Tropes for characters appearing in the Honor Harrington prequel series Manticore Ascendant.
WARNING: Spoilers are unmarked.
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Royal Manticoran Navy
Travis Uriah Long
Travis Uriah Long
"...I continue to believe this officer is far too conscious of the exact letter of the regulations. This makes him in many ways a less than ideal leader during routine shipboard operations. He is clearly not comfortable dealing with subordinates outside the strictest interpretation of regulations and standard operating procedures, and one cannot avoid the impression that he takes refuge behind them rather than seeking opportunities to generate a sense of rapport. [...] He is also, however, fundamentally incapable of giving less than his best to any task to which he may be assigned. He does not appear to know even the definition of the term 'dereliction', and despite his obvious preference for clearly defined hierarchies and the social insulation of regulations and SOP, he excels at identifying and correcting weaknesses in the training of his own subordinates. [...] Perhaps most importantly, this officer possesses the intellectual integrity and moral courage not only to shoulder responsibilities which should never have been assigned to someone of his relatively junior rank, but also to accept the potentially disastrous personal consequences of exercising his judgement in meeting those responsibilities. In short, it is the undersigned officer's opinion that Lieutenant Commander Long is one of the most competent, if frequently infuriating, and valuable officers with whom she has been privileged to serve."
— Captain Trina Miranda Clegg, Royal Manticoran Navy
The main protagonist of the series. As an intelligent, but neglected adolescent hungering for a sense of order in his life, he enlisted in the Royal Manticoran Navy and turned it into a career.
- Awesomeness by Analysis: Travis is able to figure out that one of the enemy ships has a malfunctioning autocannon due to the way it is maneuvering to keep one side facing their attacks. They exploit this to sneak a missile past that ship to lay in a sucker punch on the battlecruiser it was screening for.
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Diagnosed by the Audience: Travis need for following the rules due to them helping him structuring his life, his comprehension issues with social cues and other elements strongly imply he's somewhere on the Autism Spectrum, though clearly highly functional. - Embarrassing Nickname: One of his primary school teachers gave him a nickname, "Travesty", that managed to follow him all the way into the Navy. It comes from his name, "Travis U Long", sounding like "Travis Oolong" (a type of Chinese tea), which was then morphed into "Travis Tea".
- Free-Range Children: Justified and deconstructed. As a child, Travis can basically go anywhere, anytime he wants, and his mother will hardly even notice, let alone care. This gets him into a bit of trouble, but fortunately, wiser people than his mom nudge him onto a more constructive life path. See also Parental Neglect, below.
- Guile Hero: Travis is as ordinary and humble as they come. He is also one of the most promising naval tacticians of his generation.
- Hands-Off Parenting: Travis's mother seems to take a near-total disinterest in anything he does, ultimately giving him both ultimate freedom and ultimate lack of guidance. The result is a young man who feels lost in the world.
- Hidden Depths: Many of his early Navy instructors find him to be at best average and at worst annoying. His by-the-book attitude makes him appear, superficially, as the kind of one-dimensional thinker who is competent and reliable, but ultimately destined only for mediocrity. In truth, he has a far more agile mind than people give him credit for, and more astute officers take notice and cultivate his talents as an outside-the-box tactician. His powers of observation and reasoning eventually land him in Manticore's new Special Intelligence Service.
- Lawful Stupid: Even when he was just starting out as a boot, Travis quickly earned a reputation for being an uncompromising rule stickler. It gets him into no end of trouble, especially early in his career, because he is unable to understand that, while some rule-breaking is certainly unacceptable, the realities of life make it impractical, and sometimes even counterproductive, to always follow regs to the letter, especially with how underfunded and undermanned the RMN is. Some of his COs just find him annoying, while more reasonable ones understand that he means well and that his rigidity, if properly tempered, could make him a good leader. As one officer put it, Travis is very good at reading the lines of the rulebook; he just needs to learn how to read between them.
- Non-Action Guy: Travis is in reasonably good shape — he's in the military, after all — but he's also a navy tactical officer who spends most of his time staring at computer screens.
- No Social Skills: Downplayed. Travis does have some social grace, but has even more social anxiety. He has more trouble than most reading the thoughts and emotions of others and has a tendency to catastrophize when he doesn't know what someone is thinking about him — which is often.
