Ponyfic Roundup 541: Spotlight on Redheart's War

Read it Later story count: 90 (-1)

Words read this week: 46,081

I've been really looking forward to reading Redheart's War. It's had such a impressive reception, including from multiple reviewers I read and respect, and I've badly wanted to see whether it would hit the spot for me as well. For that reason, I accelerated its progress up my Read it Later queue. I can say right away that I didn't regret that decision. Here's the review!

Redheart's War by SockPuppet
Nurse Redheart, Shining Armor, Celestia, Cadance and Hippogriffs
G4; Adventure/Drama; 46k words; Jun 2020; Teen (Gore, Violence)

A nurse has seen it all. A combat medic has seen even more.

Although this can, as SockPuppet says, be read as a standalone, I strongly recommend having read A Story to Relate To (PR 507) and, especially, The Ponies in the Caves (PR 523) first as certain elements are referred to here. Anyway, this is Nurse Redheart's backstory as a member of Celestia's Own, Equestria's storied elite combat unit. The admittedly fairly thin domestic modern-day framing allows her to tell series of stories about her role, which show a mare of immense character who rises above her doubts to become a hero of her country. There's a lot of blood and guts here, but the emphasis is always on character rather than history, and that's a huge plus. It's an extremely exciting fic, with highs and lows of emotions – one particular very hard-to-read scene had me white with fury and in tears. Its flaws are few and minor, and vastly outweighed by the pluses. I'm not a huge war fic fan, but I now consider this essential, if not always easy, reading. ★★★★★

As usual, major spoilers lurk beyond this line!

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for a war story is if it reads like a history book. This one does not, because it's very clearly a character-driven piece. Everything that happens in her flashback stories is from her perspective, and we live, fight, cry and hurt with her. I found her portrayal utterly compelling, especially in the hardest moments – especially when she has to kill, and even more so, when late on she's a corporal and has to order soldiers into apparently certain death.

Her regiment, Celestia's Own, is the elite of the elite and this pride comes through. It even convinces that its soldiers tend to go over the top into being stupidly brave and loyal at times. "Celestia's Own don't quit" is their motto, but perhaps a few of them have trouble in grasping that sometimes retreating from a battle is the best way to win the war. You can't help thinking that one or two of these soldiers might have lived to fight another day had they done that... but that isn't Celestia's Own's way.

Talking of which, there's a lot of death and gore here – Redheart's tally of ponies she's saved, lost... and killed is a running theme – and while I think the story's [Teen] rating is appropriate it's certainly a hard T. Among many, many other things we get splashing brains, stomping on genitals, vast quantities of broken bones, poison, snake bites, fungal infections... you name it. Redheart's medical knowledge is stretched to its limit and beyond, all the more so given the extreme pressures of operating in battlefield conditions.

Although he's not tagged, one of the most interesting characters in this story to my mind is Blueblood. At this point he's a Major, and although Redheart is clear that he's the insufferable prat¹ we know from "The Best Night Ever", he's also personally extremely brave. This combination is not at all unknown in the real world: King Edward II of England, for example, was a poor king and a bad general, but during the disastrous defeat at Bannockburn in 1314 he fought bravely. Blueblood here is a better general than Edward, and he comes out of Redheart's War better than in the vast majority of fics about him.
¹ That word caught my attention, since it's largely a British term.

Celestia and Cadance are also very much warrior alicorns here. Despite their extreme power, they are not going to simply run through the enemy, and late on Celestia almost loses her life. We know she must have inner steel to have survived so long, and that's on show here. But it's Cadance who I find more interesting, especially very late on when she reveals that she unknowingly allowed the Storm King to escape and therefore to attack Canterlot a decade later. (Shining Armor has a solid role too, close to Cadance but not of course yet married to her.)

The absolute, unmitigated baddies in the story are the pirate slavers. There's an utter visceral hatred for them as hostis sapiens generis, including from Celestia, that is potentially tricky to reconcile with what we know of Equestrian mores. SockPuppet chooses an even tougher course by giving them no redeeming features at all, which in lesser hands would risk their coming across like caricatures. Fortunately the story is so well written that this doesn't happen – though it does bring up some very uncomfortable thoughts about Captain Celaeno's crew's possible pasts.

This is underlined in the part of the story that I suspect most – certainly me – will find the hardest to read: when the traumatised fillies are rescued from their cage on the pirate ship. This scene was the one time when I had to stop and have a break from reading. I think SockPuppet judges this scene very well, making it utterly horrific without being tackily explicit. We really don't need to know exactly what happened to those poor kids, but we can tell well enough to understand why Celestia, that calm and regal princess, has no compunction about ordering "no quarter" for the slavers.

There's a clear and believable escalation in the stories Redheart tells, starting with a relatively conventional conflict in which the laws of war are generally observed – when she's taken POW, she's treated relatively well. The fighting against the slavers is on another level entirely, with death or glory (or both) the only options. SockPuppet's notes mention that an early outline had her captured a second time and brutalised in a manner similar to those fillies. I agree with the author that dropping that subplot was a good decision. Redheart's gradual accumulation of experience and – unwilling – command is well done, too.

Quibbles? Well, a few, but only a very few. It's not totally clear to me why Redheart's retinal surgery is so painful, since human retinas have no nerves – hence laser eye surgery for retinopathy not needing anaesthetic. It may be that horses are different, of course! I'm also iffy about the use of the word "urine" even in the most visceral moments of Redheart's stories. Although she is a medic, she's also a soldier, and there are times when, frankly, "piss" might have been more believable.

The story is also just slightly abrupt in its ending. When the slaves are released, we get no information as to how many of them were injured, how many were even alive. The brief detail in which the captured slavers are – let's be blunt about this – revenge-murdered at sea by the Equestrians actually works well without more detail, though. Still, Redheart's War has far, far more good than bad, and it's among the most exciting wartime character studies I've read in ponyfic. I have no doubts about that five.

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There's nothing I like better than being able to award a rare maximum score, so this was an enjoyable Spotlight to write up! Back to the usual five shorter stories next week. Here's the list of what I'll be considering:

Love Defenestrates by Liquid Truth
Mistmane and the Torii of Time by Impossible Numbers
The Dangers Of Teleporting While Intoxicated by naturalbornderpy
Dinner with Rose by Admiral Biscuit
Reminiscing by Gleaming