Rage Review: Resist and Bite (Chapter 13, Part B) · 10:03pm Apr 27th, 2020
Chapter 13: Slavery in Canterlot (Part B)
We return to the construction of the Fairly Large Wall of China ...
Twilight Sparkle was going to walk up the stairs to the top of the large metal walls with six floors made of logs.
... as opposed to the large metal walls with five, or seven floors made of logs ...
Now, a slight digression upon the usefulness, and lack thereof, of walls -- and fortifications in general.
A wall, like fortifications in general, is a passive defense. This means that it protects defenders sheltering behind the wall, and slows enemy passage of the wall long enough for the defenders to (hopefully) kill or drive off the attackers.
An undefended wall is of only marginal utility. All it will do is slow down an attacker (or infiltrator) while he climbs over, tunnels under, breaches or otherwise passes the wall.
Thus, to be effective, a wall must be defended.
Everyone clear on this?
Now, the Red Chinese Invaders have, according to Word of God, a "platoon" of troops. (Word of God also claims they have plenty of helicopters and heavy artillery, which is inconsistent with the stated force size, but that's another issue). A "platoon" is, in most force structures, around 30 to 60 men TO&E, generally 20-40 after some casualties.
The Reasonably Big Wall of Canterlot must, to be useful, girdle the city and palace of Canterlot. Suppose that the city is, oh, a couple kilometers on a side (that small because of its mostly vertical construction. Suppose that we don't need to continue the wall around two of the sides of the city, because they are protected by the cliff (foolish, given how many of their potential enemies can fly, but okay ...).
So that's four kilometers of Mostly Adequate Wall of Canterlot that must be built. And manned.
If the "platoon" constitutes 60 men and mans the wall evenly, that's 15 men per kilometer. But this is a constant patrol, so at any given time that is 5 men per kilometer, or 200 meters per man. And note, the platoon is now doing absolutely nothing save manning this stupid wall: I'm not allowing for any support or internal security services. Let alone activity outside the Wall.
Let's charitably assume that we can get away with 1 in 5 doing support and security work (this is a lousy support system!) so that it's 250 meters per man, or 1 kilometer per four-man fireteam.
Can a single fireteam cover a kilometer of wall?
Maybe, given all the cameras etc. that are being deployed, and the fact that they seem to be mostly monitored by AI expert systems. (By the way, who is installing and maintaining these cameras and computers? Oh heck, robo-coolie technicians, why not?)
Given any early warning system, the defenders could probably get close enough along the wall to accurately shoot at invaders who can't be more than 500 meters away from them, before the attackers could get over the wall. (Actually if the sentries are well-trained and have scope sighted bolt- or automatic, rather than "assault" rifles, 500 meters is perfectly-adequate range to shoot and expect some hits).
Now, mind you, we're making some very favorable assumptions here:
(1) The attackers can't fly (Pegasi, Griffons, Changelings, Dragons) over the wall.
(2) The attackers can't dig (Diamond Dogs, Rock Ponies, Changelings, Dragons) under the wall.
(3) The attackers can't teleport (Unicorn Mages, Changeling Royalty) past the wall.
(4) The attackers don't have the numbers (Earth Ponies) to simply equine-wave the wall, taking heavy losses and then ripping apart the defenders when they get through.
(5) The attackers don't have ranged weapons which they use against the defenders to attrition their numbers during an assault.
These are all highly-optimistic assumptions on the part of the defenders.
And lest anyone cite the obvious historical example of a (mostly) successful and far longer Great Wall of China, we should be aware that the Wall was there primarily as a speed bump for the barbarians. Like all such long walls, the idea was to have regular forts along the wall, with gates through the wall located at those forts. Because the forts were garrisoned, barbarian raiding parties or armies couldn't just ride through the gates, and most particularly couldn't easily cross the wall with wheeled vehicles carrying plunder.
The wall served as a high, protected road for forces to redeploy rapidly along the wall to meet any attacker. Against serious invaders, reserve armies were maintained at major forts on or behind the wall: the wall would delay the barbarians long enough for the armies to march out to meet the foe.
The point of all this is that the Not So Impressive Wall of Canterlot is entirely useless unless the Red Chinese reinforce their inter-dimensional portal-head, and fairly soon. In fact, it's kind of stupid to start trying to build the wall this early; it would make more sense to build a far smaller fortification to protect their troops. (See Roman legionary practices for what this sort of things entailed).
