Has anyone else decided to root against Manticore?

I’m not sure when I realized I was no longer rooting for Manticore. Sometime after no matter how well Haven did their work, the Manties would miracle their way out of it perhaps. Sometimes their industrial recovery would be nigh short of miraculous. Sometimes Deus Ex Machina would be heavy on the Machina - just in time Apollo, Pods, etc., sometimes it would be heavy on the Deus (surprise, yet another million-to-one thing saved a character!). Losses that were explicitly stated as crippling would be institutionally recovered in months. What have you.

Basically, when they started to cheat. But even then, the cheating was no more egregious than most fantasy/sci-fi at some point. Sure, I wished that Haven didn’t consistently do the literary equivalent of never rolling above a seven while the Manties got Boxcars when they needed it most, and that made me back Haven more than the RMN, but it wasn’t really against the Manties as it was hoping that Haven would get some respect.

But when did I start hating the Manties the way some people hate the Yankees? When they started fighting the Sollies. They got so many free passes, so many “I win” buttons, so much oppositional stupidity while they became more and more perfect in their every being, all the while having fewer and fewer actual consequences no matter what happened, that for me they became the villain. When it became clear that no matter what the opposition did, no matter what the opposition could do, they were going to get a consequence free perfect and decisive victory with clean consciences. And an un-earned one at that.

So who here besides me is really hoping someone pounds the Star Empire into scrap? Or at least gives it a run for its money where it has to save itself for real without free chicken?

This!

GloriousRuse wrote:
But when did I start hating the Manties the way some people hate the Yankees? When they started fighting the Sollies. They got so many free passes, so many “I win” buttons, so much oppositional stupidity while they became more and more perfect in their every being, all the while having fewer and fewer actual consequences no matter what happened, that for me they became the villain. When it became clear that no matter what the opposition did, no matter what the opposition could do, they were going to get a consequence free perfect and decisive victory with clean consciences. And an un-earned one at that.

I'm not sure I can agree with this. Keep in mind, the whole Solly interaction is just the 'prelude' to dealing with the .. Mesa? The Onion Core? whatever we're calling it these days.

Think of Uncompromising Honor (and maybe 1 or 2 before it as well) as book(s) 0.5 in a new series.. and book 1 is next, written from the viewpoint of.. 20? 40? years later.

The solly's were just the pawn. The Fop. The scapegoat to be used. They weren't supposed to be hard. They were just big, and had to be dealt with with kid gloves (avoiding causing mass casualty events).

Don't get me wrong, you have a point if you treat the book as the end of the series. The enemy (Sollys) were ridiculously weak for an 'endgame' enemy. The issue however is... we're just getting started.

Cheat?

Rules? Rules only work when both sides follow them. How about: don't murder anybody unless they obstruct what we want to do.....how's that for a good rule, which fairly well sums up a philosophy of the Peoples Republic of Haven.

Back to reading fiction.

It appears I should clarify some of my language: when I say cheat, I don’t mean some in universe ruse-de-guerre, or way-it-should-be-honor-mode, or Space Law of War violation. I mean when the meta of the entire thing gets cheated.

No one has an issue with the protagonists winning. No one really has an issue with protagonists sometimes pulling a rabbit out of a hat or having a “they’re just that good” moment. It’s when the manties are given a free pass to emerge as a perfect ten every time, all the time, and the basic governing meta-rules (economics, physics, what have you) no longer apply to them.

At some point they crossed that line. No setback has even the mildest effect on them besides large numbers being printed and some maudlin remembrances - which in zero ways actually change the strategic situation. Regardless of what even dramatized scenarios should allow.

Every strategy they try is wise, just, and entirely effective. Anything the enemy tries? Not a big deal. Likewise tactics, technologies, etc.. And it grows less and less explicable and more and more “nope, we’re the Manties, so we always have miracles.”

Yeah, it goes from

"It's as if instead of destroying obsolete battleships at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had somehow managed to blow up every manufacturing plant in the continental United States and kill the entire workforce from every one of those plants. The steel mills are still there. The coal mines and the oil wells, the iron mines and the farms, but Ford, GM, the New York Navy Yard, Bethlehem Steel's shipbuilding facilities, Northrop, Grumman, North American, Boeing -- all of them and their competitors -- and everyone who worked in their plants are simply… gone. And the only way to reconstitute the capacity that's been lost is to regenerate the slaughtered workforce as well as the physical plant."

To no big deal, we have plenty of ammo and spare parts so no impact to our operations and in a month we have some other planet turning out all our critical stuff on their old production gear, and our new generation of gear will roll out and be put in service with any testing and naturally will work just fine.

