/mlpol/ - My Little Politics

>>284789

Unfortunately, though the author starts off on a decent foot, with his next step he immediately faceplants into the mud. I'll quote the opening line again:

>If I’m going to tell you about the adventure of my life -- explain how I got to this place with these people, and why I did what I’m going to do next -- I should probably start by explaining a little bit about PipBucks.
Opening lines are important in any story, but when the story is told in the first person it's doubly important. This is our first time meeting a character with whom we are about to spend roughly half a million words seriously. We know literally nothing about this character yet; we don't know their name, their gender, their occupation, their personality, or anything. If it wasn't for the fact that this is an MLP fic, we wouldn't even know that this character is a pony.

In and of itself, this is fine; we shouldn't know everything about this character yet. However, our first meeting with the character should at least tell us something important about them. So considering this, let's look at the last part of the opener:

>I should probably start by explaining a little bit about PipBucks.
Is this really the first thing we need to know here? I understand that this is probably going to be a rather technology-heavy story, and I don't doubt that PipBucks are going to be rather central to the plot. So, we are ultimately going to need some detailed information about what these things are and how they work. However, is it so important that the author needs us to read a whole technical manual about it before we can move on to the story itself?

The first couple of lines should give us at least a general sense of who we are talking to, and what he/she is going to be telling us about. Ideally, we should also get an impression of why the character wants to tell us this, and why it might be worth our time to listen.

Essentially, this character has tapped us on the shoulder and said to us: "Hey there, fuckface, stop whatever you're doing and listen up. I've got some important shit I want to tell you about." This is usually enough to grab our attention, but before we spend half a million words with this person pony, whatever they're going to need to convince us that we actually give a shit.

So, what does kkat's protagonist need to get off his/her chest? Well, whatever it is, it's apparently going to have to wait, because first they need to explain to us about some made-up techno-thingamabob.

From here, the text launches into a very dense paragraph explaining a lot of details about the PipBuck: how it is worn, what it's general function is, what it does, how it works. I have to say that we are not even a full two paragraphs into the story yet, and the author is already losing my interest.

To put this into perspective, imagine that you were writing a story set in 2020, but you were going to travel back in time to 1990 in order to publish it. Your story relies heavily on smartphones, which a person from 1990 isn't going to be familiar with. However, does that mean that the literal second paragraph of your novel needs to be a detailed technical spec that covers how a smartphone works and everything it can do? Probably not.

>b-b-but, my protagonist is a smart phone technician, so it's actually really super important that I explain what a smart phone is right away...
Shut up, faggot. No it isn't. All you need to do is tell us that your character is a smart phone technician; you can fill us in on the details later.

No matter when or where it's set or what kind of space-age machinery the setting contains, a story is still a story; it has characters and a plot. What we need right off the bat is essentially a thesis; we need something that introduces us to the character and gives us a sense of what we are about to read. If the literal first paragraph of your story is just a tech manual for an imaginary device, odds are you've already lost about 2/3 of your readers.

Anyway, from what I can gather, the PipBuck is some kind of general-purpose device that keeps track of health, armor, stats, and shit like that, and has a map and a radar function and whatever the fuck else; basically it's the game interface I guess.

>It can even be made to glow like a lamp.
For some reason, the author considered this completely unremarkable statement to be important enough to treat as a single paragraph.

Anyway, it seems that all of this is more or less trying to go somewhere. The narrator goes on to explain that PipBucks are a common device that all ponies own, and that most of the super-neato features that the author just spent an entire dense paragraph detailing aren't even used by most ponies. So, basically, a PipBuck is just some completely unremarkable utilitarian thing that everyone has, and we actually don't need to know that much about it at all.

However, the protagonist apparently has a PipBuck for a cutie mark, and is exceedingly bummed about it, because it's basically the equivalent of a pony living in our world getting a cutie mark of a toaster or a hairdryer or something.

The prologue continues to meander. I'll be honest, this isn't really grabbing me so far. The author paints us a portrait of a generally unremarkable main character who rambles on for several disjointed paragraphs about how unsatisfied she feels over being so unremarkable and dull. We can assume, probably, that this ordinary, average pony will soon be plucked from her unremarkable life and called upon to do extraordinary things, but for now it's mostly a chore to listen to her.

Apart from this, the author drops in a few details that may be central to the story at some point. Someone called The Overmare appears to be in charge, and there is a character, apparently a singer, called Velvet Remedy who is mentioned twice, suggesting that she may be important.

At the absolute end, we are finally informed that the main character's name is LittlePip.

Chapter One: Out of the Stable

The chapter begins with an italicized quote:

>“Because in Stable Two, no pony ever enters and no pony ever leaves.”
This quote is not attributed to anyone.

Anyway, to summarize the story so far, we've had an intro monologue that felt rather unnecessary and had the feel of a cheesy voiceover narration for a 1980s sci-fi apocalypse anime. This was followed by a prologue, in which we were introduced to a character named LittlePip, who rambled about how boring she is for probably far longer than was necessary, and then that was that. All things considered, everything up until now could easily be chopped at no serious loss.

The first proper chapter of the story opens with the LittlePip character cleaning a wall. Apparently the takeaway from the prologue is that LittlePip is apprenticed to the technician who keeps the PipBucks in working order. Since the PipBucks don't break that often, he's basically the Maytag repairman of post-apocalyptic ponyland, so he assigns whatever minor chores he has to do to LittlePip and then masturbates naps all day. She is presently staring at a wall she is supposed to be cleaning, and wishing that there was something painted on it.

>I let myself fantasize, picturing the Overmare agreeing and ordering Palette herself to turn our entire stall into one of her brightly colorful masterpieces. Palette was the greatest painter in Stable Two, and like every skilled artist, that made her a stable treasure. Life in Stable Two inevitably began to eat at your spirit -- you were born in the Stable, you lived your whole life in the Stable, you were going to die there, and the course of your life was largely laid out for you to see by your Cutie Mark Party. So the Overmare insisted that a new song be added to the Stable broadcast’s repertoire each week, that public areas were brightly painted and adored with uplifting and motivational murals, that regular parties were planned in the atrium… all in an effort to distract and stave off depression.
I'm a little torn on the writing style so far. Overall the prose is fairly good, but the author has a tendency to jump from thought to thought in a rather inelegant and haphazard way. The prologue, particularly, meandered quite a bit, giving us a lot of jumbled facts about the protagonist's life in no particular order, without adhering to any kind of central idea or thesis. In the same way, this paragraph tells us some useful things that help to flesh out the world, but it feels like it's all just sort of dropped in at random.

Anyway, LittlePip is feeling gloomy at the prospect of having to clean this mural-less wall every day for the rest of her life, when all of a sudden Velvet Remedy shows up.

>“Oh dear. Is it really that bad.”
This is presumably a question, so it should end with a question mark.

Once again, the author begins to gush information at us in a rambling and chaotic fashion. We learn that Velvet Remedy is basically the local celebrity; a singer, who broadcasts her songs to the PipBucks as part of some sort of regularly scheduled entertainment session. The story also informs us that LittlePip wants to munch her vag.

The scene is a little awkward. LittlePip is appropriately tongue-tied at having her idol randomly show up out of the blue while she is performing her daily chores. There is a brief, very goofy dialogue exchange and then Velvet informs her that the reason she is here is to drop off her PipBuck to be repaired. Since the actual technician is off somewhere beating his meat, she gives it to LittlePip. LittlePip is more than happy to give the device a full tune up, and assures her that it will be ready by the following night. Velvet thanks her and exits.

There is a page break, and we rejoin LittlePip the following day. She has spent the night fine-tuning the PipBuck, but when she goes to drop it off she finds a crowd gathered around Velvet's room. Apparently she has vanished without explanation.

>She was gone outside?!?
She had gone outside. "She was outside" would probably work as well, but "She was gone outside" is grammatically horrendous. Slap yourself for this, kkat.

Anyway, the "Overmare" assures the crowd that she will track down Velvet Remedy in short order. Naturally, this involves tracking her PipBuck, which of course LittlePip has. The crowd now turns on her, apparently blaming her for Velvet being gone. The Overmare then tells her to take the PipBuck and go back to her room.

There's another page break, and we see LittlePip in her room, listening to Velvet Remedy songs on her iPone, rubbing her maresnootch and thinking about how strange it is that Velvet Remedy would just leave the Stable for no obvious reason. Oh yeah, this was covered briefly in the introduction but I didn't mention it in my commentary: a "Stable" is some type of bunker that the ponies stay in because radiation or whatever. I'm assuming this is the "fallout" in Fallout.

Anyway, what makes the whole thing even more perplexing is that the door to the outside can only be opened by the Overmare, so she shouldn't have been able to even leave in the first place. My best guess is that Velvet has probably been planning to escape for some time, and leaving her thingamotron at the repair shop was done deliberately to ensure that she couldn't be tracked. However, what she didn't count on is that the mopey little repair-pony who works in the shop really, really wants to lick her labia.

So, I'm assuming what will happen next is that LittlePip is going to break out of the Stable herself, so that she can go look for Velvet in order to give her back the PipBuck she obviously doesn't want or need, but probably more because she really, really wants to lick her labia. And thus begins her epic adventure. But...we shall see. It's entirely possible she just stays put like a good little pony and the entire story is just her repairing PipBucks and cleaning walls for the next half-million words.

>>284789
>This intro is on par with the sort of thing you might expect to hear in a voiceover narration during the opening of a 1980s anime; "in the year 2525, Tokyo has been reduced to ash," that sort of thing.

You don't have to explain. I know exacly waht you're talking about.

>>284789
>>The details are trivial and pointless. The reasons, as always, purely our own.
Oh holy lel is this actually in the intro? I didn't remember that. That's a line that sounds edgy and cool for an intro, but the story goes on to explain the details and reasons of the war pretty explicitly.

>>284789
>After spending several weeks in deep meditation over new ways to accuse amateur pony fiction authors of being homosexuals, I have returned to bestow my wisdom upon you foolish mortals.
Hooray!
>foolish mortaling intenseifies

FUCK YES, IT BEGINS

>If I’m going to tell you about the adventure of my life -- explain how I got to this place with these people, and why I did what I’m going to do next -- I should probably start by explaining a little bit about PipBucks.
There's another thing that makes this particular story-opener terrible. Multiple things.

