Honor Harrington/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Alas, Poor Villain: Steadholder Mueller at the end of Ashes of Victory. He also counts as an Unwitting Pawn in the way his downfall came about.
    • Admiral Rayna Sherman in Honor Among Enemies. She deeply regrets signing up with Andrew Warnecke and spends much of the single chapter she appears in plagued by her conscience before dying in the service of a madman.
      • Worse, her ship was blown to bits while she was trying to surrender, seconds before she was able to strike the wedge. (Even if she had succeeded, she herself likely would've been executed for being one of Warnecke's highest-ranking people anyway.)
  • Anvilicious: The destruction of the starships Sovereignty of the People and Equality by State Sec during the coup that put Saint-Just in power.
  • Author's Saving Throw: Impeller signatures can be detected FTL. Since a widely reported experiment in 2002 supported the idea that gravitational waves travel at light speed, War of Honor explains that this works thanks to an echo off of hyperspace and not via direct detection.
  • Broken Base: A number of readers have complained it jumped the shark after about the fourth book—perhaps because they wanted it to continue being a light space opera rather than morph into a political conspiracy epic.
  • Canon Sue: A frequent accusation leveled at Honor, occasionally even in the books themselves, depending on how you interpret the lines in question. Pavel Young and William Fitzclarence ruminated about it at length, but Oscar St.-Just sums it up best near the beginning of Ashes of Victory:

She's just happened to be in the right places--or the wrong ones, I suppose, from our perspective--for the last, oh, ten years or so. That's the official consensus from my analysts, at least. The other theory, which seems to have been gaining a broader following of late, is that she's in league with the Devil.

    • Hilariously, Weber has - in all seriousness - made the claim that she's totally a realistically flawed character - her flaws are that she's too good and too honorable.
      • Someone with her capabilities and ethics has to be burdened beyond belief by the responsibilities inherent to them. If she were "perfect", she'd understand that they're part and parcel of the job - she'd kick a rock and get started on the next job. Instead, she spends all her spare time insisting It's All My Fault. Honor's humility and sense of responsibility often turn emotionally self-destructive. She genuinely believes that she's such an absolute, unstoppably perfect Badass that if something bad happens to one of her friends or allies, it's her fault for not foreseeing and mitigating it. To be sarcastic about it, her biggest "flaw" is that she doesn't realize how awesome she is.
        • To be more literal about it, her biggest flaw is that she has a martyr complex and is prone to occasional neurosis. Which are, legitimately, flaws; flaws that her opponents have deliberately taken advantage of in order to drive the plot forward, no less.
      • Indeed, a possible Crowning Moment of Awesome in A Rising Thunder is when Thomas Theisman tells her to Quit Your Whining when she starts backsliding into this emotional guilt-trap after a major battle.
      • For all her Tranquil Fury, Honor makes some terrible mistakes when she lets her emotions guide her. Twice The Honor of the Queen and In Enemy Hands she has run away from awkward social situations with the result that people get killed. Twice The Honor of the Queen and Field of Dishonor she has been so impatient for revenge she's let it blight her career even though a little patience could have achieved the same thing with no personal consequences. Other times her armsmen have needed to physically restrain her to prevent her doing something suicidally dumb in the heat of the moment.
    • Victor Cachat. Again.
    • Just so long as Tropes Are Not Bad is remembered.
    • Samantha. Yes, a treecat Canon Sue. 'Cats that have the ability/need to bond with humans are rare, and female ones are even rarer. 'Cats capable of becoming memory-singers are rare. 'Cats capable of innovative thought are rare. Samantha is all three. On top of that, she's one of the only bonded female cats ever to leave Sphinx, she's part of the only human-bonded, mated pair in history, and she's one of the few 'cats to survive losing a partner and forge a second bond. Oh, and she's the leader of the movement to get treecats to start their diaspora, she's right at the heart of treecats learning to speak with humans, and her children may be part of a new generation of human-acclimated, innovative 'cats. If she weren't a side-character, she'd be a perfect shoe-in. Oh wait, she in fact is the main character of the short story, Changer of Worlds.
  • Cerebus Syndrome (or Growing the Beard): The series starts out as a fairly light space-navy adventure series, but gradually morphs into a galaxy-spanning political conspiracy epic. (Losing some readers along the way.)