And OB was really bad, but we are really taking seriously the risk that someone might do it again, which is why we have an entire fleet parked with their wedges down at the Beowulf WH. Like anyone has super stealthy guided weapons who might want to hurt the RMN. Don't be silly.

And seriously, can ANYONE explain the geometry of barricade?

Don't hate us because we're morally responsible, worthy, decent, caring, respectful and fortunate enough to own the MWJ. And please don't hate us because God is on our side.

Manticore deserved to win. Talk about being worthy of all of their blessings. The machina came because they didn't sit on their asses and count coins. I'll give you one thing, it's much easier to be righteous when you're rich. BUT! It's so easy to be an ass when you're rich too. Manticore as a whole sowed the right seeds and a stitch in time saves nine.

"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Manticore threads the needle.

I commend those who were able to see the good in Peeps even when they were all covered in shit, but the good in Manticorans was never hidden. I simply can't blame the blameless, that would make me guilty of a charge far worse than the Mandarins.

cthia wrote:Manticore deserved to win. Talk about being worthy of all of their blessings. The machina came because they didn't sit on their asses and count coins.

I think the complaint is that RFC made it TOO EASY to defeat the mighty Solarian League. How many books did it take to defeat Haven? How many books will it take to defeat the Malign conspiracy? Even with repetition it was not much more than 3 books to defeat the Mandarins and only the initial destruction of the unsuspecting destroyers by Byng could be counted as a Solarian victory.

In universe, I blame the Malign for this: true they wanted the Solarian League to lose; but they wanted it to happen against a closely matched enemy, so both would be diminished and they could pick up the pieces. Since they were playing close attention to the developments of the war, they had no excuse for starting the end game when the SLN was not within shooting distance of any of the nations already fighting. Even if Haven had taken advantage of Oyster Bay, as they expected, the Solarian League was not a match for the victor.

tlb wrote:
In universe, I blame the Malign for this: true they wanted the Solarian League to lose; but they wanted it to happen against a closely matched enemy, so both would be diminished and they could pick up the pieces. Since they were playing close attention to the developments of the war, they had no excuse for starting the end game when the SLN was not within shooting distance of any of the nations already fighting. Even if Haven had taken advantage of Oyster Bay, as they expected, the Solarian League was not a match for the victor.

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It comes down to the issue of Murphy.
Events overtook the Detweiler Plan -- (1)there was supposed to be a couple more decades (or centuries) for the Darius Project to develop, (2) spoon-fed technology to build up the SLN, (3) Theisman was not supposed to "retire" St.Just and the PRH.
Remember the PRH was the test-bed for usurping control of the SL. The assassination of King Roger was "supposed" to trigger a pre-emption in SKM.

Murphy's Law is always active.

The early activation of Houdini and its associated side operations triggered the MALIGN and SLN failures. What happens at Darius and its associated systems is yet to be seen.

-- Stewart

stewart wrote:

tlb wrote:
In universe, I blame the Malign for this: true they wanted the Solarian League to lose; but they wanted it to happen against a closely matched enemy, so both would be diminished and they could pick up the pieces. Since they were playing close attention to the developments of the war, they had no excuse for starting the end game when the SLN was not within shooting distance of any of the nations already fighting. Even if Haven had taken advantage of Oyster Bay, as they expected, the Solarian League was not a match for the victor.

-------------

It comes down to the issue of Murphy.
Events overtook the Detweiler Plan -- (1)there was supposed to be a couple more decades (or centuries) for the Darius Project to develop, (2) spoon-fed technology to build up the SLN, (3) Theisman was not supposed to "retire" St.Just and the PRH.
Remember the PRH was the test-bed for usurping control of the SL. The assassination of King Roger was "supposed" to trigger a pre-emption in SKM.

Murphy's Law is always active.

The early activation of Houdini and its associated side operations triggered the MALIGN and SLN failures. What happens at Darius and its associated systems is yet to be seen.

-- Stewart

Actually Manticore had a lot of hits. A lot of allies were battered and left. Honor was actually captured at one point. With the High Ridge government they almost lost completely.

Now against the Sollies they did very well but keep in mind that the Solly navy was filled with blithering idiots who had not bothered to keep up with what was going on in the Haven sector.

Does that ever happen? Look at leadership in Europe at the start of World War I. Look at Britain, etc., for a lot of years when Japan and Germany were rearming.

Look at the US who thought the Japanese would have no chance because they were bucktooth little people with bad eyes.

There's a lot of that in history. Also remember that RFC is getting on in years. He didn't want to NOT finish off the bad guys...and the series went on longer than expected because Eric Flint found a whole new villain.