1. The Pip-Buck is just a Pip-Boy from Fallout 3.
the Pip-Boy 2000 in Fallout 1/2? Handheld personal computers.
Fallout 3 decided their characters should use a made-up sequel, the Pip-Boy 3000. See what they did there? It has a 3 in the title, like 3dog. This is as smart as Bethesda's writing gets. Anyway, they decided this should be a tacky bulky arm-mounted computer for no reason at all. Perhaps the devs thought it would make the obnoxious "Your main pause screen just has you pause time and raise your pipbuck to your face" DIEGETIC INTERFACE cuntery look cooler. Many mods exist to unfuck it and make it the handheld PC it was always meant to be. And this doesn't impact the Diegetic Interface shit at all! It still has a fucking screen! Hell, why even bother with this Diegetic Interface when looking at it still pauses time and you have another SECOND PAUSE BUTTON that brings up the Save, Load, Settings, and Quit Game options amongst others? Fuckers should have either gone all the way on Diegetic Interfaces or not bothered.
The Pip-Boy is a nonsense machine that shows you your health and Limb Condition (if you have broken legs or not), a World Map, a fucking worthless Local Map, and an Inventory separated into bd categories and sorted poorly. You can stop time, eat 30 pieces of food, heal yourself with 30 stimpaks, and unpause time to resume the fight with full health.
Compare this to Metal Gear Solid V. Time isn't paused when you bring out your iDroid. Your iDroid can mark enemies you look at for a while, letting you see them through walls and in the dark and see how far away they are. It can call in air strikes and weather-changing shell launches and Assault Helicopter attacks and Helicopter Pickups and weapon drops from your base. Your map is justified as a satellite map. You can manage many things from this menu but whipping it out is dangerous as time isn't paused. You change equipped items with the D-Pad without timestops.
The Other Pause menu in this game, for restarting missions and changing graphics settings and quitting the game, also exists. But it lacks a Quicksave and Quickload button because the devs understood how this ruins challenge.

2. The Pip-Boy in F1/2? Mostly a map and computer-hacking tool. Your HUD had this cool beaten-up time-worn look to it for no reason other than "it looks cool and fits the tone".
F3? The justification for your HUD being full of ugly glowing green bars, and the justification for VATS: your "pause time and make the game shoot for me" ability.
NO OTHER NPC IN THE ENTIRE FALLOUT FRANCHISE HAS EVER USED VATS, OR MADE ANY MENTION OF VATS EXISTING CANONICALLY, before F4 threw in a random terminal to imply you were always a robot (even though this makes no sense) and robots can do Vats. WHENEVER YOU ARE TOLD ABOUT VATS, IT ONLY COMES FROM TUTORIAL-POPUPS OR LOADING-SCREEN HINTS. The author gives the heroine VATS and calls it SATS because the ponified Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System is now called the Stable-Tec Assisted Targeting System. Even though you could have called it OATS if you called it the Optical-Assist Targeting System.

>>284790
Just saying, I think 'kkat' has a soft k, so that when you pronounce it its "gaykat"
>>284816
Dude, please dont ruin this like last thread. Glimglam is funny and entertaining. You're... let's listen to him.
>>284818
Just the first k is soft

>>284817
>Just saying, I think 'kkat' has a soft k,
>soft k
Ghayghat really needs to go get that checked out by a medical professional.
If your kay is really soft it might just be gay.

>>284816
3. This is the opener for this motherfucking story.
THE STORY'S OPENING!!!
An opener should tell you what to expect. And you know what? It buttfucking does! Not one single fucking line has passed, and the author is already copypasting Fallout elements without creatively remixing anything or adding any new magical features before dumping it in this mutated half-aborted crack-infused rape-baby of a setting.
The "Batman Cold Open" is a common thing where stories start with Batman fighting enemies, THEN establish the "Lore" on who he is and why he punches a Clown every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday night and what tonight's adventure is.

4. Littlepip is a Pip-Buck Repair Technician.
IT'S HER JOB TO FIX (AND TEST) THIS SHIT.
It is not fucking necessary for Future Littlepip to narrate to you, the audience, what one of the most common pieces of technology in the post-apocalypse does and what every last one of its features are, certainly not when it's eventually revealed who the story is canonically being told to. (no spoilers here but it's SOMEONE WHO SHOULD FUCKING KNOW HOW PIPBUCKS WORK!)
The first chapter could have easily featured her repairing the broken Pip-Bucks of a few different idiots to give you, the reader, a sense of her mundane toaster-repair-bitch existence. Dialogue, LP testing her pip-bucks out, and her clients testing their pip-bucks out, all of these things could give you, the audience, a sense of what Pip-Bucks can and cannot do.

For example:
Imagine a scene where some fat bitch runs into her room and demands "Fix my pip-buck!"
"What's wrong with it?"
"If I knew that, I wouldn't need you to fix it! So fix it!"
LP snarkily thinks about what an asshole this girl is as she goes through the overly-full personal computer with typical retard computer problems like viruses.
She tests every function. She checks the Status screen to see her Health Points and Limb Condition and Physical Statistics, the watch says it's worn by an unhealthy bitch with bad ankles and low intelligence/agility.
She checks the map, it looks okay.
She tests the targeting system by using VATS to make this fat bitch throw a crushed ball of paper into a bin like a bored basketball fan. For the seconds VATS spends in control of this girl's body, she is a precision instrument, a lean athlete perfectly programmed for precision and force calculations. Then the effect wears off and she screams about how much she hates this function and hates feeling like a puppet in her own body.
She checks that the watch's pressure-seals are firmly attached to the wearer's wrist. All good there, nice and firm yet squishy.
She checks the battery. 97%.
"Of course the battery's fine, it's magical!" she thinks. "Damn thing could last a thousand years, as long as nobody made it overheat."
She tests the radio, and the volume knob
>"YOU'RE LISTENING TO VAULT 69 RADIO! TODAY, ONLY THREE PEOPLE HAVE KILLED THEMSELVES! WOW, THAT'S HALF THE NUMBER WE HAD LAST WEEK, AND WE'RE ONLY HALFWAY THROUGH THE WEEK!"
>*violin music*
>*insert shitty big-band swing-60s-singer shit about ponies here*
>*sex noises*
>"SOMEBODY ONCE TOLD ME THE WORLD IS GONNA ROLL ME!"
Then she tests the Inventory, and sees it's glitched out badly.

"There's your problem: You've overloaded your Magical Inventory" Littlepip says, and alternates between pressing the Drop Item button and pulling out over 50 different outfits from the wrist-mounted computer like Pinkie Pie pulling a pie from nowhere. "I know you can carry up to 300 pounds of stuff in your inventory before you start feeling the weight, but you should really try to travel light. It's easier for your system's software to keep track of

Then a delivery-mare Pegasus hovers in. Either she's miserable because this Vault's low ceilings make flying hard and precisely nobody considered fliers when designing this pony vault for fucking ponies...
Or she's happy because this Vault's high ceilings means she can fly over the seas of ponies travelling around the Vault and can fly around and loop as much as she wants in specially-built Racetracks and Obstacle Courses and Nature Rooms full of plants and blue-painted ceilings.
Either way the Delivery Mare job is for Pegasi only and they're rare and well-paid. LP could wish she had wings here. Or be glad she's got a horn that can do shit no wing can do.

Then some guy comes in. "Hi, I came in with a broken Pipbuck screen yesterday and it should be fixed by now"
Littlepip checks her supply of fixed crap, checks his name, and gives him his watch.
The guy puts the loose watch on its arm, and its interior swells up until it's firmly stuck to the guy's arm and able to read the pulse of magic through his body, letting it know the dude's physical and mental stats.
Then he tries to haggle a refund out of her even though her boss underpays her and won't let her haggle. So she has to show her stubbornness/charm/willingness to call security and have the guy escorted out/whatever.

Then imagine a scene where Littlepip struggles in her free time to repair a burned and broken Pip-Buck that was worn by a pony who got cabin fever and shot himself with a Laser Pistol. Grimdark, it explains why almost everypony alive has a pip-buck 200 years after the war, and the sheer "this is just a normal saturday for me" hits you with the fact that this sort of "Everything must be recycled down in the vault, also sometimes people just die" culture is normal. It tells you "This isn't FIM down here".

Then imagine a guy walks in and shows her his dick, which has a pip-buck stuck around it.
He thought he could stick his dick in the expanding interior seal to fuck it, but he got his cock stuck.
The guy asks if there are any cuter mares who could take a look at it because she's so plain and boring. She's a dyke so the sight of cock doesn't arouse her. She levitates a toothpick over and presses some debug-mode secret command corner-of-the-screen shit on the touch-screen and gets his Pip-Buck to reset itself and release the dude's cock.

>>284819
Furthermore, Chapter One and this entire story only happens because of luck when it really didn't have to.

Canonically
>be littlepip
>famous singer Velvet Remedy walks in asking to have her Pip-Buck fixed
>gee, you sure are lucky that it's you and not any other person who can fix pipbucks
>remove it
>FORTUNATELY, this pip-buck just so happens to contain the Secret Password needed to open/close the Vault Door, it's implied to have once been Sweetie Belle's and the CMCs built Vault-Tec I mean Stable-Tec
>she runs away from home because her Cutie Mark is "Sing nice songs to dying patients" therefore her talent is to be a Medic and she hates just being a singer in the vault
>get blamed for all of this for no reason, be even more socially hated than before
>still be Littlepip
>still have her pip-buck for some reason
>complete with door password!
>leave vault because being socially despised sounds worse than risking death in post-apocalyptic hell world
>start tracking her down hoping to give her pip-buck back, even though the Vault Overmare said "if you leave this vault you will never be allowed home, whether you bring Velvet back or not"
>eventually find Velvet and begin Murderhobo Adventure Filler bullshit adventures with the big strong dude in power armour you randomly find out of sheer luck
>at some point you find and fight the evil Pegasus Enclave. Before the apocalypse, all Pegasi except Dash and Fluttershy said "Fuck this shit, I'm out" and flew to Cloudsdale and overclocked the cloud factories, covering the skies in Brown Dusty Cloudy Skies that should really cause a nuclear winter logically speaking.
>this is why Pegasi are canonically rare in the Stables and outside
>individual rare good Pegasi who don't want to work for Liberal's Nightmare Cartoon-Fascist Pegasus Enclave get branded with a branding iron shaped like Rainbow Dash's Cutie Mark over their own marks and are exiled and kicked down into the Wasteland and called "Dashites". Yes, Dash-ites. Da-shites.
>why do Dashites not just get executed? the author didn't think of that. it's not like a pegasus have their wings clipped to "gliding only" levels of flight, so being down there with a laser rifle but no power armour and shitty wings makes you a glass cannon and tempting target carrying expensive tech, and it's not like Raiders dream of having a Dashite slave to molest.
>kkunt is a lesbian faggot

Do you know what would have been more interesting, and made the protagonist more of an active and interesting protagonist with goals and dreams, AND greatly improved the story and setup and everyone's motivations, AND made this "everyone has a pipbuck" shit less retarded?

