Rage Review: Resist and Bite (Chapter 10, Part C) · 6:28am Apr 7th, 2020
Chapter 10, "Rough talk with the griffons," Part C
Now we go to the POV of the Bad Guys.
Back in the military headquarters in Canterlot.
Where?
Seriously, Story can't seem to make up its mind over whether the Chinese have set up their main HQ in Canterlot or in Ponyville. The key seems to be that the invaders occupied "Twilight's castle," and Author seems to be unsure about just which castle this happens to be.
Now, in "The Last Problem," Princess Twilight Sparkle was actually ruling from Canterlot. This makes sense, because Princess Celestia set up Canterlot as a national capital (in canon as a finer successor to the old Castle of the Royal Pony Sisters; in my stories because Nightmare Moon devastated the City Foreverfree and Princess Celestia hated to be reminded of their battle so she abandoned rather than rebuilt Foreverfree, which fell into utter ruin in a century or two).
Moving a capital is more than merely a matter of designating a new capital. Offices were set up in the old capital; they and their personnel need to be moved (both of them into adequate lodgings). Nobles and merchants have oriented their lives around the old capital, and must also make rearrangements. Communications and transport nets have been built with the old capital as a hub.
Changing these things is not impossibly difficult on the scale of a continental Realm like Equestria, but the cost (and confusion) attending the move are still an important consideration.
Heck, Twilight Sparkle's parents live in Canterlot. She and Spike were both raised there. So ruling from Canterlot makes sense.
But elsewhere in Story, it implies that the castle which the Chinese attacked was Twilight's crystal castle, an extension of the Tree of Harmony, just outside Ponyville. And while Ponyville is within sight of Canterlot, they are two decidedly different places.
So, Story, which is it?
Lieutenant General Jin was in the medical room looking at the three fallen S.W.A.T units.
Individuals are not generally called "units." That term should be reserved for units made up of more than one individual or sub-unit.
So General Metal Plates debriefs Lam Xie Li, the least wounded of the three MP SWAT troopers. Lam declaims this immortal poetry:
When me and my team were searching for the infiltrator Charlie Lam and the escaped fugitive Luster Dawn in the Kirin village. Many of the Kirins armed with spears popped up behind us in the bushes. They then threw the bushes and three of my colleagues including my captain were killed except for the Lieutenant and Sergeant. After their assault, the infiltrator Charlie Lam walked up to us with the prisoner Luster Dawn. And to our surprise, Charlie Lam was turned into an alicorn like Princess Twilight Sparkle, and he could speak Chinese.
(1) The ambush was possible because General Jin dispatched a ridiculously small force into a built-up area and that force then ignored basic security in the march.
(2) The Kirins threw the spears, not the bushes. If they were strong enough to throw the bushes, I'd advise not entering their village.
(3) Three troopers including the Captain were killed; "the Lieutenant and Sergeant" are not part of the Captain, unless these are some sort of weird military anglerfish.
(4) Luster Dawn is not a "prisoner." If she still were, trying to apprehend her would make about as much sense as a married bachelor getting a divorce.
(5) It sounds as if Lam is more amazed that Charlie can speak Chinese than that he's turned into an Alicorn.
(6) If they didn't know Charlie Lam was now an Alicorn, how exactly were they tracking him? As AC97 asks:
So... again, how did you know an alicorn that doesn't look like a human... was actually him? (AC97)
The answer, I'm guessing, is that Charlie just can't keep his big bilingual mouth shut.
When Jin heard the information that Lam told him, he was mad at first, but he was astonished by the teenagers field and transformation.
Charlie's field? Does Jin mean force field? Lam actually didn't mention it, but it's possible that someone reported this to him earlier.
General Jin decides to assign Captain Zhou to the job.
After that, Jin looked at Zhou Chang Min a military captain. He was also one of the General's top soldiers, he mastered many martial arts training core program as well as some long range shooting trainings. But he is more proficient with firearms like pistols and assault rifles. ...(Story)
And again, why would a Captain need to know these things? Why would marksmanship be important? (and of course, bad expositing as to why a character is obviously a threatening villain)
Indeed.
Story is essentially reading off Captain Zhou's skill list, as if this were an RPG. The problem with this is that the skills being listed are the ones least relevant to an officer trying to command a force. They are those relevant to Captain Zhou's ability to engage in personal combat.