- Parental Neglect: His mother, Melisande, might actually care less about Travis than she would a random stranger. As an adolescent, his peers are envious of his freedom, but he finds it rather hollow. In fact, she thinks about him so little that, years later, his brother Gavin learns with disgust that their mother didn't even bother to check if Travis survived the Battle of Manticore (with the excuse that if he hadn't, Gavin would have told her). The reason Travis enlisted in the RMN was to find the purpose and structure that his childhood never had.
- Passed-Over Promotion: Downplayed. Travis does get promoted, but he doesn't receive the honors and opportunities his exemplary service merits because his half-brother is a politician in league with Earl Breakwater. The higher-ups in the navy don't want any acclaim given to Travis to spill over onto one of their opponents. Lord Winterfall may be too upstanding to exploit his brother's success for political gain, but his boss definitely isn't.
- Reassigned to Antarctica: Gets assigned to instructor duty with the MPRS in A Call to Vengeance. Travis naturally assumes this is a punishment due to his brother being one of Breakwater's allies, but soon learns he loves teaching. Later, he is transferred to the Bureau of Personnel, where naval careers go to die, though this turns out to be a front for his real assignment with the Special Intelligence Service.
- Recruiters Always Lie: Travis joins the RMN on an impulse after seeing the recruiting posters (and the beautiful recruiting officer) advertising an exciting career defending the Star Kingdom and learning valuable skills. As it happens, the RMN of this time period is a demoralized undermanned service seemingly lacking any actual purpose.
- Up Through the Ranks: Travis decided to enlist in the navy as a non-com to get his career off to a quicker start, but after events at Secour demonstrated his potential, his then-captain and XO jointly sponsored him for a commission.
Charles Townsend
Charles "Chomps" Townsend
A Sphinxian non-com who becomes close friends with Travis during boot camp.- Big Eater: He has the same accelerated metabolism as other heavy worlders and the appetite that comes with it.
- Heavy Worlder: Like Harrington from the main series, he comes from a modified human gene line designed for improved survivability on heavy gravity worlds, hence his family's choice to emigrate to Sphinx. Unlike Harrington, he's also the size of a bull.
Lisa Long
Lisa Long (née Donnelly)
A Navy officer slightly senior to Travis who becomes close friends with and eventually marries him.- Be Careful What You Say: Lisa is a rational woman who doesn't believe in fate, but she grew up with enough melodramatic fiction that she is unwillingly superstitious that giving Travis a tearful goodbye before a deployment will mean one of them isn't coming back.
Manticore Government and Civilians
Roger III Winton
King Roger III Winton
The first of Manticore's monarchs to receive Prolong treatment, he spends most of his military career, and after retirement, his reign as King, to prepare the Star Kingdom of Manticore for what he sees as the inevitable war with the Peoples' Republic of Haven. Oversaw much of the Royal Manticoran Navy's pre-war expansion program, despite considerable political pushback both from his senior officers and from Parliament. When he was on the verge of forging an alliance with San Martin against Haven, he was assassinated via an engineered grav-ski accident, leaving his teenaged daughter Elizabeth to take the throne in his place.- Badass Boast: Which would become the epitaph on his grave:
- Dramatic Irony: He is the first member of the Royal Family to receive the new Prolong treatments, and is expected to have a long reign as King as a result. Much is made of the fact that there is plenty of time for him to put his various plans into effect (most notably forging an alliance with San Martin, training his daughter in her distant future duties as Queen, and reconciling with his son over a disagreement). And then he is assassinated.
- Guile Hero: Knowing that he will never get Parliament to agree to pay for the research and development programs he needs for the RMN to have a fighting chance against the bigger People's Navy, he simply sets it up in secret, siphoning funds off from various other parts of the budget to fund it.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: He is assassinated via a sabotaged grav-ski, falling to his death.
- Military Maverick: He spends most of his career as an outspoken proponent of an expansion of the Royal Manticoran Navy, as well as a transition from a large force of lighter units (best suited for protecting their vast merchant fleet) to a smaller force of powerful capital ships (better suited for power projection and defense of the home system). Most of his superiors in the Navy feel that such changes in doctrine are unnecessary.