>be Littlepip
>bored nerd who loves adventure stories and hates boring job repairing tech
>you're the only pony in the vault with a repairing-tech cutie mark and your elderly fat bastard boss is losing his mind
>too poor to afford modern Pip-Buck 3000, use shitty old hoof-held Pip-Buck 2000
>your hobby, and the project you work on in your spare time? repairing an old broken piece-of-shit Pip-Buck 3000 your fat bastard boss gave up on trying to fix
>it had a fucking sick custom paint-job, which you touched up nerdily using precise paintbrushes
>surely, eventually, you will make the thing work
>one day you fix the broken Pip-Buck and put it on
>sick, this pip-buck's been upgraded over the years! it has magical program functions no other pip-buck has, and an optimized enhanced Aiming Assist System justifying how talented and lethal kkunt made Littlepip despite her severe lack of combat training and poor stat build
>it also has a fuckload of diary entries
>sick, you love reading the diaries of dead people to get a sense of who they were and how they lived and died! that's a perfectly normal thing to do down here in the vault- i mean stable since entertainment is very rare for some reason!
i'd also justify the lack of entertainment with "the overseer is a paranoid control freak who doesn't want art to exist if it's not boringly pro-military and pro-Current Overseer and pro-conformity and anti-individual, so he burned many books and data disk copies of books are rare things that fetch high prices"
>read the diary
>the diary of a man who spent years trying to escape the vault and was murdered for it
>turns out he knew things about the outside world thanks to a unicorn's magic crystal ball
>he saw visions of the evil Enclave raiding existing Stables and breaking in to kidnap un-irradiated ponies and turn them into breeding slaves for the "glorious pegasus empire"
>there's also a good Pegasus Rebellion fighting him because not all Pegasi but two are evil in my take on things, but it's understaffed and weak until the heroes join it and win fights for it
>diary says the world will be conquered and your home will be destroyed by the evil Enclave and their malicious cloud covering unless they are stopped and Celestia's Sunlight is allowed to reach the earth once more
>jump at the call to adventure and leave the vault with the password he got
>leave the vault, adventure solo badly, eventually a team leaves the vault to save you and drag you home kicking and screaming since you know how to fix pip-bucks
>everyone in the recovery team dies gorily except for one who cowered in fear and pretended to be dead: a cowardly pacifistic Medic girl drafted into "military" Vault Security service because she's one of the few ponies who can perform healing spells
>she never asked for this, but her choices are to go home and admit her incredible failure and probably get shot for it, adventure solo, or get dragged along by an adventure-obsessed gun-toting plucky heroine in deep over her head and get the opportunity to heal this chick and others.
>medic girl hates fighting and sucks at it, but she quickly learns how brutal this world is and gets over her pacifism instead of relying on an infinite-ammo tranq-dart gun for a nonsense "no-kill" rule that is eventually broken yet held onto hypocritically anyway.

>>284789
>there came an era when the ideals of friendship gave way to greed, selfishness, paranoia and a jealous reaping of dwindling space and natural resources
This is mostly false, the only glimpses we see of Pre-War Fallout paint Equestria as a selfless and morally-superior nation eternally raped and fucked over by Zebra hordes and Zebra rapefugees. Author did this accidentally. It's never even confirmed whether Ponies declared an imperialist "we want your fucking coal and diamonds" war on Zebras or if the war was just what happens when the Wonderbolt-Killing Two-Faced PirateZiggers pissed ponies off just a little too much.
Though it IS confirmed that Zebras fired nukes first AND their reason for doing so was an utterly retarded niggereligious reaction to something their race directly caused. I'll save my rant on that for when we get there.

>The end of the world occurred much as we had predicted -- the world was plunged into an abyss of balefire and dark magic
The author is, as usual, ripping off a Fallout thing (Fallout 1's opening narration) without understanding why it worked there or how Fantasy RetroFuture America is different from Equestria. Ponies don't predict the world wwill end in magi-nuclear fire or dark magic.

>The details are trivial and pointless. The reasons, as always, purely our own.
I'm going to criticize Fallout here, a franchise I love.
And criticize a major part of Fallout 1, the franchise's sacred cow.
The details behind ANY historically significant event are NEVER trivial or pointless.
If more people understood the situation that made WW2 a necessity (Evil jews in charge, corrupt unions, inflation forcing people to take wheelbarrows of bank notes around if they wanted to buy anything, economic raping of the german people forcing German men/women/children to become prostitutes to wealthy jews and union bosses, Germany being raped for being dragged into WW1 and then having Jews in charge 'surrender' after killing millions of whites for jewish entertainment and profit, the failed Communist revolution in Germany where the Jews attempted to establish a communist state within germany) humanity would have tried harder to avoid the jewish problems that are sending us all towards WW3.
I understand why Fallout didn't establish whether the first nukes were fired by Communist China or Imperialist America That Conquered Canada And Warred With China Over Anchorage For Muh Oil.
But in FE's quest to "One-up and storify" Fallout in a pony costume, it will never improve anything Fallout did or understand why Fallout did it.
Blaming America would piss off Americans and blaming China would justify Evilmerica's wars.
Imperialist America and Commie China's reasons for warring with nukes?
They needed resources and were willing to kill for them.
and eeded resources because the authors thought if 1960s "Peak Americana" continued on forever we'd continue using up all our resources and then be forced into war... even though nuclear power is canonically a thing. Cold Fusion for infinite power also canonically exists. And Matter Reconstitution as seen in Dead Money. The authors really fucked up there.

>horrors of the holocaust
I'm still surprised jews lets pop-culture say "Nuclear Holocaust" about any nuclear event. Then again, it helps with brand recognition even though the Holocaust isn't the most recent, the biggest, or the worst, and certainly not the most plausible.

>technology infodumps
I hate when authors don't know how to dump info on the author in a seamless and quality way.
Here are some tricks I personally like:
>two faggots argue over whether the AK-75 or Remington Hellfire are superior rifles. Both swear the pros of their futuristic guns outweigh the cons brought up by the other faggots.

>protagonist goes from using an old and reliable thing the audience is familiar with to a new futuristic thing we have to get used to.
For example, Futuristic Detective likes using an old 45 Pistol. But is eventually forced by his boss to start using the new Cyber-Pistol that can fire ElectroPulse Blasts that disable robots and power armour and taze foes to the ground. DNA-Scanners on the palm ensure only the approved wielder of the weapon can fire it, and a thug who picks the gun up and tries using it just makes the trigger click uselessly. The weapon also carries a laser that can scan whoever it's pointed at, check if the target's in the criminal database as a career criminal or not, and unlock use of the pistol's Ballistic Bullets if the target is registered as someone cops can shoot at. Police Detective fucking hates the new gun and needs his younger buddy-cop partner to tell him how to operate the gun.

>an advertisement, typically on TV, shills the product and all its amazing new features. For example, the all-new Ferrari Gundam Suit! A power-suit on wheels, clad in foot-thick steel armour with retractable ankle-wheels to allow 210MPH an hour movement in combat! Also flies at 300MPH on energy-field wings and jet-boosters in the ass! Someone nearby can react to it and say "That's such a massive improvement over the previous Ferrarri model!" and another can say "Yeah but the Lambo Gurren 386 could fucking destroy it in a fair fight. Who cares about speed when the Lambo Gurren Energy-Shielding can't even be penetrated by railguns and nukes?"

>someone's hobby or job is repairing or selling or making futuristic tech that's important to the plot.

also minor funny thing
>It can even be made to glow like a lamp
some of Fallout 3/NV/4's most popular mods edit the Pip-Boy Lamp to suck less.
Also only faggots turn their lamps on because having your light on reduces your Sneak skill and environments are rarely dark enough to require use of these weak fucking glowstick-tier lights.
The author wants to one-up Fallout by ripping it off and making up bullshit justifications for why a futuristic post-apocalyptic pony world would resemble Fallout at 4 separate points in the franchise's timeline and average tech level so strongly.

>>284792
>She was gone outside?!?
This story is widely considered the greatest pony fanfiction ever written within this fandom?!?
This story is regularly published in "Print Runs" and sold commercially at a high price so faggots with too much disposable income can have this piece of shit taking up space on the anime-figurine shelves that house a few books and pseudointellectual books they've never read and shitloads of trashy pornography mangas?!?
People was paid money for this?!?
WHO WAS PHONE?!?

>Anyway, the "Overmare" assures the crowd that she will track down Velvet Remedy in short order. Naturally, this involves tracking her PipBuck, which of course LittlePip has. The crowd now turns on her, apparently blaming her for Velvet being gone. The Overmare then tells her to take the PipBuck and go back to her room.
GOD, this fucking part of the story is disgraceful. Sure, it "has" to happen this way for the plot to make sense. But while we eventually hear talk of the Vault setting up a Search Party to recover Velvet (and nothing EVER comes of this even after LP leaves) they never ask for (or take) the Pip-Buck, which LittlePip fucking waved around right in front of everypony.

>I'm assuming this is the "fallout" in Fallout
yeah, also it was initially a clever reference to how our actions can have "fallout"s that we can't predict. It's why Fallouts 1 and 2 were really more about people and their problems/struggles than the apocalypse itself. I often wish Fallout 3 didn't exist. Van Buren (the real F3) contained all the good ideas that were eventually re-used in New Vegas, the best Fallout game.
but back to writing...
in Fallout these massive underground shelters called "Vaults" were built, and then sealed via bank-like Vault Doors.
Vaults are full of cameras, these camera feeds appear on screens in the Overseer's Office. He's the boss, who commands Vault Security guards and decrees shit.
These Vaults were made in unassuming places, where they could easily be hidden within mountains or beneath cities.
Fallout 4 fucked this up by making Vaults easy to find and easy to see from miles away, and then typically not making anyone try to break into these vaults because bethesda is dumb and its writers desperately wish they were working on Borderlands 3.
However not all of these Vaults were completed in time.
And every existing Vault... Some were "control vaults" designed to be normal, and others were Experiments designed by the Enclave to see how isolated populaces react to various weird shit people might be expected to deal with during space travel.
"What happens if we make a Vault that doesn't actually keep radiation out because its front door visibly does not fit the hole?"
"What happens if we make a Vault containing one man and a box of puppets, one containing one woman and 999 men, and one containing one man and 999 women?"
"What happens if we split a Vault right down the middle, paint one half red and one half blue, make weird noises in the vents, and pump the vents with paranoia gas?"
"What happens if a Vault is designed to elect its Overseer boss for one year at a time, and he gets killed at the end of his term? Surely a system of voting blocs will form and remain in power until 200 years pass and one elected girl thinks to change the system and make everyone's vote randomized via computer (this results in a civil war that leaves 6 people alive. they refuse to sacrifice anyone and the vault computers play peppy music and say thanks for proving humans would never sacrifice each other to save themselves. Some people involved kill themselves after this, others fuck off and go offscreen to never be seen again. Obsidian was so proud of this fucking stupid questline they shilled it during loading screens. No fucking wonder their worst writers and newest werewolf-porn-writing dykes went on to shart out The Outer Worlds)"
"What happens if we make a Vault and then give everyone Super Mutant-inating Juice that just exists now and also makes you into a big dumb cannibalistic fantasy Orc nigger because Marketing said nobody will buy a Fallout game unless you can run around killing Super Mutants"
"What happens if we fill a Vault with junkies, and then 20 years after everyone gets sober, we open a secret compartment full of lethal amounts of drugs including drugs that were actually developed 80 years after the bombs fell? haha whooooops continuity error good thing most fallout fans secretly don't care about story and are just here for the shooty shooty gun-modding wannabe-badass gameplay and pseudointellectual cyclic faction discussion"
The writing's pretty fucking terrible for a lot of these "Experiment" vaults. Was it really necessary for Fallout 2 to say Fallout 1 only happened because that Vault's water chip was designed to fail on the specific date it broke on?