  • Complaining About Books You Don't Read: Writing for The Guardian, Damien G. Walter calls the Honor Harrington series part of "the same neo-conservative fiction that has perpetuated our real world conflicts." (This, of course, completely ignores the books' strong centrist position that makes Strawmen Political of both liberal and conservative extremists, and the fact that several of the books were written by a prominent Trotskyist.) He also refers to Honor defeating "one alien menace after another" and accuses the books of failing to portray the cost in human wreckage that war creates... despite the fact that the only non-friendly aliens in the entire series are displayed as victims of Haven's plans, and that a book rarely goes without a War Is Hell Wham! Episode.
  • Complete Monster: Several of Honor's enemies. Pavel Young stands out as someone who is never shown ever displaying a single positive human emotion and who goes to extreme lengths to hurt people in his way.
    • Also pretty much every one of the Masadans.
    • Cordelia Ransom. She actually managed to make Oscar Saint-Just's State Sec look like honest, decent human beings by comparison.
    • Lady Georgia 'Elaine Sakristos' Young, formerly Pavel Young's security chief and then Lady North Hollow after marrying his brother Stefan and Pavel's own death. She started out her career as a Manpower slave who, when the Audobon Ballroom attempted to rescue her slave ship and free her and the other slaves onboard, betrayed them all back to the Mesans for cash. You'd think selling out an entire shipload of fellow slaves just for a few million would be the worst thing someone had ever done, but in Lady North Hollow's case this was just the beginning. Other lowlights of her career include blackmail, murder, conspiracy to commit murder, being the chief black ops consultant for the Conservative Association (themselves the by far worst people in Manticorean politics), and being the cutout and operational planner for Young's contracts on Paul Tankersley and Honor herself, in addition to masterminding the slander of Honor and Admiral White Haven.
    • Pirates. Every time they show up.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: In-universe example. Later on, Havenite units start using music in place of standard shipboard alarms for things like General Quarters or Battle Stations. One ship uses "Ride of the Valkyries" for the Battle Stations alarm. In context, it is awesome.
  • Dying Moment of Awesome: A Grayson armsman will settle for nothing less than this or Heroic Sacrifice.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: "Tac witch" Shannon Foraker for her plucky, geeky cheer even under a tyranny that distrusts its officers, for the "Oops!" CMOA, and for almost single-handedly being responsible for the Republic of Haven catching up to Manticore in their Arms Race.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: At the end of Flag In Exile, Weber's Author Note points out an uncomfortable parallel between the Oklahoma City bombings--which occurred after the manuscript had been finished--and the Mueller dome collapse. Readers after 2001 may notice a few parallels with 9/11 as well.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: In Honor of the Queen one Masadan officer is criticised for relying on weight of fire to try and overwhelm Honor's defences, which is odd when later books are so much about Manticoran Missile Massacre.
    • In The Short Victorious War, the idea of battlecruisers trumping ships of the wall is dismissed as impossible. Several books later, Manticore does just that against the Sollies.
    • Crown of Slaves, Berry Zilwicki claims that the only two things she would be good at are being a housewife or a queen. Guess what.
  • Ho Yay: Although Scotty Tremaine and Horace Harkness are "officially" Heterosexual Life Partners, there is the rare ... hint ... of something more. Like in In Enemy Hands, when they were captured and Tremaine had thought Harkness had turned traitor, but then discovered it was only a ruse so Harnkess could gain the Peeps' trust and engineer an escape:

Aside from five of the noncoms, [Harnkess] was junior to every one of them, but he had their undivided attention. Especially that of Scotty Tremaine, who couldn't seem to take his glowing eyes off him.

  • I Knew It!: The end of Mission of Honor features Haven and Manticore allying against Manpower and the Solarian League.
  • Like You Would Really Do It: A character in Basilisk is given a full three pages of backstory before being "killed" while trying to escape. Anyone with any Genre Savvy at all doubtless figured out it wasn't him. He is shown later escaping Basilisk thanks to his use of the craft that everyone thought he was in as a decoy. He shows up again in Field of Dishonor, and is hired by Pavel Young to kill Paul Tankersley and Honor in duels. Succeeds at the first, but the second... not so much.