There's a larger issue here, related to how Story has the Red Chinese operate. They seem to have assigned a very small force to the mission of conquering and occupying a continental empire. We see this because squad to platoon sized forces capture Twilight's castle, Twilight and the Mane Six are defeated in literal hand-to-hand combat by General Jin PERSONALLY, and follow-up missions into enemy villages are given to fireteams.
This only works (to the extent that it does) because the Equestrians (of all races) are depicted as being absurdly few, and incompetent in anything resembling battle, or even a hand-to-hand fight. They have been deprived both of numbers, and of any weapons beyond spears (when we know even from the not-very-militarily-oriented Show that they have a bigger Guard with better and more varied weapons than that). They are deprived of any natural advantages including bodily weapons, armor and even reflexes.
And yet, the Chinese force seems ridiculously small for the job, simply for geographic reasons. If we estimate it as being battalion to brigade strength, how can it possibly conquer and hold down a nation-state occupying the better part of a fantasy North America? It would have hundreds to thousands of Humans, trying to control TENS OF MILLIONS of Ponies and other creatures. That means it would be outnumbered (10,000 to 100,000):1.
Why is the Chinese force so tiny? It's possible that the reason why lie in the limitations of the teleporter. That might be an expected and valid handicap.
Yet nobody -- not Charlie Lam Gadgeteer Sooper Genius, nor the Chinese officers, not even General Metal Plates himself -- have mentioned any such limitations. You would think that Jin, in particular, would be constantly griping to himself about the transport constraints his small force must labor to overcome. But ... no.
If personnel are limited, one would expect that the Chinese force would be elite and very well-armed. Surely one would want to bring Special Forces, all equipped with the most advanced weapons, armor and vehicles, to maximize the technological advantage over the natives.
Nope.
The only special skills any of the Chinese leaders have shown so far is in marksmanship and martial arts. The ordinary troops seem fairly normal, with sub-standard tactical training. Their weapons are ordinary automatic rifles, pistols, hand grenades and (implicitly) machine guns and incendiary devices. Their armor is ballistic cloth with metal inserts. No guided missiles, no drones, no special armor designs.
We've seen no example of exceptional vehicles, though this might be even more limited by the teleport capacity. Trucks, cars, motorcycles, and implied helicopters. Nary a tank nor APC in sight. And, most damningly, no artillery.
The only reason they aren't all being overrun after the Prologue is that this version of Equestria appears entirely incapable of any sort of organized response to being attacked. This happens on the surface in the Show as well, but if you watch some of the premiers and finales more carefully, it's plainly a consequence of fast conquest followed by fast response by the Mane Six. Note in particular how The End of the End ended.
General Jin orders Captain Zhou as follows:
... I want you to track down the Australian infiltrator Charlie Lam, and the wanted fugitive Luster Dawn.)" ... he pulled out an IPad sized tracking device from his pocket. After that, he tossed it to him and Zhou caught it with his right hand. He looked down at it and saw a small blue indicator and a large red indicator. And they read:
Wanted: Luster Dawn
Age: Unknown
Foreign: EquestriaInfiltrator: Charlie Lam
Age: 18
Foreign: Australia
The issue of just how the device, or maybe a computer it's tied to, is "tracking" Our Nominal Heroes is entirely ignored.
Captain Zhou goes off on his mission.
Once he has made it to the parking lot, he jumped on a police motorcycle. He tucked the key in the ignition and it started to rev up, he then gripped onto the handle bars and twisted the right one.
With exciting motorcycle-riding action! Woo hoo!
And the Zhou began to drive off to Charlie Lam and Luster Dawn's location by following the red and blue indicator on the tracking device.
I wish the US military had Omni-Scanners. Maybe they can buy them from Charlie Lam, once he's finished curing cancer with the contents of his old high school biology project!
So, let's review. The last attempt failed because they sent six guys in a truck to nab two dangerous enemies in a hostile village.
General Jin's answer? Send one guy on a motorcycle to do exactly the same thing.
Oh, I've read and watched enough poorly-thought-out action adventure stories to know why Captain Zhou is going to be much more dangerous to Our Nominal Heroes than were the MP SWAT fireteam, but this really needs more justification than just "Zhou's a skilled shot and knows martial arts!"
Which is all the justification, you'll notice, we got.
Remember, this is the same author who stapled Cloudsdale to Griffonstone. We should be grateful the entire country isn't treated like a single suburban neighborhood.