>>284817
>don't speak
no u
you're free to skim or even scroll past what I say about the story we're all reviewing and reading and talking about

>>284824
In the last thread I repeated myself a lot.
I'll try to do that less and keep my thoughts on this fic focused. But this fic has over 1million words and a lot of mistakes to bitch about.

For example... Ballistic Shields.

IRL, useful.
would be more useful to a unicorn who can levitate a shield in front of him and 3 guns in front of or around the shield.
Enchanted shields that bounce bullets and spells back at foes would be even more useful.
Most unicorns in this fic fight by pointing and shooting guns anyway. Not like anyone uses status buffs. Or area denial spells.
A shield would get in the way of direct spells like Horn Laser. But can always be moved for those. And who says mages can not bend their fireball spells around corners or a shield?
Ballistic Shields are not seen in Fallout, so they are not ripped off in Fallout Equestria.

Is it right to hate when stories only happen because of bullshit coincidences and incredible stretches of logic, rather than actions taken by driven and competent active protagonists with agency and goals and plans and setbacks in those plans?

>>284824
And you're free to not ruin everything you touch by trying to make everything about your endless list of complaints which are neither entertaining nor or engaging.
This(these) thread(s) could be far more interactive and lively if you didnt discourage participation with your endless and unsolicited diatribes. But no one else is important right? Just (you) right?

>>284829
>I'll try to do that less and keep my thoughts on this fic focused.
Please do. Most of your arguments boil down to complaining about Fallout 3, or saying that some aspect of FoE is either too much or not enough like Fallout. Let's try our best to look at FoE as its own story. I promise it's bad enough when left to stand on its own merits.

>>284792

Anyway, LittlePip lies on her bed and does some predictable musing. All the ponies have lived in the Stable their whole lives, and it's scary outside, and why would Velvet want to go out there, and blah blah blah, all that stuff.

>The two things I did understand was that Velvet Remedy had gotten me to remove her PipBuck so the Overmare couldn’t track her with it, and that I was screwed.
The second thing really doesn't follow the first thing. It should be obvious to just about anyone, including the Overmare, that Velvet's leaving her PipBuck at the repair shop was just a ruse. Velvet took it to the repair shop and asked to have it worked on. The pony at the repair shop did as she asked. LittlePip did her job and is not guilty of anything.

Anyway, the implication seems to be that LP's predicament has less to do with any formal discipline being handed down through the chain o' command, and more to do with everyday common ponies shitting on her because reasons. They are all assblasted that the only pop singer in the bunker decided she would rather die a slow death of radiation poisoning than spend one more minute singing for these retards, and they have chosen to vent their frustrations on LittlePip because she's there and she's easy to blame. Fair enough I guess.

Meanwhile, for some reason, LittlePip still has Velvet's PipBuck. Instead of just leaving the damn thing at work where it belongs and distancing herself from the problem, she instead takes it into her room with her and begins goofing around with it.

She pokes around and finds a sound file hidden on the hard drive (or whatever it has) that is encrypted and looks suspicious. Conveniently, LittlePip is able to break the encryption because reasons, so she plays the file. Also conveniently, it contains the access code to the front door being spoken by a mysterious voice.

In a clever twist which should surprise absolutely no one, LittlePip decides that she is going to leave the stable and look for Velvet Remedy so she can lick her labia.

There is a page break. In the next scene LittlePip is standing at the door, carrying a backpack full of food and a bunch of canteens, and just generally looking like somepony who is trying to escape. Instead of doing anything to stop her, the guards just stand there and glare menacingly at her, until she is able to levitate something over their heads and knock them unconscious.

An alarm goes off, and the Overmare begins yelling at her over the intercom to stop doing all the shit that she's doing. But LP's having none of it. She punches in the code, opens the door, and goes outside. The Overmare tells her that if she leaves, she will never be able to come back. She leaves anyway, because she really really wants to lick Velvet's labia.

Another page break. Jesus, this guy is almost as bad about these as what's-his-name, the last dude. Soulpillar. Anyway, LittlePip finds herself in a hallway filled with skeletons 3spoopy. Apparently the hallway had once been someone's apple cellar, but it had become the entrance to an underground bunker somehow. It's not explained how LittlePip, who has lived her entire life in the underground bunker and has no idea what is outside of it, would know what an apple cellar is. The chapter ends with her going out into the open world.

Since this is the end of the chapter, I'll pause and share some initial impressions. After having read three full-length works, two of which are apparently among the "classics" of the fandom, and having been mostly disappointed, I've come to accept that I shouldn't expect too much from these. So far, FoE is confirming that this is probably the right approach.

Of the works we've examined, this one feels the most "professionally" written, so the author gets a few points for that. This is not to say that it's good, but in terms of writing mechanics it's at least less bad than what we've seen from others. Unfortunately, this is a bit of a mixed blessing as I'm finding the story itself to be pretty meh. This reads less like a novel and more like a play-by-play of someone's tabletop RPG game. Since this is based on a video game, I'm not terribly surprised.

Our hero is a fairly generic "player" character. She starts out in a "safe" area, and we get a little bit of her rather dull backstory (tl;dr, she's just an average, unremarkable filly who happened to be in the right time and place when adventure called). Then, an event occurs which requires her to engage in a short fight and then takes her out into the broader world. If this were the plot of an indie game or an RPG scenario, it would probably be fine; however, as a story that a person is expected to sit and read (for half a million bloody words, no less), it's pretty damned unimaginative.

As I've said before, this author has thus far shown a tendency to bounce around from thought to thought without adhering to any central idea. More seriously though, he lacks any real sense of flair for the dramatic, which might pose a problem for an idea like this.

I came into this more or less assuming it was just meant to be a fun mashup of MLP with Fallout, and I'm not really expecting any serious depth from it. That's fine, but the trouble is that, lacking any serious depth, the story will need to at least provide some measure of entertainment value. In order to do this, it will need to rely entirely on action and adventure, which so far the author has not demonstrated much aptitude for. The first chapter was basically about the main character escaping from a locked-down bunker in a post-apocalyptic world, which should have been at least a little exciting. However, the action just plods from scene to scene: LP is fixing PipBucks and moping about how dull her life is, then Velvet shows up and asks to have her PipBuck fixed, then LP fixes said PipBuck, then it turns out Velvet is missing, then LP decides she needs to escape and does. Even the fight scene was dull.

>>284854

The events in this story so far have been very predictable, and the action mostly plods. People who were following along for my Past Sins review might remember my comments on a scene where Twilight infiltrates Nightmare Moon's castle. Basically my complaint was that whatever problems existed with the overall story, this should have at least been an exciting scene, but the way it was written made it monotonous and dull. I have the same complaint here: the story overall is a fairly weak brew, but it could still potentially be fun to read. Those shitty 1980s apocalypse animes I was comparing this to earlier are dreadful, but the action and fighting and general ridiculousness still makes them fun to watch. However, the author mostly fails to deliver even on this. I can forgive the lack of depth in the subject matter, but what I can't forgive is how bloody boring it is.

The characters so far are also pretty uninteresting. LittlePip is a generic heroine who, again, would work well enough for a video game, but seems pretty mediocre as the heroine of a 500,000 word novel. She's basically just an unremarkable Jane Everymare who feels out of place in her world, and then is summoned one day to go on an adventure because reasons.

It's worth keeping in mind that tropes from one medium don't always translate effectively into another. A hack and slash video game can get away with a very simple plot because the story simply exists to provide a backdrop for the action; the same plot wouldn't necessarily make a good novel. By the same logic, a complex plot that would work brilliantly as a novel or movie might potentially weigh down a video game with heavy cutscenes and quicktime events that players would complain about. You have to learn to adapt your story for whatever medium you're working in.

Anyway, we're only one chapter in so far, so I suppose I should reserve serious judgement until the story has had a little more chance to unfold.

Chapter Two: Equestrian Wasteland

This chapter also begins with an italicized quote that is attributed to no one. I find this device a little pretentious, but whatever; kkat is not the first author to do shit like this. Generally though, if you're going to include epitaphs as chapter headers, they should either be attributed to someone (real or imagined) or else the quoted text should appear somewhere in the chapter (or at least somewhere in the book).

Incidentally, it's perfectly ok to make up your own quotes and attribute them to fictional characters in your own universe. There's a novel called Memories of Empire by Django Wexler in which each chapter begins with a "quote" from some long-dead general or historical writer from Wexler's universe. There's no literary law against doing that if you want, and if done right it can help flesh out your universe and give it a past. But just writing a sentence or two in quotes and tacking it onto every chapter without any context or explanation is just obnoxious.

Incidentally, the quotation here is:

>"What world do you live in? Out here in the real world, blood flows, little pony. Blood flows."
Well, I guess whatever else they have to deal with, at least these ponies don't have clogged arteries. Always look on the bright side, I say.

Anyway, LP steps outside of the bunker and emerges into night, which she's never actually experienced outside before. The author's description of it is actually pretty well written:

>A cool air, quite unlike anything within the Stable, tickled my coat and chilled my skin beneath. It bore smells that were dank and rotting, dusty and alien. I could hear the sounds of night insects, creaking of wood and a far-off sloshing... but I was struck more by what I couldn't hear -- the constant low hum of the Stable's generators and the ever-present high whine of the lights were gone -- so powerful in their absence that I first mistook the outside as silent. I could feel dirt and broken stone beneath my hooves, so unlike the smooth and sterile floors I had trotted all my life. And though I could not see much or far, I could see further than I had ever seen before, and there were no walls to mark the end of the room. I was staring into a horizontal abyss that stretched out from me in every direction.

Again, I suspect this particular work may have been professionally edited and not just pre-read. However, I'm still happy to give credit where credit is due, and being able to read a story that isn't a minefield of spelling errors and goofy, awkward sentences is a nice change (looking at you, soulpeener). However, while this is much better written than Sun and Rose from a technical standpoint, soulpeener had an interesting and somewhat original idea that could be quite good if revised. FoE, so far, doesn't seem to have much going for it beyond the novelty of being a Pony-Fallout crossover; the story itself is dull and not particularly inventive.

ANYWAY, LittlePip has just left the only home she's ever known and ventured forth into the big, scary world, and she is subsequently freaking out. To the author's credit, he again paints a pretty good picture of what things look like through his protagonist's eyes right now.

Once LP has adjusted enough to stop hyperventilating and take stock of her situation, she looks around and sees that she is on the ruins of a farm, which her PipCuck informs her is called Sweet Apple Acres. She sees a bunch of dead trees and the rotted out husk of an old farmhouse. She also discovers that she is now getting some new radio transmissions. Unfortunately, it seems like the stations out here mostly suck balls; just a bunch of dying ponies whining about how post-apocalyptic the world has become. At least play some Skynyrd or something; fuck.

In any case, now that she's out here she realizes that she doesn't stand much chance of tracking down Velvet Fog, but it's not like she can just turn around and go back, so she decides to press forward.