The larger point is that trying to invade a nation with a platoon is absurd. Not even the lopsided victories of Cortez and Pizarro were conducted against such odds, and both of them made sure to secure native allies as soon as possible!
But then, some panicking noise stopped her. She looked up and saw two mares and one stallion on the first floor trying to pull up a large heavy metal plate they nearly dropped while dragging. But then, the metal plate fell to the ground dragging the three ponies along with them as well, and the three ponies fell on the ground roughly resulting in some contusions on their muzzles and chests.
When one of the riot police units on the fourth noticed the ponies temerarious and frail exertion. He looked down at one of his colleague.
"Temerity" is courage. "Frailty" is weakness (specifically of structure). A work accident involving dropping a heavy metal plate and getting injured in the process is certainly not a display of courage, though it may be caused by frailty.
"(Zhou Zhi Xiang! Beat them up without hesitation!)" The officer ordered.
Let's play the Continue the Stupid Order game!
(1) "(Once they've been beaten up, they'll be stronger and thus won't drop any more heavy metal plates!)"
(2) "(Given how few we are, it's amazing we even noticed what just happened!)"
(3) "(Don't worry about the fact that there's a whole team of them and I've just asked you to stand right among them to beat them! There's no way this could go wrong!)"
(4) "(If they do try to kick you to death, it's okay! We can always shoot them!! There's nothing they could do with a heavy steel plate intended for a fortification to protect themselves from bullets!)"
"Shì, zhǎngguān! (Sir yes sir!)" Zhou said with a salute to his Captain.
Then, he dropped his circular riot shield and walked up to the three fallen ponies with his baton in his right hand.
ZHOU (thinks): I'll drop my main piece of defensive equipment and stand among my victims. There's no way this can go wrong!
Once he got to their location. He first decided to beat the green coloured mare.
ZHOU (thinks): She looks green and minty-fresh! Yum!
He grabbed the female earth pony by her hoof and threw her on the ground in front of him. Then, he walked up to her and swung his right arm back and began to beat her with his baton, and the mare grunted and cried when the invader's metal stick collided with her back.
So just to get this straight, he's focusing all his attention on her.
The ponies, yaks, changelings, dragons and griffons so desperately wanted to help the mare but, there was nothing they can do.
Story here admits that there are at least ten other Equestrians watching this. So ...
Gee, guys, couldn't you rush the guards? There are, after all, only two of them, and there are at least ten (probably far more, as the Ponies outnumber the other races) of you. A gun doesn't convey that much of an advantage, and the guard doing the beating is distracted and wielding a baton in his gun hand.
This all gets back to the absurdity of trying to conquer a nation with a platoon. By all logic, those two guards should be the only two guards within about 500 meters, or four guards within a kilometer.
There aren't enough troops to effectively watch the prisoners.
When Twilight saw the mare getting beaten brutally, she couldn't hesitate again. She dropped the metal plate and stood up with all of her might. She then took a deep breath and yelled at the invader.
"Leave her alone!" Twilight yelled.
TWILIGHT SPARKLE: Invader, no invading!
So, Twilight, it doesn't occur you to do something more useful? Such as blast the Captain with a magic bolt, then drop Zhou with a second one while he's fumbling to bring his firearm to bear?
BIG BLUE GENIE (whispers): The part of Decisive Action Hero Princess Twilight Sparkle will be played by Miss Helpless Hoof-Wringer for the duration of this fanfic.
Amazingly, Zhou actually stops.
Suddenly, it turns out that General Jin and several other Chinese are magically on the scene. I love how the Chinese always have precisely as much manpower deployed into a scene as dramatically-convenient to the plot -- no less, no more.
The ponies, yaks, changelings, griffons and dragons all ceased their work and began to cheer from Princess Twilight Sparkle's brave words ...
Now, we all know it's not gonna be that easy.
... and some of the riot police units aimed their Anti riot guns at them preparing to disperse them ...
"Anti riot guns?" That's a description of intended application, not (as far as I know) a specific type of weapon.
Also, if these weapons are meant to be non-lethal to Ponies, they would be entirely ineffective against Yaks, Dragons or any Changelings with a useful combat form.
General Jin then orders Colonel Lin to beat up Twilight Sparkle. She suffers this without resisting, because ... look! A wild Wikipedia excerpt has appeared! Gotta copy 'em all!