"Welcome once again to Self-Defense Against Fresh Fruit."
"I thought we were doing pointed sticks this week."
"Shut up."
'What if they have a bush?"
"You too."
Possibly field of study? They knew he was an engineering major but didn't know he was minoring in Chinese?
It's been said that no character can be more intelligent than the author, but I don't agree with that. It's not easy to write someone smarter than you, but it can be done. Heck, you've demonstrated that with your Cosmic Concepts, translating their vast simulation-messages to something our minds can comprehend. But I think this story shows that no character can be more imaginative than the author, especially in the field of military tactics and strategy.
Indeed.
And there's not enough plausible justification as to why they can beat beings with magic, because the author didn't even make a good attempt for that, and they vastly, vastly oversell how physically formidable humans are supposed to be, and vastly underestimate in a lot of regards how much they rely on their technology and weapons, and how melee weapons can only do so much for you, beyond a certain point (like against dragons if you don't have, like, enchanted/highly advanced weapons and what not, or if you get ganged up on, just like with unarmed fighting).
In short: the author doesn't understand the concept of "logistics."
As a matter of fact, I don't think we've seen much evidence at all that they're even occupying/holding down land that isn't Canterlot/Ponyville/Wherever "Twilight's Castle" Is. Are they occupying Manehatten? Baltimare? Silver Shoals, that is to say, the coastal town Celestia and Luna went to? How could/did they deal with Cloudsdale, a city in which humans cannot set foot on without magical assistance, in most places? They obviously didn't consider any of that, and the list goes on, up to and including the Crystal Empire and Twilight's Forgotten Family, that is to say its respective Demigoddesses ("demigod" is what I consider to closest to being what alicorns in general can be adequately described as, IMO; they can be fought by mortals, are not unbeatable, but it isn't easy).
edited to add the following sentence: Also, one must wonder however the Chinese Blitzkrieg'd their way throughout multiple different places, while seemingly so short on men, let alone successfully, like with the Griffons, Changelings, and Dragons, which is egregious especially, considering their advantages, and expected it to make any logical sense in any sense of the word.
Edited to add a sentence or two of three again: To compound the absolute absurdities even further, apparently, according to Chapter 18/19 (again, depending on if you count the Prologue as Chapter 1): Revelations (which is very, very thick on the nonsensical stuff, for the backstory and assorted logical holes it has), well... they say that the size of the Chinese invading force is... a Platoon. Repeatedly. And the Lieutenant General Metal Pads himself says it's a "platoon," in addition to the protagonist saying it's a "platoon". No, I am not making this up. They are really that astronomically outnumbered. I basically went down the "CTRL + F" route for everything above "platoon" and found nothing in that chapter.
This whole thing is kinda reminding me of the huge problems that your standard Fall of Equestria story has with the entire setting (except well, less of that assorted mess, with that kind of slavery), except it's with humans. The caribou are massively outnumbered (and should by all rights be less powerful), yet they take over the Crystal Empire and so on, with a corrupted artifact. (poor Cadance, her power just isn't respected enough)
In part due to things like "where's the artillery, APCs, Tanks," as you mentioned (and even then, dragons could probably cause more than a few problems against them; they can be way more intense than the problems that Molotov Cocktails can cause)
It's like the author thinks Conservation of Ninjutsu is a valid excuse when it comes to armies, with no mitigating supernatural factors like magic, or whatever.
5237724
Hmm... maybe that can be an AU sitcom premise.
Edited to add: Regarding the thought of "teleporter limitations," well in the last few chapters where the author rips off Avengers Endgame AND The Ending of the End (Gary Stu Human-Turned-Alicorn/The Author dares to use the line "Equestrians Assemble"), well... it's seemingly apparent that no such limitation exists, due to part of how it went, how the Chinese tried to get a request for reinforcements through, with however many logical failures that has, which I'm assuming there's many, least of which is probably "have a few guys there you can reach with radio to pass information, just in case."
(forgot to talk about this)
Somehow, I think I really did miss that/skimmed it while reading the story.
Oops, lol.
It's not as if it's an uncommon language, so I'm not sure why that'd be a surprise at all... and it's a comparatively minor nitpick, due to them being a Low Level Mook Of Low Relevance, but why wouldn't the author make more of an effort to avoid having the character share any part of their name with the main character (Charlie Lam)?
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The former is at least vaguely plausible - Cloudsdale can move, after all.