>>284856

LP goes into the farmhouse and explores a little. She finds some sort of computer terminal upstairs, that contains a message:

>To any pony who has left Stable Two in search of me:

>Please, go home. I am doing what I have to do. The Overmare understands, even if she can never agree, and I hope one day you will to.
This should be "You will too." I'm actually a little surprised that such a simple mistake made it in here; this text is otherwise fairly well polished. I hope I didn't speak too soon about the professional editing.

>I will not be back.
Aw, that's too bad. The Terminator will be so disappointed.

>Do not look for me. Do not endanger yourself further for my sake. Please forgive me.

>Velvet Remedy

Well, that's that I guess. Time for LittlePip to go back into her bunker and enjoy a nice quiet life of soul-crushing monotony. Oh wait; she can't, because Velvet put this message outside the bunker, where it could only be found by someone who had already broken the inviolable rule of "don't leave the bunker, retard" and thus could not return. Whoops.

LP also finds a second message on the terminal, which is encoded with some kind of special who-gives-a-fuck double-secret encryption. I'm a little unclear on this part; the text mentions that all of the other messages are from some forgotten century, and this one catches her attention because it's from the present or near-present, which basically makes sense. However, it then says:

>Nor did I have any reason to believe a message centuries old would be of any significance.

The text also mentions a "companion terminal," which is apparently required in order to read this message. I'm not sure what the significance of this is, but it seems like the message has some kind of end-to-end encryption that means it can only be opened by the terminal it was sent to, presumably with this one being the origin point. In any case, I'm unclear on why LP notices this message out of all the others and on why she decides to save it. But whatever.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that LittlePip now realizes that she is well-fucked and far from home. Or, to be technical, well-fucked and not that far from home, since she's only a few feet away. However, she can't go back in there because reasons, and moreover she now realizes that even if by some remote chance she manages to track down Velvet Revolver, she probably won't agree to come home with her. So, the long and short of it is that she's stuck out here now, and will probably die. And just think: all of this happened because she wanted to munch down on some pop-idol's labia. Sounds like Post-Apocalyptic Pony Jesus was right about not following those sinful impulses.

Page break. LP heads out and notices what appears to be a campfire off in the distance somewhere. Again, having lived her entire life in a bunker one might wonder how she is capable of identifying a pinprick of light on the horizon as a campfire, or how she would even know what fire is to begin with. I don't know much about these "stables" the ponies live in, but the impression I have is that they are underground chambers with little to no ventilation. I'm guessing most of the occupants don't have fireplaces. Gas stoves for heat or cooking might be plausible, but since that would require a continuous or at least renewable gas source, electric would make far more sense. So, the concept of a "campfire" should probably be pretty foreign to LP.

Anyway, the point is she sees a campfire in the distance and heads towards it. Since it's well established at this point that LittlePip is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, she assumes that whoever built the fire must be friendly and walks right up to it. She immediately discovers that a unicorn has been bound and gagged, probably by generic thugs who intend to violently sodomize him.

>and caught the glint of the flames against a few expose links in the chains binding his hooves.
A few exposed links. Seriously, faggot; please don't make me regret complimenting you on mechanics.

>"Well lookee here! Walked up all nice and pleasant, didn't she?" A large earth pony emerged from the shadows of a nearby rock.
Generic thugs; called it. All these guys need to make them any more generic would be stars n' bars belt buckles and haystalks hanging out of their mouths. inb4 LittlePip has a purdy mouth

>Two more ponies slid out of hiding on opposite sides -- one another earth pony holding a shovel whose blade had been lethally sharpened, the other a unicorn whose glowing horn levitated towards me a short instrument of wood and metal with two barrels.
A few issues here. First, "one another earth pony" sounds very weird. I'd probably go with "another earth pony" or "one was another earth pony" instead to make it clearer. Second, it's not explained how exactly an earth pony would hold a shovel. Is he walking on two legs and holding it with his forelegs? Gripping it in his teeth? If the latter, how exactly is he holding it? Gripping from the base would make it awkward to use, but holding it sideways would mean he'd have to keep his head turned. Ponyworld is a pain in the ass sometimes. Third, the unicorn is obviously supposed to be holding a firearm. However, to say he is "levitating it towards me" is a rather poor choice of words, since it seems to imply that he is using his levitation powers to either throw it at her or pass it to her. What the author probably meant is that the unicorn is pointing the device at LP, but this is not what this sentence is technically saying.

>Much like night, I had never seen a firearm before, save for pictures in books.
Having seen a picture would mean that she has enough general knowledge to identify what she's looking at, thus the author could have easily bypassed the awkward explanation and just said "the unicorn was levitating a gun, with the barrels pointed towards me" or something to that effect.

>>284859

When you have a character who has limited knowledge of the world like this, you have to put careful thought into how you write her. Spending her whole life in an environment where open fires would be nonexistent means she probably can't identify a campfire from half a mile away in the dark; the possibility that ponies intentionally start fires might even frighten her and she would thus shy away from someone's campfire rather than seek it out.

However, just because she's never seen a gun up close before doesn't mean she doesn't know what one is. It could go either way, but in this case the text establishes that she's seen pictures of them, thus she should have been able to identify the device the unicorn was pointing at her as a firearm, thus the whole awkward explanation of a "short instrument of wood and metal" was unnecessary in the first place. You have to think stuff like this through if you want to write convincingly. I've never seen a dragon irl, but I've seen pictures in books; thus, if I ever saw an actual dragon, I'd be surprised and alarmed, but I'd still be able to identify it as a dragon, I wouldn't describe it as a "scaly winged lizard thing."

Anyway, this scene goes about the way you'd expect. The generic thugs make some derisive remarks about LittlePip's general ineptitude, and indicate that they intend to tie her up so they can rape her sell her to ponies who will rape her. LittlePip, of course, is overly confused by this turn of events and just stands there instead of trying to run. Eventually, the tied-up unicorn gets the gag out of its mouth and informs her that the ponies are slavers.

Page break. We rejoin our boring intrepid heroine at some indeterminate point in the future. She is in chains, walking alongside the other unicorn, whose name is Monterrey Jack (this would actually be a decent name for a pony character were it not recognizable as the name of a prominent character from another cartoon).

>My PipBuck had stymied the slavers efforts to bind my forelegs, eventually forcing them to chain me above the knees.
They let her keep the PipBuck? Maybe there's some crucial detail about these devices that I'm missing, but as far as I can tell the PipBuck is basically just an oversized Apple Watch that straps to the foreleg, and can thus be easily removed. Even if these slavers have never seen one before, confiscating anything that looks like a communications device or a weapon from a captive is pretty much page one of the generic thug handbook.

Since this has mostly been a by-the-numbers adventure story so far, I'm assuming the point of this scene is to have LittlePip escape from capture and free Monterrey Jack in the process, so the two of them can become traveling companions. For this formula to work, the generic thugs need to be at least stupid enough that LP can outwit them. However, this level of stupidity is really pushing it.

>I was not gagged, but Monterey had convinced me early that unnecessary chatter from the slaves-to-be would likely result in the loss of my tongue. Not that I had much to say to these brutes anyway aside from my repertoire of colorful metaphors. I didn't expect they would answer my questions, even if my tongue should survive the asking, and they were being chatty enough with each other to suffice.
This paragraph is good example of the author's meandering style. This is a pretty long block of text, and the gist of it is basically "I wasn't gagged, but I wasn't allowed to talk either." The level of detail here is mostly unnecessary, and considering the size of this tome, I'd say that if anything in it can be pared down it probably should be.

>"Hate thef fart," grumbled the earth pony through the spear clenched in his teeth.
I'm assuming this is supposed to say "hate the fart." I'm joking; I actually have no idea what the fuck this is supposed to say. When you have a character trying to speak with something in his mouth, it's fine to write his dialogue the way it sounds, just be sure that we can understand what he was actually trying to say.

>"Hate fuffen sweffey."
Again, no idea what this is supposed to mean.

Anyway, whatever the pony with the shovel in his mouth was trying to say, another earth pony named Cracker who is apparently the leader, assures him that if he stops complaining, he will be allowed to rape one of the prisoners later oh my, le edge; clearly this is a raw, gritty pony story intended only for adults. LP hears rushing water and something like music coming from somewhere up ahead, and Cracker helpfully informs her that the music is coming from something called a sprite-bot.

I'm sure the sprite-bot is just an analog of something within Fallout that the author wanted to reference, but my complaint is more about the way the information is just sort of gracelessly plopped in here. If you want to do convincing world building, you have to remember that while the reader is unaccustomed to your setting and will need to be spoonfed some of the details, the characters already live there and know most of this stuff. They aren't going to go out of their way to explain commonplace, everyday things to each other that they would assume any other resident of their world would already be familiar with.

LP's introductory schpiel about PipBucks at the beginning is another example of this. If you were to narrate your life, you would probably assume that anyone listening would come from a background roughly similar to yours and you wouldn't need to explain things like cars and cell phones in excessive detail. So, it feels weird when a character just starts droning on about something that she considers commonplace. By the same logic, it makes little sense for Cracker here to just volunteer this tidbit of information about sprite-bots. LittlePip didn't ask where the music was coming from, and there's no logical reason why he would assume she wouldn't know, so he shouldn't feel compelled to explain it to her.

>>284860

If you're in doubt about how to explain some element of your setting to the reader, a good exercise is to swap out whatever you're trying to explain for a comparable phenomena in our world. For instance, let's say two characters are talking, and then suddenly you both hear a police siren. Character A's ears perk up at this, and Character B notices. Is Character B going to assume that Character A doesn't know what a siren is? Or is he going to assume that Character A has some personal reason to be skittish a the sound of a police siren? Like maybe A is running from the cops, or is afraid of cops because her name is actually George Floyd, or some shit like that. If you were just talking to someone and suddenly you both heard a siren, and the sound had some profound, noticeable effect on the person you were talking to, what would that cause you to think about them? If you want to write fantastical settings convincingly, you have to learn to think this way; it's all about taking the fantastical and making it commonplace.

Anyway, whatever a sprite-bot is exactly, its presence seems to be a source of concern for the slavers. They banter back and forth about what might have happened to it, and then suddenly it appears in front of one of them. The device is described as "a metal ball about the size of a foal's head floating on four silently flapping wings." One of the slavers, the one with the gun whose name is Sawed-Off, fires at the thing, but Cracker tells him to leave it alone.

The question of what the sprite-bot is exactly, as well as its significance, is left unanswered for the moment. The slavers seem to feel like it is not a threat to them (one of them calls it a "flying radio"), but at the same time they go to a lot of trouble to try and destroy it. The gunshot, incidentally, seems to give away their position to...somebody...so, shooting at it pointlessly would place these already stupid thugs in even stupider territory. Anyway, my best guess is that a sprite-bot is some sort of spy-drone and that it's a relatively common thing around here.