"Please, give my subjects food and water." Twilight pleaded "Give them food and water or they will-"
GENERAL JIN: Stop bringing up biological realities! I represent the will of the Party!
Now, it's sadly true that the People's Republic of China has been historically cursed with far too many leaders, all the way up to the monstrous Mao Tse-Tung (most prolific mass murderer in all human history), who thought just like that. But Jin is being characterized as competent. (Which he isn't, of course, though his strategy might be to deliberately work his prisoners to death, something which Twilight believably might not grasp).
Jin replied to her by cocking his pistol in his right hand and aiming it at the male orange dragon. Then he pulled the trigger.
*BANG!*
The dragon got killed instantly when the bullet collided in his head. Then he fell on the ground bleeding from his head.
I call foul.
(1) A tetrapod's skull is usually the best-armored part of his anatomy. Dragons are armored. Unless this is literally a baby Dragon, I seriously doubt that any normal pistol could pierce his skull.
Now it's possible that Jin is carrying a very heavy pistol (a .357 or .44 Magnum) and/or he's a good enough shot to put the bullet right into the Dragon's eye (where he has nothing but a nicating membrane and his tough skull might actually cause the bullet to ricochet inside, maximizing the damage).
But this is never stated. It's clear that Writer merely assumes that "head shot" = "instant fatality."
(2) Why didn't the Dragon fight back as soon as Jin pointed the pistol at him?
(3) Why did Jin kill one his stronger workers?
"Quick, get back to work." Starlight said in an exhausted voice. Then, all of the creatures began to do their work again.
Does it seem plausible to anyone here that Starlight Glimmer -- ruthless strategist and former firebrand revolutionary -- of all Ponies would counsel submission, instead of using the moment to start a general rising?
Jin let out a chuckle when he saw the creatures resuming their work.
JIN: Stupid Equestrians! You are constrained by the plot from anything resembling effective resistance!
In conclusion to this segment, Evil Laugh.
Looks like the author was going for timorous. Lady Spellcheck's loose ways strike again...
In the author's defense, he did establish that Twilight was too thoroughly beaten to cast spells at this juncture. (Of course, you've already outlined how "too thoroughly beaten to cast spells" should translate to "dead.")
And, yeah, Starlight of all ponies saying to give up, is just... ARGH.
5251447
This especially burns me because Starlight is a complex character, with strong virtues and vices, and one of her virtues is courage. Both moral and physical.
One of the ways in which she is a lot like Twilight Sparkle is this courage. Both of them stand up for what they believe (good or bad) even if non-conformist; both of them are willing to face direct danger in order to achieve their ends.
In this Story, they are instead both moral and physical cowards.
This disgusts me.
both of them made sure to secure native allies as soon as possible!
Now there's a good question; if you wanted to 'pull a Cortez' on Equestria, who the heck is left in the way of potential allies? Try getting the dragons or griffins to help and they'd likely attack you. Just imagine telling Ember or Gilda that you're here to conquer, plunder, and enslave Equestria, and do they want in?
Still, I don't know, maybe the Diamond Dogs can be used? Or whatever's left of the Storm King's empire, if anything?
With them working the ponies and other creatures literally to death, maybe that's the idea? To open up their lands to Chinese colonists once cleansed of the guaiwu*? Kind of like they've attempted IRL with Turkestan and Tibet?
* -- According to my net search, this is the Han word for 'monster' or 'freak'.
You did a magnificent job of explaining the horrid manpower woes that the Chinese should logically be suffering from... but they aren't, because the author is shielding them from logical consequences.
Bravo.
I honestly don't think, say, torturing her into having PTSD would stop her (regarding ideas I might have had). She'd only stop caring if she had to die in the process of taking you down, if she ever got the chance to get out of it, and get to planning on her next move, in a lot of cases, if that wasn't already the case to begin with (not already being willing to give her life).
It probably wouldn't work in being a deterrent against her, and in any case she'd need some onscreen character development to stop being so... iron-willed, become so broken, especially when there's an advantage staring them down, a numerical disadvantage on the enemy's part in this case.
What this story has done is character assassination on multiple levels. Whether it be from how everyone was so easily subdued, or how they act throughout the story. Twilight Sparkle, Starlight Glimmer, Spike... the list goes on.
You're right, it is disgusting.
5251516
Thank you.
