Last Stand / Fan Works

• Along Came a Spider: With the invasion collapsing, Aidan Pryde leads a galaxy of Jade Falcon troops into the teeth of the counter-attack in order to recover Clan Civilians.
• An Empire of Ice and Fire: The remaining forces of the Targaryen Empire go into the Battle of Winterfell with this mentality. They know that if they fail to defeat the Night King at this point, there'll be nothing left to stop the Army of the Dead from overrunning all of Westeros. Therefore they all acknowledge that there's no option to retreat this time — win or lose, their war ends here.
• Equestria: A History Revealed: Princess Luna does this with her remaining Nightmare forces in the Battle of the Everfree forces. Knowing the war is lost, she personally sits this one out as she orders her armies to take out as many of Celestia's forces as possible. It ends with most of her forces dead or fleeing to be captured later.
• Eugenesis has Kup holding the rear and buying time for the rest of the Autobots to escape an oncoming horde of Sharkticons. Only he's not doing it to be heroic, he just can't take anymore. We later get a lovely description of what's left of him once the Sharkticons are done.
• Fallout: Equestria: The Battle of Dragon Mountain has the Applejack's Rangers, Unity alicorns, Talon Company, groups of freed Fillydelphia slaves, and various other random wanderers and Wastland vagabonds team up to defend The Gardens of Equestria megaspell chamber from the Enclave. Less than one-fourth of them survive.
• Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past: In the titular future, when Voldemort is taking over and everything is going to hell, Voldemort's forces mass against Azkaban. Mad-Eye Moody breaks past the sentries and rallies the vastly outnumbered guards against Voldemort. They held the fortress for twenty-two days and killed so many of Voldemort's followers that afterwards, a captive of the Death Eaters could earn a quick death by shouting "Constant vigilance!" at their captors.
• The Immortal Game: The Battle of the Everfree is an interesting play on this trope. By this point, Titan has lost all of his top lieutenants and his ability to create Puppets, and the Loyalists are assaulting his Citadel. However, he still controls the monsters of the forest, which all combined vastly outnumber the decimated Loyalists. On top of that, he's preparing to enact a spell that will strip the world of its free will, so Twilight and the others know that they have to finish the war with this last battle, or they lose everything. So really, in a way, it's a Last Stand for both sides.
• The Lunar Rebellion: The pegasi, Proud Warrior Race as they are, have a tradition of engaging any invader to the last rather than ever surrendering their city to outside forces. The story generally discredits the concept, noting that most of the time the choice to fight in a Last Stand rather than accept surrender is only a needless waste of lives.
  • In a footnote, Cloud Kicker notes that this has historically resulted in a great deal of ponies dying needlessly over matters of pride and that as a survivor of a near last stand herself she sees little appeal in the concept. A short while later in the story proper, Shadow concedes that it’s easy to speak of dying gloriously when you’re not the one who’s actually going to have to die.
  • In the end, after the Siege of Canterlot is broken, Steel Striker and his army choose to fight and die at the Maresidian Fields, caught between two royalist armies, knowing that the cause they fought for is already lost and preferring an honorable death to a humiliating peace through surrender. Steel even briefly wonders if there will be any stories about the last stand of the last ponies not to answer to immortal rulers. They don't get the chance. The royalists, taking advantage of a drought, burn the entire rebel army alive with a tremendous fire spell.
  • In the last true battle of the war, the remnants of the rebels engage the loyalist army in a last huge, hopeless charge once the latter reaches Cloudsdale, rather than face the humiliation of defeat. The last surviving rebel leader chooses to dress as a common soldier and die alongside his army rather than submit to the ignominy of captivity. This is later decried as a useless sacrifice of hundreds of lives for the sake of maintaining national and personal pride, as the loyalists would have readily accepted a surrender.
• The Negotiationsverse:
  • The prequel story Warfare, which describes how the last days of the series' Great Offscreen War played out, shows that the ponies attempted these only for their efforts to fail.
    • Luna was killed in battle when the ponies attempted to launch an attack on Jerusalem, staying behind to hold off humanity's forces long enough so her own forces could escape. She met her end after being Brought Down to Normal by the presence of humanity's newly unveiled Anti-Magic generators and was then promptly riddled with bullets. Her death was the first major blow to the Equestrians' morale and got many ponies to wonder if what they'd thought was a guaranteed victory may not be possible anymore.
    • After the double whammy of the barrier being brought down thanks to the aforementioned Anti-Magic generators and the Crystal Empire getting nuked as retaliation for the destruction of Mecca and Vatican City, humanity offered Equestria the chance to surrender peacefully, but Celestia instead chose to keep the fight going. While the ponies prepared themselves for the invasion by pouring every last resource they had into fortifying their defenses and even developing firearms and tanks to even the playing field out, they were still hopelessly outmatched, with the first line of defense getting utterly plowed in the first few minutes as humanity proceeded to rain fire and death down onto Equestria.
    • As humanity's invasion of Equestria began closing in on Canterlot, every pony in the city was absolutely ready to fight to the bitter end, with even teenagers being recruited and given a weapon. As Halberd noted, they all knew there was no way that they could win but would nevertheless die putting up a fight. However, after Celestia was rendered comatose by the strain of using the last of her power to protect the city from a brutal aerial assault, Twilight ultimately defied the trope by surrendering the war to spare her subjects a meaningless death via throwing themselves into a suicidal and ultimately hopeless last battle. It's also noted that several towns and cities like Cloudsdale decided to surrender to humanity's forces rather than be blown to bits trying to fight against an enemy they had no hope of making a dent in. The last pony army outside of Canterlot even had a mutiny in its ranks when the lower ranked soldiers forcibly relieved (as in, killed) their commanding officer and surrendered rather than fight humanity's forces.