>Unlike my fellow slave, I was pleased to have witnessed the unicorn firing off his weapon. Because now I knew how it worked.
"Now I knew" muddles past and present tense in a rather unattractive way; you have to be careful about stuff like this when you have a character in the present narrating events that happened in the past. Also, this whole passage reads a little awkwardly anyway. Also, I'm not sure about LittlePip's reaction here. For one thing, for someone who doesn't spend time around guns, hearing one go off for the first time can be pretty startling; I find it hard to believe LP would accept it this calmly, let alone be thinking rationally enough to observe how the unicorn operates it.

This also goes back to what I was saying before: that LP's knowledge of this world is a little inconsistent. On the one hand, she has never seen a gun personally before. On the other hand, she has seen them in books and has at least a general understanding of what they are. Just watching the unicorn fire the gun isn't going to be enough to grasp how it works at an internal level, so the most she can really claim to have "learned" by watching him fire it is that when you pull the trigger it goes bang. It stands to reason that the books would have provided her with at least this much knowledge, so what could she have really learned?

Also:
>"...What kind of damned fool," Monterey grumbled, "announces his presence this close to raider territory."
This is a question, so it should end with a question mark.

Anyway, there's another page break here. The party has arrived at a river, where a bridge leads to a ruined town (I'm assuming the town is Ponyville, since one of the slavers mentioned it earlier and LP was just at Sweet Apple Acres a short time ago).

>Briefly I may have made the mistake of hoping for rescue; but my eyes were drawn to the spiked poles that lined the bridge, and the still rotting heads of decapitated ponies that adorned two of them.
My stars, kkat, does your mother know you're being this edgy on the internet?

In any event, there are a couple of issues here. For one, "Briefly I may have made the mistake of hoping for rescue" is a really verbose way of wording a fairly simple expression. "Briefly I'd hoped for rescue" would be the easiest way to shorten it. Another issue is that the semicolon is unnecessary here; a comma would have worked just as well.

Anyway, apparently the significance of this is that the bridge is being held by some group of brigands or other. One of the slavers goes to find out what the "toll" will be hopefully none of them have burned the coal, and meanwhile LittlePip takes advantage of the distraction and slips a screwdriver and bobby pin out of her barding, because these generic thugs are apparently beyond fucking stupid and never even thought to search her.

LittlePip is frankly not that bright either, because she makes enough noise getting her manacles off that it draws the attention of Cagey, which is apparently the name of the pony with the shovel in his mouth (I'm still a little unclear on how exactly he's holding this thing, but something tells me it won't matter for too much longer). Cagey says some more unintelligible bullshit and points the shovel menacingly at her, but as luck would have it a gunfight suddenly breaks out at the bridge.

>I suspect he was warning us to stay put, but I'll never know. His head exploded, showering me with gore.
Oh my, how edgy. I'm beginning to worry this story is going to be far too edgy for me. Here I thought I was going to be reading a story about cute little ponies, and you went and made it all edgy and dark.

>>284860
>>284864
>oh my, le edge; clearly this is a raw, gritty pony story intended only for adults
>My stars, kkat, does your mother know you're being this edgy on the internet?
>I'm beginning to worry this story is going to be far too edgy for me.
Kek, get used to it. FoE is basically a slip'n'slide of blood, cum, and angst. And Littlepip herself somehow has a fouler mouth than your average Anonfilly.

>>284844
But FE is a worse version of Fallout 3 that's trying to be a better version of the whole Fallout franchise in front of bronies who love it because it gives weird sandpaper-gloved handjobs to Derpy Hooves and Vinyl Scratch and the mane six and Celly and Luna.
I'll try to keep complaints about F3's abysmal game design to a minimum since that usually isn't relevant to a writing discussion. Then again Fallout Equestria does copy over game elements to this story even when they REALLY don't work in literature, so some discussion of Fallout gameplay is necessary.
It's hard to separate one from the other when you're talking about mistakes copied over from F3 or mistakes that exist because the author tried to one-up something done better in Fallout.
F3 was about using a magical matter-reconstituting device to remove the radiation from a river of irradiated water and then dump it back into the irradiated Pachachamac Riverbed. the whole game tried to be biblically jesusy about water even though it's actually really easy to remove Radiation from water IRL. You have a "rival" who makes no sense, and your rival works for a boss who makes no sense. You join a Power Rangers team that makes no sense, because F3 repurposes Fallout 1/2's Iconic Iconography in a bland by-the-numbers story full of madcap lolsorandum bullshit like a town of children that exists for no reason and is connected to a Super Mutant-infested dungeon basement, a town where a supervillain and superhero fight endlessly to annoy the local populace, and a vault whose "experiment" was "What if we, a private company, somehow acquired a military-grade evolution-manipulating virus and somehow modified it and then unleashed it on a Vault's populace".
Settlements have walls made of Adobe or Junk in Fallout 1. In Fallout 2, Vault City is fucking thriving. But in F3 and F4, nobody has cleaned their rooms or swept the pre-war skeletons from their homes or eaten any perfectly-preserved pies in over 250 years.
Shouldn't a magical world full of unicorns who can harmlessly turn their parents into plants and back again have an even easier time solving post-apocalyptic radiation problems?
And there are so many ways magic can be abused. So many missed opportunities for horror.
Imagine you're a post-apocalyptic pony and you enter a town and find a combination restaurant and hospital. Excellent veggies are on sale. Doc Orchid runs the restaurant. But if you check the basement you'll find some sun lamps and a bunch of screaming ponies strapped to tables and transformed into regenerating plant matter, which is occasionally cut up and used as mulch for the gardens, which grows food that is served to the people. Anypony who requests healing with low chances of survival gets turned into plant food for life.
It's Doc Morbid and his human-meat "Squirrel Meat Kabobs" from Fallout 1 but given a magical body-horror plant-based coat of paint.
>>284854
that "Littlepip glows her horn at the guards, and they smirk until she knocks them out with something from behind" trick is so dumb. It's one of the most basic telekinesis tricks possible, literal unicorn foals can levitate stuff in the show. If a suspicious unicorn started glowing their horn around a guard, "stop the glowing before weird shit happens" would be the first thing that popped into the guard's head. A glowing horn's a better threat than a gun to your head. A glowing horn could do ANYTHING to you. You can look at a gun to guess its caliber and lethality but unless you intimately know a Unicorn, you won't know what spells she knows. At best you can guess it's got something to do with her Cutie Mark, whatever a pony's typically-vague symbol means.
Littlepip can levitate Boxcars.
Boxcars!
Not the dice game, not the nigger from Nipton in FNV, she can telekinetically pick up boxcars and crush enemies with them. She does this later in the story.
She has "The Strongest Telekinesis" as a trade-off for rarely if ever learning any real spells. It's ALMOST like a Fallout character "Trait" but not quite.
A boxcar can weigh over 260,000 lbs, or 130 tons (US)
The German tank "Tiger II" weighed just 70 tons, and carries a 88 mm 71 calibre length tank gun along with two 7.92 mm Maschinengewehr 34s.
She could levitate one of these tanks around above her head and fire it at foes, if she wanted to and she had the necessary ammo.
Yet she still insists on using a few normal human-sized canon-compliant guns from Fallout or those guns but "enchanted" with bonus fire damage.

>Littlepip the generic player character
I think you're never even told what she looks like. It's the fandom that decided amongst themselves she's got brown hair and grey fur. Or one author drew her like a grey and brown Unicorn RD, kkunt said "Yes, that's it! that's how she looks!" and everyone just copied it. I forget

>videogame-like starting area
It isn't even a good one narratively speaking even by videogame standards. Fallout's starting areas are designed to teach the player basic mechanics. F1's cave of rats gave you combat without tutorials, F2 had that path of trials, F3 has you dialogue your way through major moments in the player character's life to change absolutely nothing about the ending where you Sandy Hook your way out of a vault that's nonsensically Reverse Sandy Hooking you first, FNV's town has Sunny Smiles teach you shooting/crafting/questing and then you're dragged into a "Convince townfolk to form a militia and help fight off the Powder Gangers via dialogue skill checks" tutorial. F4's opener is a nonsense movie.

>Littlepip knows what an Apple Cellar is
So many of these "Somehow, Littlepip knows way too much about the outside world" moments could be solved if the author established Littlepip as a fanatic reader who loves pre-war books. It would still allow moments of "hilarious" assumptions/misunderstandings, too, when it comes to whether things pre-war ponies did in post-war books really happened or not and are still done after the nuking or not.

>>284868
>Fallout Traits
Fallout 1 was initially going to be a GURPS-based video game. GURPS doesn't matter, forget I said that, it's basically DND but generalized enough to fit any setting from ancient fantasy to the modern day to futuristic sci-fi BS. GURPS pulled out so Obsidian pulled a Them's Fighting Herds and made their own "Fallout" series.
When making your Player Character in Fallout 1/2/NV you select your SPECIAL stats (strength, perception, endurance, etc),
you select three Skills to set as your "Tagged Skills" (When you level up, you gain Skill Points to spend on raising Skills like Barter, Speech, Small Guns, Big Guns, First Aid, and so on. Tagged Skills gain 2 points for every one Skill Point you spend on raising them)
and select up to two Traits.
Traits are things like "Four Eyes - You gain 1 Perception while wearing glasses and lose 1 Perception while not wearing glasses" "Gifted - every SPECIAL stat is raised by 1 but you gain fewer Skill Points per level up" and "Kamikaze - You get more action points to spend on moving and shooting every turn, but armour won't make you tougher" and and "Small Frame - +1 Agility but you can carry less weight and your limbs are easier to cripple" and "Fast Shot - Your gun attacks cost 1 less Action Point but you can't aim at specific body parts on your enemy, meaning you can't tactically disable a humanoid foe's arms or cripple a Deathclaw's legs or hilariously aim for an enemy's groin".
Trade-Offs that impact your character's abilities and your playstyle.
But enough about videogame shit

>>284854
One thing that bugs me about Littlepip's Stable-Vault, in terms of narrative?
Nothing happens in the Stable to give you a sense of Littlepip's personality or backstory or drive.
If it wasn't for the narration telling you everything, you'd have barely any idea who she is.
She's a bored lonely unattractive friendless dyke who once woke up screaming during a sleepover after some scary stories where the world outside the Stable is an endless void. She's also snarky and unrealistically "I will purify this evil world and make its foul mouth choke on me!"ish and has a male-hating streak that comes and goes now and then, matching the man-hating author. God, just wait until you see what happens to the "only Stable ruled by a man".
She is practically forced into being a hero. Not literally, though. Fate fucks her, so she decides to run out into the Wasteland to lick labias, and then she decides to give obnoxious Paragon Speeches about what a good person she thinks she is and how much she wants to unfuck this horrible world.
But if it wasn't for fate dropping this pip-buck in her lap, she would have never done anything good for her stable, or the world.
She's got the backstory of a "I NEVER ASKED FOR THIS! I'M JUST ONE LITTLE GUY TRYING TO SURVIVE IN HELL! I FEEL LIKE TOO LITTLE BREAD THAT'S BEEN SPREAD ACROSS TOO MUCH BUTTER!" kind of character.
But the author wants his "totally ordinary protagonist" to start scaring trained killers with death threats and delivering quippy one-liners in the middle of firefights way too soon.
She never earns this.
There is not one precise moment where she graduates from cowardly little everymare who says "Oh god oh shit I am so far in over my head, I never asked for this" to "I mustn't run away, I mustn't run away, I must protect my friends or they'll die and then I'm fucked" to "In the name of heroism and the moon, I must kill all the raiders and purify this scorched earth through sheer force of will! Row row fight the power!"
It's not character growth with a linear arc or even a dynamic arc. It's just bad character writing from the author. She was always just a murderhobo for the same reason Velvet's hypocritical semi-pacifism and pseudo-idealism makes no sense and is never compared to or contrasted with Littlepip's RPG-protagonist murderhoboery.
Though she later takes drugs and after a doctor injects her with AddictionAway she's magically cured of drug addiction so I guess that's character growth, right?

