in MY life, and I'm a bit "baffled." By what means did Charlie's "scanner" detect the enemy? Passive sonar? Radar-returns? Communications intercepts? Crotch odors?
What's more, this is the sort of information which the "scanner" should provide Charlie, so that he can evaluate the reliability and nature of the contact from the first tentative detection. Why? Because, in real life, no scanning-analysis system is 100% accurate.
She tried to question him but then a loud vroom noise can be heard.
*Vroom!*
We all needed to know that the "loud vroom noise" went "vroom!" rather than "zap!" or "pow!" or "splorch!" That's even more important than knowing how the "scanner" detected the contact!
Charlie clicked on his scanner again and what he saw traumatized him because there was a police truck driving towards their location at their three O' clock position. He turned around and faced Luster Dawn and said "We have to get out of here!" And that perplexed her.
... because Luster Dawn apparently has the mind of a cucumber.
Author. The Ponies are sapient, and real ponies (the kind you can buy rides on) are smarter than this! This would be true for the average Pony -- but this is supposed to be Princess Twilight Sparkle's chosen student!
How is she "perplexed" by the concept that, when being hunted by dangerous enemies, she might want to run and hide when her comrade says "We have to get out of here!" How is this a complicated idea?
Charlie tried to grab her hoof and run away but he couldn't even make his move when the police truck parked twelve centimetres in front of them, but to Luster Dawn, it was an iron carriage with wheels, but with nopony dragging it.
How fast is this truck? Are Charlie and Luster Dawn on a paved road (why and how, given that before this they were in the midst of rugged Everfree Forest terrain)? How freaking slow are they to react?
Again, this very strongly reminds me of a mandated encounter in a video game, where we are not supposed to think too hard about how it's possible and the game does not permit evasion of the foe.
Also, Luster Dawn should by now be well-aware that the Invaders have motorized vehicles. The concept of such vehicles shouldn't shock her, as they existed in full canon (locomotives, road engines, and airships).
Then, the doors of the police truck opened and four policemen armed with pistols exited the truck. But to Luster Dawn, they were the invaders, and she now began to tremble in fear.
NARRATOR: To Charlie, however, they were Willie Wonka's Oompa-Loompas, and he salivated at the prospect of yummy, yummy candy!
Seriously, Charlie's outnumbered too. He has a pistol, yes, but there are four of them, and to paraphrase Captain Raisul from Aladdin, "We've all got pistols!"
I'm not sure why to him this is merely a minor inconvenience.
Anyway, Charlie prepares to fight.
Plot sensors. (Calm down, Luster, I mean it literally.) They detected the incoming conflict, much in the same way the Chinese scanners picked up numerous details about the narrativium-dense protagonist.
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Y'know, that's as good an explanation as any in Story! Better, really.
Why is it that whenever the Chinese army shows up, I imagine them as evil Power Rangers?
I wonder if we're to assume (I know, dangerous word to use) that the Chinese are keeping the ponies and others in line via threats of mass reprisals if they don't obey?
Of course, trying this with non-ponies might backfire badly: "Obey us, dragons, or we will execute dozens of your pony friends!"
Garble: (One must imagine the little light bulb going on over his head) "Oh, you couldn't possibly kill all those ponies."
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I'm guessing that's the point of doing things like shooting Ms. Nameless Mare in front of everyone for speaking out of turn. "Frightfulness," as the Germans in both World Wars put it, and initiated it in World War One Belgium and World War Two Poland and the USSR. Or as the Red Chinese do in the real world in Tibet and to the Uighurs and Falun Gong, which is why I'm not at all complaining about them being depicted as doing it in Equestria.
I'm less certain that Author understands that Frightfulness is an military-administrative STRATEGY, intended to cow hostile populations into subjugation, rather than just a random manifestation of callousness and cruelty (though being callous and cruel certainly do help in deciding on such a policy and carrying it out). The idea is carrot-and-stick -- cooperate with the occupying authority, and you will be spared; resist, and you will be killed (with the "you" often being collective, as in the reprisal-killing of groups of civilians when the actual rebels are unknown).
It is a policy that tends to be very morally dangerous to the polity carrying it out, because it corrupts and hardens one's own troops to atrocity, and even if one despises the subject populations, one cannot guarantee that their guns will remain turned on that particular foe. And, of course, if the enemy ever gains the upper hand, one can expect no mercy from him after one has massacred his civilians.
Germany found out after the First World War that their hardened frontline troops no longer scrupled to forcibly seize control of their own cities and murder Germans who attempted to even speak or write in opposition to them. Germany found out after the Second World War that the Soviets they had abused during the first two years of the fighting on the Eastern Front were only too willing to return the favor when the Soviet forces rolled into Germany.
Above all, though, Frightfulness must be well-targeted to even work on the most basic level. If one gets a reputation for massacring everyone for no reason (like the Germans on the Eastern Front or the Japanese in China and the Philippines) then Frightfulness loses much of its deterrent effect: why not die fighting rather than with one's hands up?
The notion that Equestrian Ponies are so soft that they would be shocked into helpless submission by Frightfulness is dubious. They've faced horrors before, and even seen mass horror inflicted upon them (as by Chrysalis and Tirek, just within the span of the Show). The Red Chinese are ruthless troops with better-than-average missile weapons, but they hardly seem invincible.
Part of the problem evaluating this is that Story reveals very little of the capabilities or limitations of the Chinese teleporter. How much mass can it move at what cost in energy (I don't need engineering stats here, just general magnitude)? How often can it operate?
How many troops and supplies are here right now? Story gives me the impression of nothing more than a scratch regiment with maybe a couple of motorized infantry battalions, an MP battalion and some sort of HQ/support company. and possibly less than that. Enemy strength is necessary to evaluate the threat posed, and Twilight Sparkle should KNOW that, being from a military family herself and trained to rulership and command.
One of the things dead wrong with this story's portrayal of Twilight Sparkle is that she's shown as a helpless victim, battered this and that way by the whims of Fate and General Metal Plates Jin, when in Show she's a brilliant, cunning and decisive leader. She has her moments of morale failure -- her Heroic BSOD's -- but (often rallied by her friends), she always eventually finds the Heroic Spirit to rise from the wreckage of her errors, come up with a new and better plan, and return to save the day.
That's key to the character, and why we love her.
Twilight Sparkle would not be defeated by mere Frightfulness. She would escape, figure out a way to wreck the Chinese teleporter, beat General Jin, and defeat the Invaders.
Story's version of her is a pathetic shadow of her canon self, and I hate it.
Wait, that character had a name?