    • Despite the author's insistence that Anyone Can Die, there is a distinct pattern of Plot Armor around Honor and her family. Yes, nearly the entire Harrington clan is wiped out in Oyster Bay, but miraculously all the ones we've actually met onscreen escape with their lives.
    • There's a similar tendency for crew members with a lot of Character Development to survive at the least the book they're introduced in. There was no way that, say, a young techie who takes a level in ass-kicking and puts the ship's bullies in their place is going to buy the farm in the inevitable Honor Death Ride at the end of Honor Among Enemies, for example. After their introductory book, however, they're as fair game as anyone else.
  • Made of Explodium: In every conceivable nuclear fusion reactor design in Real Life, the hardest part is making the fusion reaction happen at all. If containment fails, the fusion reaction simply stops. The fusion bottles on board starships in the Honorverse, however, blow up like a supernova if they're sufficiently damaged, ensuring that destroying a starship in combat always results in a massive explosion killing everyone still aboard.
    • Starship fusion reactors are stated to work via gravity manipulation. Basically, take a bunch of hydrogen, squish it with a few hundred gees, and you've got a miniature star. Remove the gravity and the magnetic containment field and even though the reaction has stopped, you've still got a bunch of hydrogen plasma at about 10,000,000 degrees on the loose.
    • In Flag in Exile, Honor's pinnace is hit by a missile and crashes into the spaceport runway. As a safety feature, it ejects its hydrogen fuel tanks -- one of which smashes into the spaceport's terminal, explodes, and kills over ten times as many people as were aboard the pinnace.
      • In fairness, that's templated from real-world combat aircraft and the safety feature that allows them to immediately jettison all unexpended ordnance in case of emergency. This feature is not intended for use when directly over a friendly airfield; the designer assumes that the most likely place the aircraft will suffer combat damage is when already in a combat zone.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Honor considers Thomas Theisman to be one and Theisman seems to return the favor. Then there is Victor Cachat who proves to be a heavy weight contender for the title with his actions in Crown of Slaves.
    • While above examples are just contenders, Oscar Saint-Just and Albrecht Detweiler are the ones. With emphasis on the "bastard" part.
  • Memetic Badass: Victor Cachat -- of this very page.
  • Moral Event Horizon: The Masadans, who prior to that point had just been fairly generic religiously oriented bad guys, crossed the MEH with what they did to the crew of the HMS Madrigal.
    • Burdette's faction of Steadholders crosses it when they sabotage a dome over a middle school.
    • Andrew Warnecke casually nukes a city on a planet he's holding hostage just to show he's serious.
  • Protection From Editors: Mission from Honor and A Rising Thunder have firmly moved the series from its Horatio Hornblower focus on single deployments with a traditional narrative arc (setup, rising conflict, climax, aftermath) to an unwieldy "record of an ongoing period of time" format that embodies this trope.
    • For example, if A Rising Thunder didn't have P v. E, it might not have taken a third of the book to reach the main cast, nor would the first three chapters have focused on one-shot Lower Deck Episodes that basically came down to "Operation Lacoön upsets Solarians and Manticoran shipping companies."
  • Purple Prose:
    • While Weber is fairly good writing military situations, he is arguably much, much less proficient at casual dialogue. For example, in Storm from the Shadows we meet a character on the planet Montana; in Planet of Hats terms, the planet wears a cowboy hat. For all the character's principle-driven, plain-spoken ways he still refers to a "plebiscite" and the "oligarchs" behind it the same as everyone else.
    • In general, characters who are angry will actually become more verbose, not less, regardless of educational level. One common example is describing someone with three adjectives or phrases, such as "stiff-necked, obstinate, mule-headed idiot!" or suchlike. Even the Queen, who has the fiercest temper in the entire series, is prone to this.
    • These are dialed way down in books written or co-written by other authors.
    • David Weber orders a pizza.
  • Rooting for the Empire: Late Haven under Pritchart vs Manticore under High Ridge government. Elizabeth's issues about Haven didn't make the situation any better now that High Ridge is out.
    • Haven, even before that.
      • On one side, you have a small but prosperous Kingdom, with a powerful and well-trained military. They are engaged in a war for survival against The Empire. While they are smaller, they have allies, better technologies and are mostly winning.
