One-Shots18,979 stories ·2,370 members
Twilight is Best Pony6,400 stories ·3,073 members
The Usual372 stories ·55 members
Stories on Goodreads28,603 stories ·493 members
Equestrian wars17 stories ·36 members
Most folks in town know about Longbow, even if not many really know her. She's somepony parents teach their foals to avoid. Everypony understands that she's dangerous.
Everypony except Twilight, who just moved to town.
Supplier of trashy romances... RainbowBob
Sounding board... buckweiser
Free idea fountain... Maskedferret
Veteran who understands... Biker_Dash
Page generated in 0.166 seconds
Total duration
708 users online
701,070 hits today, 2,924,228 yesterday
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
A little bit reminiscent of Bridle Gossip, but very different in how it plays out. Twilight's suggestion seems to have worked out quite well.
Great story for a one off. Love longbow as a character. Would love to see more of her if you've got any more stories planned.
I liked this, even though I do think that AJ and Rainbow wouldn't have been that afraid of a veteran. It is true that IRL we have a regrettable tendency to expect people to fight for us in the most dangerous roles and then regard them as somehow "tainted" for doing so. I could launch into a very long rant about why this is, and why it is despicable to do so -- but I won't.
Somepony like Longbow might be very useful later on if Twilight needs to train her own Guards -- ever think of that?
A refreshing air of relaxation blows through this one, TNaB. Not your usual fare, by any means, but much, much more satisfying to read through. A good lesson that, frankly, many of today's youth could do well to learn, and I must say that even I take away something from this little excerpt.
I normally don't feel respectful of those that take others' lives, nor have I ever wanted to join the forces, but I've always been indifferent as to the memories and standards they continually employ, even though in civilian life. I can walk away from this with a newfound respect for those that do the things that Longbow has done, without feeling the overwhelming thought that they'll crush my lungs and snap my neck when I bump into them.
and that, my friend, is what makes a good story so.
~Dash The Stampede
Shes sorta like my dad...only no one talks about him being dangerous and is afraid of him.
4771557 Talk to Biker_Dash about this.
4771557
There will be more of her in another fic, that much I am certain. If things go as were talked about, though, it shall not be TNAB who will be writing the next fic with her in it.
There's a lot of win contained here. A lot.
Nicely done, especially for Season 1 Twilight.
A perquisite is a job perk, like vacation days or insurance or stock options. I doubt Twilight meant that killing was a bonus for the job, though AJ or Rainbow might have thought so. She likely meant prerequisite.
This is awesome.
Love this story. You and Biker_Dash did a great job.
I completely relate with the friends part, too. Never get to hang out with any of my old Navy buddies, what with them being so spread out. Hell, since coming home, it's been about the same with my old high school friends, too.
I hope a sequel comes by quickly. That'll be a joy to read.
I got this to say: if you ostracize a veteran because you're afraid of what they've done or who they've turned into because of their service, you need to eat a bag of dicks. That's right, AJ, RD, you both need to go find a big long pole to screw yourselves with right now. Because that's basically punishing somebody for choosing to go out to exotic lands where they would be at constant risk for the sake of your country and your freedom.
So yeah, AJ and RD in this fic can go fuck themselves.
I was expecting this to be about PTSD.
I kinda want to see a sequel to this. It would be pretty interesting to see what happens next with Longbow.
Good. I liked this story
Well written, and a brilliant moral. Good job!
4773110 Did you just unintentionally ship AJ and RD by calling them out?
4774125 What!? No I...
Oh goddammit, yes I did
Longbow was a very compelling character. I like her. Good story.
Great story, and very heartwarming for those of us who have military in the family.
4771713, awesome idea! Longbow would make a great captain for The Twilight Guard, and I suspect Celestia will transfer more civil and eventually even military responsibilities to the new Friendship Rainbow Kingdom – and its lavender princess!
4773110
The reasons why I don't think that AJ and RD would act this way are
(1) AJ comes from exactly the sort of family background that produces military recruits, and indeed is the sort of pony who if she had less family responsibilities might have joined up, and
(2) RD's ambition is to be a military or at least para-military heroine.
That was marvellous.
-Spirit
This has to be the first one chapter fanfic that i think is good enough to become maybe even one of my favourites. PS: And i am not a fan of the soldier thing that much, that way i try to say how good this fanfic is.
4773110 I know right!? Austria number one baby! Suck it America!
Love and slightly dislike relationship with this one. This isn't so much a pony story as a personal parable told through ponies. As a writer I think that's cheap for the plenum. As a combat veteran, however, I enjoy the hell out of it, as it relates to some poignant personal experiences. Like, after returning from the invasion of Iraq, getting cursed out by my friend's mother for "killing people for oil". Or the first few months after my third deployment where I'd wake up at 0100 with my hands cupped into hard, veiny 'C's and inculcated with a vague inclination to grab steel.
So I'm going to chalk this one up as a cheap pleasure. It's a tube-top wearing, chain-smoking truck stop waitress of a story, but hell. I wouldn't take her to dinner, but we can hang out. Thumbs up.
Don't you go meta on me.
What a beautiful story full of meaning.
ok, I'd say this is worth the thumbs up. not all that funny or suspenseful, but still a good story.
