Honor Harrington/Heartwarming

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Honor Harrington's reunion with her parents, and meeting her new siblings, in Ashes of Victory after being 'unavailable' for the last two books.
    • Made especially effective by Honor's words when she first sees them. Nearly all of David Weber's dialogue is very formal, with characters very carefully enunciating and bordering on purple prose at times, even when the characters are explicitly being casual with one another. When Honor finally sees her parents, all of that goes right out the window, and she can only say, "Momma...? Daddy...?"
  • From Echoes of Honor:

Honor Harrington: "We're home, System Command.... It took us awhile, but we're home."

    • And pretty much everything between those two examples. Honor's return from being believed dead for two years is a string of heartwarming moments one after another.
  • In At All Costs, Howard Clinkscale's funeral and the aftermath, when Honor creates the legal equivalent of blood bonds between her family and the Clinkscales family.
    • Also in that story the epilogue has the story David and the Phoenix being read to by Honor to her young siblings and her own child. The story is not only beautiful, but a ready made allusion to the state of the empire.
      • David and the Phoenix is a real book, as it happens.
  • Pretty much every single time with Graysons and Honor, but especially in Flag in Exile when Harrington steaders take down Father Marchant and later, the sermon Reverend Hanks gave in Harrington Cathedral.
    • Andrew LaFollet's first conversation with Tomas Ramirez.
  • Honor giving her approval to a naval rating choosing to exercise with marines, with all the subtext it includes.
  • A bit more violent than your typical Crowning Moment of Heartwarming, but in Field of Dishonor, when Honor's lover had been killed, her friends in the Manticoran Navy conceive and perform an op disguised as a training exercise for the sole purpose of tracking down the killer. This move was highly illegal and would have cost everyone involved their careers if found out. They did it anyway.
  • Nearly every interaction Honor has with Hamish and Emily Alexander after they finally get together.
    • Okay, in particular, one that stands out is the birth of Honor's son.
  • Honor explaining her choice of her son's armsman.
    • Her choice gets vindicated in Mission of Honor during the Oyster Bay terrorist attack, in what serves as a Dying Moment of Awesome for Andrew Lafollett.
  • In Honor Among Enemies, the PNS Vaubon, commanded by Citizen Commander Caslet, does some truly epic and heartwarming stuff.
    • Totally annihilate a brutal pirate ship and rescue the two Manticoran MauveShirts that appear at the beginning of the book.
    • Attack three more pirate ships in order to save a Manticoran merchant vessel from them. When it turns out that the merchant vessel is Honor's Q-ship, she captures the Vaubon, but also extends her personal thanks and congratulations to its crew. Awwwww.
      • And at the very end of the book she gives them a cover story to explain why they did it.
  • Many things from the ending of The Shadow of Saganami, but not least among them is when we find out that HMS Warlock -- up until then one of the least-regarded ships in the Royal Manticorean Navy, with a reputation for being staffed by fuck-ups and cowards, whose prior CO was the infamous Lord Pavel Young... has, due to its (posthumous) valor as part of Commodore Terekhov's 'Southern Squadron' at Monica, been granted a position on the RMN's List of Honor, the roster of ship names that are perpetually kept in commission at all costs as reminders of the finest examples in RMN history.
  • In Cauldron of Ghosts, crimelord Jurgen Dusek of the seccy district on the planet Mesa proves that he has the potential to be something more. Having just been warned by Victor Cachat that severe reprisals will soon be launched by the Mesans and that he'd better prepare 'his people' for evacuation from the arcology his headquarters is in, Dusek's lieutenant asks for clarification on just how extensive the evac efforts need to be.

Jurgen Dusek: How many people live in this building?
Trieu Chuanli: Nobody knows for sure. I'd say thirty-five thousand, thereabouts.
Dusek: What I figure too. Okay, then. They're all our people. Every man, woman, and child.