  • Also defied in the climax of the fourth story in the series, Useless, where Applejack and Rainbow Dash make a pact to go out in a blaze of glory and kill as many humans as possible before they bite the dust, even pumping themselves up with some Body-Count Competition banter, only for the human soldier that finds them to kick the door in, gun them both down, and then move on to the next room uncaring of who he just killed nor breaking stride, all in the blink of an eye.
• The Night Unfurls presents an unusual usage of this trope: people who do this are lucky enough to survive long enough for a Big Damn Heroes.
  • Sergeant Roland prepares to meet his end, axe in hand as his soldiers are being forced back by greenskins. Then he catches sight of a dangling, upside down rune, painted on a flag unfurled in the distance — the arrival of Sir Kyril's company.
  • Soren, after killing ten guards on his own, is seemingly at his limit. One of his arms is broken, yet there's five more remaining and Mandeville's within his sights. He intends to go down in a blaze of glory, until a gunshot is heard, and one guard has a hole on the side of his head. The remaining four turn as they see Hugh charge from the left flank.
• Nobledark Imperium: The Last Roll of Thunder — the very last of the Thunder Warriors, at that point retirees in failing health, mustering to the Imperial Palace and fighting to the last against the forces of the Beast during the invasion of Terra.
• Origins: Discussed by Aria T'Loak, of all people, after her venture to retake Omega (which was probably never going to work anyway) heads south—"Until every last one of us is dead!" is her answer to how long the force will fight.
• Pony POV Series: This is how the Dark World version of Cadence went down. Having long since become the new Queen of the changelings and acted as Rebel Leader against Discord, her base is finally overrun by him and his enforcers, the discorded Mane Six. In order to buy time for her subjects to escape, she names a successor before proceeding to fight all six Villain Protagonists and kicking their asses before Discord literally stabs her in the back and she dies. While she lost, she still managed to succeed in her goal to protect her people (since they're still around five centuries later).
• The Raven's Plan actually opens with one of these, as the last survivors of Westeros gather on the Isle of Faces to protect it from the Night King's forces as Bran and Melisandre prepare a ritual to send everyone's minds back in time to try and Set Right What Once Went Wrong. The defenders get slaughtered, but succeed in their goal, leading into the main plot.
• A Scotsman in Egypt:
  • Happens all the time — to Scotland's enemies. Due to the AI behaving the same way every time, a besieged city will end up with its walls breached and its army retreating to the city square for its last, ineffective, stand. And in one instance, the surviving army consisted of one spearman. Then the Scottish commander rides up with his army and bodyguard.
    "Och, I dinnae lads, do ye think we can take him?"
  • After the Mongols are defeated, the last remnants of their army are run down by the Scots, who allow them to make a last stand: the Scot officer is a bit of an Ensign Newbie, and offers their commander a Duel to the Death, promising them safe passage if he wins (and if he loses, the officer will have proven that he's as much a Proud Warrior Race Guy as his troops).
• The Shape of the Nightmare to Come, a fan-created theory of what the Fifty-first Millennium of the Warhammer 40,000 universe might look like, has a few of these; the Adeptus Custodes and Gray Knights on Titan and the Imperial Fists on Terra and later all across the Galaxy are most notable. Almost all of the Orkish race makes a final stand against the New Devourer in the largest battle the galaxy has ever seen. And they lose.
• Tamers Forever Series: Every combatant — willingly or not — is forced to make a last stand against Daemon's forces during the final chapters of Silent Sorrow.
• TERRANIS HOLDS:
  • In typical 40K fashion, this story has gone far beyond a Last Stand, with many Krieg insisting Terranis still "holds" after more than a century surrounded by Warp storms and being engulfed by a Tyranid splinter fleet, and the planet has taken on a religious reverence not just to them, to the extent that it's regarded as part of the afterlife.
    Contact was lost before the invasion began, and nearly everyone assumes that the place was lost when the xenos hit it. I mean, one planet against an entire splinter fleet. I asked the next Krieg soldier I saw about this, why they believed that a planet that was by all reasoning most likely a dead rock, was their place of salvation and reward. The Krieger soldier just saluted and said the first words I've ever heard a Krieger speak: "Terranis holds."
  • Upped to insanity in a later fanfiction, where it turns out that Terranis did hold out until warpstorms ended, but due to the fact that the legend about it was demoralizing other regiments it was intentionally put into the warp by an inquisitor so that it would only stay as a sort-of paradise to Kriegers. It seems that the world is dead and overrun with demons? No. Why? Because orks were so terrified by the legend that Kriegers reincarnate until they earn the honour of joining others in Terranis, that this actually starts happening. And because of this Terranis is locked in an eternal last stand in the warp, constantly reinforced by new Kriegers who earned their right to go there.
    Terranis will hold. Always.
• The TSAB – Acturus War has the Sacred War holding off a large number of TSAB vessels by doing Explosive Overclocking on its relativistic particle cannon.
• The Victors Project: The Peacekeepers attack the Control Center, where the mentors are stationed, after Katniss destroys the Third Quarter Quell arena. All the oldest Victors present stay behind to fight, allowing the younger ones — Haymitch, Abram, and Cotton — to escape and help start the Mockingjay Revolution.
• War Debts: Rex and the 501st pull one when they're surrounded by enemy battle droids to ensure Anakin and Ahsoka can escape. They survive, but not without a lot of casualties.
  Rex: Alright, you lot. You know the drill. If we can't stop them, then we delay them as long as we can, and after that we make sure they have to crawl over our bodies. It's been an honor, gentlemen.

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