4772094 I hadn't realized that "perquisite" was a word, which is likely why spellcheck didn't catch it. Thanks for helping me fix this.
4774574 I've known for a while that I'm a cheap pleasure kind of writer - someone has to write B fics. However, I'd like to think that this story is just a little bit higher class than you describe. Although tube-top wearing, chain-smoking truck stop waitress certainly does fit the bill for some of my other work.
4773110 I respect the ideals that most veterans carry with them. However, considering my girlfriend lives in a different country, as well as some of my best friends, I'm personally not patriotic whatsoever.
However, as you mentioned, ostracizing anyone is wrong.
You handled the topic very well--you touched onto the difficulties of someone coming back from war without focusing on PTSD or pulling out melodramatic scenes. I like it.
An awesome story deserves an equally lame pun. "Twilight should know better than to judge a book by it's cover, or the critical blurbs."
And this is incredibly in character for the rest of the town. I kinda wish they showed the results of the town being like this before they learned their lesson from the incidents with Zecora.
I was expecting more from this story, honestly.
You have a great concept here, but I feel like it wasn't explored very much. I'm not saying you had to have a focus on PTSD for Longbow, or force the story to go into any cliche "misunderstanding" story arcs. But a bit more insight on some topics (like the wars Longbow served in, or the history behind them,) would have made the story a bit more... I don't know... fleshed out? To me it just seems like the plot could be wrapped up as "Longbow is ostracized. Twilight talks to her. Everything was okay. The end."
Maybe that's the point of this story though. It's not a grand adventure, or anything like it. Just a normal, small issue that could easily happen to any one of us, and that does make it all the more relatable.
Now, all that being said, Longbow's personality was done very well. You could have easily sculpted her into the overdone tough, quiet outcast who never smiles or leaves their house, but she's far better than that. Sure she's blunt and sometimes she seems a bit strange. But she's not downright mean or cold. She's polite, she smiles, and even visits various places in the town. You made her feel like a real person, and that was enough for me.
Tl;dr Longbow was great, though I wanted to see more.
This would have made a really great episode for the show.
4775092 Especially for this though. Especially for this. Punishing people for the choice to aid their country is just not acceptable.
How is it I never get invited to do things...? Hmph.
4774256 I'm not so sure about RD, honestly. The thing is, it's fairly obvious that RD's character trait as a Wonderbolt fanmare severely predates the Wonderbolts characterization as a military-esque group, and the two traits don't seem to interact at all. RD never expresses a desire to join a military group, or join the Wonderbolts to do militant things. She wants to join because they're the best flyers who put on the best air shows with the best tricks.
If I had to speculate, I'd say that the Wonderbolts were initially intended to be Equestria's premiere aerobatics team, and the military edge got added on as time distorted the initial idea. If I were to try to reconcile this in-universe, I'd put the Wonderbolts as something more akin to the RAF Red Arrows.
4775092
I don't see why being patriotic requires hating most other countries, and still less all the people who live on those other countries. I'm an American patriot, and when I was a young man viewed the Soviet Union with great suspicion as an enemy of my country. But I didn't hate all the people who lived in the Soviet Union, and was greatly happy at the end of the Cold War and breakup of the Warsaw Pact (1989-91) because I realized that it was now unlikely that we would ever have to kill any large number of Russians in my lifetime. (I'd always kind of liked most of the Russians I'd known personally).
The reason why I respect the real-life equivalents of Longbow, and am in general favorably inclined toward them, is that they protect us. If nobody were willing to fight for our country -- America or Equestria -- our lives would be much less safe than they are today. To hate or fear them for having had the courage to serve is ungrateful and foolish.
4776877
You've got a point about the Wonderbolts being more a home defense aerobatics team. Though I still think that Rainbow Dash's opinion of someone like Longbow would be more like "Cool ..."
Though again, RD might irritate Longbow. RD can be quite annoying without meaning to, in canon.
4776910 I don't hate anyone. I apologise if my comment sounded like such. Actually, precisely the opposite, I love humanity, which is why I wish we didn't have to have people fight for us.
I don't know how, but somehow we had almost exactly the same idea for a military sniper (Major differences: My Longbow uses a rifle and rocket launcher, not a bow; mine prefers to hide in clouds, not the tall grass; mine got her cutie mark while hunting with griffon guests).
I guess the name just works for that sort of character.
This is suspiciously similar to AdmiralTigerclaw's High Flier, in that an aircraft has been made into a pony.
4777148 Nah, if I really wanted to push it, I'd have a tough pegasus named Warthog who is being forcibly retired from the military for being old, despite being the best at what he does at attacking armored targets
4777265
Don't you mean Puma? Or Chupathingy?
4777273 I meant
absolute-news.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/A-10-Thunderbolt-1-1024x768-Wallpaper.jpg
4777281
That doesn't have tow-hooks that look like tusks.
4777148
I think that Longbow is in reference to the bow, not the helicopter.
Stories like this always remind me of Rudyard Kipling's Tommy. And because you can never instill the classics in any group enough:
4777995 Well, if a poem is going to make my story look terrible by comparison, it might as well be one by Rudyard Kipling. Good show.