Anyway in chapter 1, she doesn't really get any scenes where through interacting with other characters in real-time, these personality traits are established or explored and she makes choices of her own accord to get what she wants the best she can.
I'm sure books are full of good "Starting Areas" that give you a sense of who the hero is on a normal day, before normalcy is torn away from him or he chooses to throw normalcy away to save the world. Scenes that establish who the heroic farmboy who longs for adventure and knows tech stuff is, before his farm is burned down and his parents are killed and he has to learn magic kung fu and blow up the death star or whatever.
Video Games have better starting areas that are designed to teach you basic mechanics and they'll impart some narrative themes if you're lucky, but looking back a lot of popular games have really basic stories at best.
Like Persona 5, a game everyone's creamed their jeans over since it released. Its "theme" is that you should only be a hero if you have magic protagonist powers. Everyone who doesn't obey the system gets fucked harder than ever before and often makes things worse for others. This game says cat-abusers should be treated worse than child-pornographers (and the story says you should forgive them) and only magic can make society better. But the game spends its first two hours fucking your asshole and making adults call your kid character bad names so when you finally unlock magic powers, you're too high on your own newfound fictional power to notice how bad the writing is and always will be.

>>284856
>A hack and slash video game
The plot of DMC3 would be great as a book and even better as an action movie.
Long ago, earth was invaded by Demons. One Demon named Sparda became a good guy and sacrificed himself to seal the main portal to Hell, but not before fucking twin brothers out of a human woman named Eva. These twin brothers were separated at birth when Demons sent by the evil demon lord Mundus attacked their home. Eva ran away with the good brother named Dante and died in front of him, but the edgy one named Vergil hid and couldn't be found. Dante lived under the Pseudonym "Tony Redgrave" for years as a private eye before eventually deciding to become a professional Demon Killer for hire.
Dante is now a fun wacky woohoo pizza man with a cool sword and ice nunchuks and two guns and a rocket launcher and a guitar and a set of gauntlets and greaves, while Vergil has a stick up his ass and a fucking weaboo katana that slices through space.
Dante's currently unnamed shop gets crashed by demons, because his evil twin brother Vergil summoned a demonic tower in his town. Both brothers have a red amulet, Vergil wants both so he can absorb Sparda's magic power from the sealed hell portal even though this will unseal it and unleash hell on the world. Both brothers are being manipulated by Jester/Arkham, who is being hunted by his rocket launcher-wielding daughter named Lady.
Dante fights shittons of Demons while climbing the demonic tower named Temen-Ni-Gru. He loses his first fight to Vergil, who asks "Where's your motivation?" and stabs him in the fucking chest. It hits home because at this point Dante's just fighting for fun, not to save anyone. Dante grows stronger, embraces his demonic heritage, becomes less wacky and more mature, unlocks his "turn into a half-demon to get a little stronger for a few seconds" power, and embraces his responsibility as the heir of Sparda.
2 hours of awesome boss battles and puzzles and fucking sweet cutscenes later, Dante fights Vergil in a shallow waterfall overlooking the portal to hell. Vergil falls into hell and seals it, because he's going to kill Mundus. Except not really, this is DMC3 and in DMC1 you fight Mundus and Mundus's strongest servant "Nero Angelo" who is actually a dying mind-controlled Vergil.

>quotes
I saw a Code Geass fanfic that excellently executed quotes at the start of chapters.

Many chapters started with full-on documentary narration about how absurdly and cartoonishly big a deal the parade thrown for Lelouch is in chapter 11 was, followed by a chapter about the parades from Lelouch's perspective, or a documentary opener how the world reacted to Lelouch's decisive military campaign victories in Japan followed by many chapters from the perspective of Lelouch and assorted named soldiers who worked for him.

Other chapters started with unrelated shit like a few paragraphs from a woman's book on how to seduce men before a chapter where Lelouch talks to a woman for once. It did a great job adding worldbuilding to this setting and showing the audience what Britannians are like, what they think like, what they read for fun and what they read to learn shit, and so on. Really gave you the sense that there was a world outside Lelouch and his dudes, which was good because there usually wasn't one in this fic.

The story wasn't perfect by any means, it was slow-paced and the dialogue was clumsy and Lelouch had been turned into an unlikable dumbed-down wanker with no idea how to talk to women, the military campaigns were boring, the military strategy was dull and obvious, and a lot of elements were directly ripped from Fullmetal Alchemist of all things. The story was supposed to be a "What If" fic where instead of living in Japan as Lelouch Lamperouge, Lelouch returns to Brittania to fight for Team Evil. But the author had no idea what to do with characters who were only relevant because Lelouch was living in Japan and involved with Japan's rebellion against Britannia, so he shoehorned them into this fic because fans would likely bitch if Kallen and C2 couldn't be seen somewhere.
The author also had barely any idea what to do with characters who were villains in the original story but "good guys" now, since he wasn't willing to give Britannia any legitimate reasons to conquer the world or paint Japan as anything other than le most perfect nation ever what dindu nuffin wrong.
Also the story was never finished. It just stops right after some unimportant side-character soldier dies and Mays Hughes's funeral from FMA gets ripped off.

>and caught the glint of the flames against a few expose links in the chains binding his hooves.
this story can be found in paperback and hardback form on the shelves of many faggoted bronies, it has been read by over a hundred thousand people, and it still has that spelling error.

>shovel
ironically the "shovel handle" style of handle would make it way easier for a pony to point the shovel forwards while maintaining his bite's full gripping strength.
A pony holding a normal broadsword in his mouth... He would need to hold the sword's hilt in his mouth, sticking forwards and out of his mouth like a lollypop stick or piece of wheat, or held sideways in his mouth gripped between all teeth like Roranoa Zoro's third katana. The former would result in far less grip strength (and make levering his mouth open to cause jaw damage easy) and the latter would make pointing the sword forwards and swinging it in an arc difficult for any pony without Pinkie Pie's stretchiness.

>no pipboy removal
Fallout 3 said the "Biometric Seal" means you can only remove a pipboy from a corpse. If the biometric seal's never mentioned here, it's not canon in FE. Also later something happens that fuses the PipBuck to LP's leg and causes precisely no problems for her ever, but this surprises her so it's probably normal to remove these watches in this setting.

>jack
GOTTA GO BACK
BACK TO THE PLACE THAT WANTS TO KILL YOU FOR NO REASON
MONTERREY JACK

There's something spoilery I don't want to spoil just yet since it matters 20 chapters later
>I'm assuming the point of this scene is to have LittlePip escape from capture and free Monterrey Jack in the process, so the two of them can become traveling companions
it's actually so he can die tragically later on for no reason, and so the writer can pretend Littlepip doesn't always magically pass her speech checks during dialogue, even though later in this story she always will. There's a friend of hers who only dies because she gets tranq'd at the worst possible time and isn't around to solve everything with a few words. Later on she will be blackmailed into entering and attacking some villain's territory by another nuclear rocket launcher-toting villain. Offscreen, LP somehow convinces this villain to pass her the nuclear balefire egg bomb rocket launcher which is currently being used to threaten LP, and then LP erases her own memories and goes along with the villain's plan anyway, hoping to nuclearly attack the villain she's sent after once she suddenly remembers she has a FatMan from Fallout 3 that fires Nuclear Balefire Green Phoenix Explosive Eggs.
Littlepip joins the next 2/3 player characters she encounter, even though they have even less of a reason to travel together

spoilers over

>sprite-bot
It's the Eyebots from Fallout 3. You know how annoying it is when authors just assume anyone reading a pony fanfic would be familiar with pony-world elements? It's even more annoying when it happens in a "crossover" with Fallout because Fallout elements here aren't supposed to be "just fallout elements". Supposedly they're nuclear pony-world elements that just happen to turn out quite like Fallout elements but bigger.
So even someone who intimately knows what an Eyebot is would be left saying "What the fuck is a Spritebot?" at this point in the story.
And it's never answered, not until we learn what floated uselessly through destroyed cities and played Enclave Radio in F3 is now a dangerous floating radio that floats around randomly and plays soul-destroying Perish Song music, and its existence is blamed on Pinkie Pie because during a resource war she wasted resource on making polka-playing robots float around Equestria and spy on ponies for the Ministry Of Unpersoning And Torture she ran single-handedly before the war went nuclear.

>littlepip and guns
I won't spoil what's retarded about this, because it gets so much worse

Sorry about how long my posts were today.
I am trying to talk less at once because I've noticed how often I dominate conversations when I get going and lose track of time.
It probably seems like I'm bitching about nothing right now.
There are a lot of fundamental flaws in the story that start off a little annoying but repeat themselves during the story and cause worse writing errors later, and pointing them out at the start seems like the most efficient way to get it all out there.

If you want me to stop mentioning things that happen later on in the story, I will. I'll react to the story in real-time without spoiling surprises.

There are a lot of "stupid seeds" that fuck things up later on, make little sense, and waste incredible amounts of creative potential the story could have had for absolutely no reason.
For example...

Did the story mention what the door-opening password was?
If it did, then you've already figured out what 3 CMC BFF means and why it's the password.
In Fallout Equestria, the stables were made by Apple Bloom. Velvet Remedy is the many-times-great granddaughter of Sweetie Belle. The Stables were supposed to save ponies. The Vaults in Fallout were never actually meant to save anyone, just experiment on them.
And yet this causes no major changes!
Some Stables just have weird changes to them/experiments within them for no reason.
It's not like the gimmick each Stable has is the result of cultural development shaped by environment, cultural conditioning, scientific development, and resource limitations.
Nope
Things just are that way because encountering a dead Vault and learning what one mistake or bullshit experiment caused it to fucking die instantly while looting it is something you do in the Fallout video games.

If I was writing this I would have scrapped Vault-Tec/Stable-Tec completely (VT is an immoral company from the Fallout setting that makes no sense in the pony setting unless it's full of Griffons) and said Twilight ran a govt-funded think tank of geniuses even more autistic than her. It wanted to make some underground shelters and seal them away for thousands of years while assigning each one different technologies to research. Twilight said yes. Then the Think Tank had even more Stables constructed while making each one a different experiment in its own right, but Twilight said no, so they did it anyway without proper funding or clearance. Then Twilight learned of this and was going to destroy the unauthorized Stables, but by that point nuclear war seemed inevitable so she personally assigned space in the best stables to every pony in Equestria she wanted to save for whatever reason and then let the Think Tank sell Experiment Vault space to desperate ponies after personally inspecting and magically fixing up each one the best she could.
So every single Stable that goes wrong in the story is a tragedy ponies couldn't prevent despite their good intentions. Some got overcrowded, some were fucked when vital life support systems broke down, and some were fucked when developments in their assigned technology field resulted in some sci-fi horror bullshit.