      • On the other side, you have the remnants of a great Republic, turned into a decadent Empire caught in a spiral of self-destruction. They are conquering systems after system in a hopeless headlong rush to delay the final collapse. Its only hope for survival is a revolutionist whose Reign of Terror will cause millions of deaths. And they are caught in a war for survival against a superiorly trained enemy with far better technology, while their military is decapitated by purges and endangered by both the enemies and their own State Security.
      • Both sides have their heroes and bad guys. But who has the most compelling story? The ones with some internal political troubles, and an exterior threat they have chances to defeat? Or the ones who have to defend a monstrous regime against nice guys in a Hopeless War because it's the last thing still preventing mass-riots and billions of deaths?
  • Squick: One frequently overlooked effect of prolong therapy is that it extends all stages of human development. Which, basically, means that legally fully-grown-up 20 y.o. people still look like a bunch of grade middle school kids. Furiously lampshaded in The Shadow of Saganami, where the people from backwater planets (where prolong hasn't been available yet) were acutely disturbed by this.
  • Straw Dystopia: Haven, for most of the series.
  • Straw Man Has a Point
    • Admiral Sonja Hemphill is the leading advocate of the jeune école school, which advocated using small ships with revolutionary new and powerful weapons in semi-sacrificial raids against much larger ships. At first, Honor is horrified by the callousness of the idea when applied to light cruisers. Later, when the same concept is revitalized by LAC carriers, it's painted in an entirely positive light. (To be fair, the ratio of losses was much better there, and the new LA Cs are designed to be able to close with enemies, whereas a light cruiser has about a snowball's chance of getting into "knife range" of its intended targets.)
      • In general, the jeune école believed that new weapons could produce wholly new tactics and revolutionize war. However, her faction had a tendency to shoot itself in the foot by embracing anything just because it was new. Once reigned in a little, they proved absolutely right and turned centuries of military doctrine completely on its head.
    • Captain Oversteegan assigns Abigail Hearns to talk with a group of Space Amish, ostensibly because she could relate with them best, being born something of a Space Amish herself. She takes offense at this, until the ship's XO asks her if she knows of anyone else who might be better qualified to meet with them.
    • Mesa, who, as Weber went on record to point out, is actually right about the right and useful nature of transhumanism ideas (not genetic slavery, though). They're just being dicks about it -- and that's where slavery comes in.
  • Tear Jerker: At some point, something in one of these novels is going to make you blubber like a child. That is all.
  • What an Idiot!: Mesan Alignment's Long-Range Planning Board. Not only have those guys deviated significantly from their founder's original vision (their current modus operandi surprisingly resembles the one of one Gilbert Durandal), but the whole snafu in Torch of Freedom was created exclusively by their actions. If they hadn't insisted on culling Herlander Simões' autistic daughter as a failed experiment, the guy in question wouldn't have had the nervous breakdown that brought Jack McBryde into the picture and made him his friend. And it all went downhill from there.
    • Isabel Bardasano, of all people, described their actions in almost the same language, when she discussed that problem with Jack.
    • In the end, their insistence on "proper procedure" has led to the complete unraveling of the Alignment's "onion" and gave the Manties and Havenites the smoking gun they've needed. Together with several more critical secrets, like the streak drive and the man who friggin' made it. The outcome is debatable, and may even be a case of Doomed by Canon, as those critical secrets are being revealed too late to do anyone any good due to a Phlebotinum Breakdown keeping Herlander Simões from getting anywhere useful to prevent Oyster Bay, aka Pearl Harbor In Space.
    • Pavel Young, Eleventh Earl of North Hollow, who was so stupid and petty that he sent everything his Affably Evil ancestors worked for centuries on down the drain in his feud with the main character.
    • Cordelia Ransom, chief propagandist for the Rob S. Pierre regime. When she learned that Harrington had been captured, she decided to rush to the scene to indulge her sadistic streak, triggering no less than four major Heel Face Turns among her notional comrades:
      • Warner Caslet aided and abetted Honor's crew breaking her out of the supermax brig on Ransom's State Sec ship. Blowing Ransom and her entire ship to kingdom come in the process.
      • Lester Tourville (see his entry on the characters page) erased the evidence that Honor and company had survived and succeeded in their escape attempt. (Just to add to the mix, Tourville and his people were next in line on Ransom's "Make Them Suffer" list.)
      • Shannon Foraker: "Oops!"
      • Thomas Theisman: "Goodbye, Citizen Chairman."
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