I think that a lot of writers miss the point that Equestria is a nation -- really, a continental empire -- in part because the Show glosses over it. The reason is similar: both bad fanfic and The Show do this to emphasize the importance of their heroes.
However, bad fanfic does this with less justification. The heroes of The Show are, functionally, an elite team taking their orders at just one remove from Princess Celestia (and later, directly from Princess Twilight Sparkle), who go in first when there's a threat so that less powerful Ponies don't have to die trying to stop it. In many cases it's very much implied that the bad guys have only won a battle, not the war.
In contrast, stories such as Resist and Bite assume that the Equestrians are absurdly weak; both unable to defend themselves or to resist occupation by any enemy, mostly because the enemy is brutal and the Equestrians are just so shocked by their cruelty as to be utterly-cowed by it. Twilight's team is defeated with absurd ease; the rest of the country unable to mobilize, and only the Mighty Whitey (in this case, Human) hero able to fight the foe.
This represents a deep contempt for Equestria, and on some level for the notions of compassion and kindness. The authors forget that, in real life, Good Is (generally) Not Soft. Indeed, in our real life world, of the three major cultural systems existing in 1920 -- Liberal Democracy, Fascism and Communism -- it was the nicest one, Liberal Democracy, which clearly dominated the world by 2020, and did so in part by repeatedly winning wars.
Equestria is an idealized cross between a Western medieval order and an Eastern enlightened despotism. In that context I'm reminded of a Poul Anderson Polesotechnic League story where Human space bandits kidnap a male of a less-advanced race whose chief characteristic seems to be a rather flowery courtesy and cultural apreciation. The bandits are contemptuous of the rather nice alien, to the point of totally letting down their guard around him ...
... and, as soon as he gets a good opportunity, he strikes, seizing control of the ship and forcing the human bandits to submit to him.
He was, indeed, a courteous and accultured person.
Rather like the ideal Samurai.
I think there are strong points of similarity with Equestria.
Weird, this scene reminds me of a scene in The Prince of Egypt, so much so that I'm imagining a lot of set pieces from that movie inserted into the setting, except with ponies and other species instead of Hebrews, giant metal plates alongside the stones (wait, story didn't mention stones, did it?) and the Chinese instead of Egyptians. All it does is make me want to watch that movie, since it's actually good.
Also, why did Jin shoot a random orange dragon? Who is this random orange dragon? Did the random orange dragon say a thing that you just didn't quote, or did Jin indeed just shoot a random orange dragon? Wouldn't it make more sense to shoot the green mare Zhou was beating to get his point across?
5251574
I had flashbacks to both The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, starring Charlton Heston 1956) and Prince of Egypt, both of them excellent movies in their own ways.
5251574
Nope, the orange dragon had the misfortune of standing there, as opposed to actually doing anything. Jin is acting like a cartoonish Evil Overlord caricature, and he doesn't have any superpowers so he can get away with acting like this, or even intelligence. If he killed the green mare, it would've rubbed in to Twilight that her act of verbal defiance got her killed, sticking up for her. There's no twisted sense of Lawful Evil "justice" with just murdering some random guy, it would only make the Equestrians less liable to cooperate, more liable to rebel, as Jordan said, because it would realistically help get into their heads "they might kill us even if we're complying." (Not that the green mare wasn't complying mind you, because she just dropped something)
It's both evil and stupid, on so many levels. Jin didn't ask "who started this whole mess," he just selected some random guy, who might've been a model slave for all we know, and went *BANG*.
(probably an appropriate meme video for that)
I think the most simple explanation for all this is that the author just doesn't know what a platoon is, and didn't bother to look it up. Which is entirely in keeping with the quality of this fic in general.
5251705
I'd like to think so, but in one of his comments, Author says that he's envisioning about around 40-60 Chinese troops, which would be a reinforced platoon.(or maybe two small platoons, one each of riflemen and MP's, and I'm translating from his terminology) in the invasion.
He doesn't seem to understand why this is a ludicrously, indeed suicidally, small force with which to invade a continental empire; nor why this is inconsistent with them having access to any number of helicopters or artillery pieces.
He also doesn't seem to understand the concept of logistical support, neither in terms of supply nor maintenance.
As he describes events, it's hard to see how the Chinese could possibly win, even if the Equestrians did nothing at all to fight back. There's simply so few Invaders that they would die by mischance long before they could either kill or subdue everyone in Equestria.