- Royals Who Actually Do Something: Served for several decades as an officer in the Royal Manticoran Navy, and took his duties very seriously. As a matter of fact, he served rather longer than anyone expected him to, given the presumption that he would leave the service at the first opportunity to take up his real duties as a Royal. He never rose above the rank of Captain due to the combination of his refusal to leverage his social status for promotion and his unorthodox views on naval doctrine.
- Young Future Famous People: The one story he appears in features multiple discussions about various junior officers, including an indication that Hamish Alexander and Sonja Hemphill were both already nursing a healthy rivalry back when they were lieutenants.
Baron Winterfall
Lord Gavin Vellacott, Baron Winterfall
Travis's half-brother on his mother's side, a peer of the realm who rises to prominence as part of Lord Breakwater's anti-Navy/pro-MPARS coalition.- Everyone Has Standards:
- Gavin may sometimes rationalize his many failures to connect with Travis, but even he recognizes that their mother's total indifference towards him — to the point that she didn't know or even care if Travis had died during his battle with the Volsungs — verges on pathological.
- Politically, he was willing to turn a blind eye to some of Breakwater's more questionable methods of gaining support for their MPARS agenda because he believed it was for the good of the Star Kingdom. The Chancellor's attempt to manipulate the newly-coronated and newly-grieving Elizabeth II by threatening to start a constitutional crisis over her marital status, on the other hand, is a step too far. Particularly since Breakwater had no particular excuse to stoop that low except for "I want more power", and had been showing hints of excess paranoia even for him.
- Heel–Face Turn: Winterfall wants to expand MPARS in favor of the Navy, but he doesn't want it so badly that he'll subvert the government to do it. When Breakwater steps too far out of the boundaries of reasonable Realpolitik in pursuit of his goals, Winterfall puts an end to it by digging up some dirt on the Chancellor and making sure it finds its way into the hands of the right people.
- Satellite Character: Winterfall starts as one In-Universe when Breakwater brings him into his coalition. His status in the Lords at that point is so low that he's grateful just to be political window dressing for someone as esteemed as the Chancellor. However, with a few timely dissensions from the party line, he manages to gain recognition in his own right as the voice of reason and compromise within Breakwater's camp, which further carries him to heights of his own even after Breakwater falls from grace.
- Token Good Teammate: Exactly how honest Breakwater and Co. are in their convictions is left an open question, but Winterfall at least genuinely believes he is doing what is best for the citizens of the Kingdom and isn't motivated by ambition or political vendettas.
Earl Breakwater
Lord Anderson L'Estrange, Earl Breakwater
The Star Kingdom's Chancellor of the Exchequer, an experienced and masterful statesman, and the leading proponent of defunding the Royal Manticoran Navy in favor of his office's Manticoran Patrol and Rescue Service.- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: One of the reasons his opponents in the government tolerate his paranoid machinations is because, in a fledgling star nation strapped for cash, his effortless mastery of state finances is indispensable.
- Properly Paranoid: He is right to always be looking over his back, politically speaking, with how many enemies he has in the government. However, over time his paranoia starts to become an obsession, and he starts seeing plots against him where there are none.
Other Characters
Jeremiah Llyn
Jeremiah Llyn
A wet work operator for the Solarian N.G.O. Superpower Axelrod charged with orchestrating a change of government on Manticore that will give his employers unlimited access to its as-yet-undiscovered wormhole junction.- Master of Disguise: Llyn routinely adopts false identities and is skilled at using prosthetics and/or real-time CGI, as the situation demands, to change his appearance. Though he's not perfect at it (see The Unsmile, below). Llyn eventually realizes that the Manticorans have seen through his various faces, even if he doesn't know how, which forces him to take a back seat for the remainder of the operation.
- Pragmatic Villainy: Llyn doesn't like to use violence, seeing it as messy and a sign of poor tradecraft, but he also understands that sometimes that's just how the dice fall. If he can succeed through deception, bribery, or diplomacy, he will. If he calculates that murder and destruction are better, he will do that, too. And he won't lose a wink of sleep either way.
- Punch-Clock Villain: Llyn's job is just that — a job. And he's very good at it.
- The Unsmile: Despite being a Master of Disguise, Llyn's coldly distinctive smile left its mark indelibly in Charles Townsend's mind when their paths accidentally crossed on Casca, which allowed him to see through his other aliases later on.