/thread

>>284919
not /thread, the story just started.
are you going to contribute to this thread (or the site in general) or will you just claim my contributions aren't up to your standards forever?

>>284921
That your contributions are, and never have been up to standard is a matter of record, not conjecture. This is by your own hand.
>>284916
>Sorry about how long my posts were today.
>I am trying to talk less at once because I've noticed how often I dominate conversations when I get going and lose track of time.
In this you show an inkling of self awareness. Were it not that you compounded your error, I would grant you due credit.
But no.
It doesnt matter what you say, cuz it's 'you' who feels compelled by some abject sense of entitlement such that you feel at liberty to operate however you will because you can do no wrong, no harm, no foul? Are you entirely oblivious? This isnt the first time you've been called out, and neither am I the only person who has called you out.
I AM contributing to the thread, by telling an unqualified pseudo-wanna-be to stfu and allow OP - who has a track record of both A. Entertaining people (unironically) and B. Having some credibility to his assertions.
Glim glam is a treasure to the site. Let him do his thing. Now if you please, do stfu.

>>284922
You know what's sad? I can't explain to you why your reddit behaviour is so unmasculine.

>>284926
>lol ur reddit but I cant be bothered to validate that point so hurrr
Not an argument. You're shit, please stop detracting from those who arent

Re-reading chapter the early chapters, I'm struck with the realization that every single Pip-Buck Feature mentioned in the opening infodump is something that could have been naturally shown to the audience.

The Pip-Buck monitors your health and inventory, lets you hack and command tech wirelessly(to unlock computers and make automatic sentry guns target your enemies instead of you), tells you your videogame stats like Strength and Agility, tells you your videogame Skills like Big Guns and Sneak and Speech and First Aid, lets you turn on Aim Assist But Gayer, records and plays audio, and picks up radio broadcasts.
Also sometimes the Pip-Buck gives you a hammerspace-style VideoGame Inventory (To the point where rocket launchers can be concealed in a menu and forgotten about until they're convenient) and sometimes it doesn't so water canteens and guns have to be strapped to your body. It's inconsistent.
and the Pip-Buck is later retconned to have some extra functions in later chapters that were never mentioned at the story's start, making this part pointless.

It would have been completely natural for Littlepip to
>check her Pip-Buck(TM) stats screen and admire her high Repair stats and then moan about her low physical stats
>when bored and waiting for another client with something to repair, use her Pip-Buck(TM) inventory program's magical hammerspace to whip out and read a Batmare comic book she's not supposed to read on the job
>turn on her Pip-Buck(TM) Light so she can read her comic better
>turn on her Pip-Buck(TM) radio to see if Velvet Remedy songs are playing
>sadly they are not
>disappointed, switch over to her Pip-Buck(TM) Audio folder and play recorded mp3 copies of Velvet Remedy songs
>she reminisces about the time she held her arm-mounted computer up to a radio and recorded these songs
>shittily doodle something onto paper with a pencil and it turns out shit because her Pip-Buck(TM) says her Art skill is low
>screw the paper up and use Pip-Buck(TM) SATS to throw it at a bin
>miss because low Thrown Weapons skill
>wish you had a gun and were allowed at the vault's only shooting range, but only Stable Security thugs are allowed there and allowed to own guns
>suddenly
a good excuse to hack something with your Pip-Buck(TM) shows up!
>a client shows up
>says he left some coffee machine with Littlepip's boss to be repaired
>Littlepip's boss is busy and his computer has the data on it
>hack into her boss's computer by connecting her Pip-Buck(TM) to it, so she can access the records and see if this guy's legit
>he's legit
>she gives him the coffee machine and leaves a note on her boss's hacked computer
and just like that
she would display every basic function of VATS that gets used frequently later on
in chapter one
without any retarded infodump sales-pitches.

>>284957
I'm actually the guy who paid your Bill's for 6 months.
For those who are following along - and yes, I do apologize Glim, this will be over in a moment - just short of 2 years ago our friend here was in dire financial straights. Since he had made himself well known on the site, I had no trouble identifying his patreon, and paid him a sum in the mid 3-figures USD. Let this serve as evidence how readily our friend here will fabricate stories about anyone who criticizes him.
I think who is mad is quite evident.

>>284921
>>284919
>>284922
>>284926
>>284929

I would like to squash this before it gets out of hand and starts derailing the thread. Nigel, Anon may not have worded it as tactfully as he could have, but he actually has kind of a point here. I'd like to try and illustrate what I think he's trying to say about your posting style.

Pic related is a collage I made of all of your posts in this thread so far. I've color-coded portions of the text. Here is what the colors mean:

Portions that are highlighted in Green are meaningful contributions to the thread. These are the areas of your posts in which you make actual, insightful contributions to the discussion of this story, without veering off into random tangents or off-topic nonsense. Basically this is the good shit that belongs in the thread, that I would encourage you to write more of. Please note that this is not an evaluation of your arguments, opinions, or writing style; as long as a section of text attempts to make an actual point about something directly related to what is being discussed, and does so in a concise and legible manner, I highlighted it green. I would like you to notice that these sections are rather few and far between.

Portions that are highlighted Yellow are places where you veer off on a tangent. This basically means that you begin discussing something that is on some level related to the topic, but is actually opening up an additional, unrelated topic. Most of your discussion of the Fallout video games falls into this category, for instance. The games are related to the story in that the story is inspired by the games, and many elements in the story are parodies or analogs of elements from the games. For the purposes of this analysis, it's helpful to know which story elements are inspired by which game elements, and your knowledge of this subject is helpful, particularly since I've never played the games. However, this doesn't mean we need to know the entire history of the Fallout series, as well as your personal commentary on why you liked this aspect or that aspect of each game. Think of it this way: the story is derived from MLP as well as Fallout. So, discussion of the MLP elements in the story would be on-topic discussion. However, this does not mean that anything related to MLP is fair game here. For example, if at some point in the future Twilight Sparkle makes an appearance in FoE, and I discussed some aspects of Twilight's depiction in the series as it pertains to her appearance in FoE, I would be on-topic. However, if I started going off the rails and writing paragraphs upon paragraphs detailing everything I liked and didn't like about Twilight's depiction in the cartoon series, regardless of whether or not it had anything at all to do with FoE, I would be going off on a tangent.

You'll note that the overwhelming majority of what you've written falls into the tangent category, so this is an area you might want to consider reining yourself in a bit.

Portions that are highlighted in Red are places where you go completely off-topic. These are the areas where you stop talking about anything even remotely related to FoE, Fallout, MLP, or anything being currently discussed in whatever thread you happen to be in, and start ranting about Devil May Cry, Persona, Code Geass, Zatch Bell, JoJo's Magical Gay Mustache Adventures, Pokemon sex dolls, and a million other ridiculous things you're interested in that nobody else cares about or asked about. This is the shit you really need to work on cutting the fuck out, because it drives everyone on this board crazy, me included.

Lastly, there are a couple of items I highlighted in Orange. These areas contain statements that are technically on-topic, but don't really add any meaningful content to the thread and come across as abrasive. Basically, this is when you start ranting about the author or the story and complaining about how it sucks millions of dicks, but don't really elaborate or provide any arguments as to why it sucks millions of dicks. There's only a couple of these in this particular batch of examples, but it's still something I think you should pay attention to, because I've seen you do it a lot.

The big picture is that, while I like that you're enthusiastic about the things you're interested in, you really need to learn to filter your thoughts. What other people find frustrating about your posts is that you write a lot of text, but usually the essence of what you're trying to say could easily be condensed into a couple of short paragraphs, while the rest is just random autism about unrelated topics that no one cares about. Not everyone wants to hear what you think about every single thing in Fallout, particularly since that's not really what this thread is about. If you take a little more time to compose your thoughts, and keep your comments laser-focused on the thread topic instead of just typing whatever pops into your head, I think you'll find that you get better responses and your posts will stimulate more actual discussion.

>>284864

>In the growing list of things I'd not seen before this night, the death of another pony ranked at the top.
Again, very awkward and verbose way to word something simple. This is still at least slightly better written than most of the stories we've looked at, but I've still come across a few cringe-worthy passages in here. Anyway, a simpler and more direct wording would not only make this clearer, it would sharpen the emotional impact of the event.

Here's the full passage:
>In the growing list of things I'd not seen before this night, the death of another pony ranked at the top. I blinked, feeling the blood on my eyelid. Cagey was dead! And I had Cagey all over me!!

Now try this on for size:
>I'd never seen another pony die before. I blinked, feeling hot blood running down my eyelid. Cagey was dead. I had Cagey's blood all over me.

I didn't really change all that much; basically I just simplified the first sentence down to its essential meaning, and made the "I had Cagey all over me!!" bit a little less cartoony. I also removed the extraneous "and" because technically speaking you should never start a sentence with the words "and," "but" or "because" (even though I do it all the time). Beyond that, very little was changed, but I feel like the new version does a much better job of conveying LittlePip's emotions in this situation.

Anyway, despite the trauma of seeing her former captor's head blown off, LittlePip is still lucid enough to realize that her main objective hasn't changed. She finishes taking off her manacles while a couple of raiders put an end to Sawed-Off.

There is a completely unnecessary page break, and we rejoin LittlePip literally two or three seconds later. She has managed to get her own manacles off and is now freeing Monterey Jack. The raiders who killed the slavers are now approaching them. One is a unicorn holding a combat shotgun, and the other is an earth pony with a sledgehammer in its mouth.

Before we move on, I'd like to spend a brief moment on the combat in this story, since I get the impression we're going to be seeing a lot of it. One of the more aggravating things about writing pony fiction is dealing with some of the practical problems adapting certain tools and devices for creatures that don't have opposable thumbs. Part of this is a design flaw in the source material. As easy as it is to make fun of Big Jim's "it's just a cartoon, stop overanalyzing it" response to every nitpicky fan question, it's probably reasonable to assume that when the creators were developing this toy commercial for little girls, they didn't anticipate that grown-ass men would be writing grimdark fantasy stories about it. As such, they probably didn't think much about the Pandora's box they were opening for fanfiction writers by making it canon that ponies use tools obviously designed for humans.

The usual solution is to reserve the more complicated tools for unicorns, who can use magic to operate nearly anything, or to give pegasi the rather dubious ability to use their wings like hands. However, this is kind of a lazy workaround, and if you rely on this too much you end up with a group of characters that is too heavily weighted with unicorns and pegasi.

Unfortunately, if you want the fighting to be weapons-focused, with earth ponies you're fairly limited. This author seems to have approached the problem by having earth ponies use the melee weapons, which might make sense at first, until you realize that a hammer or a sword is only going to be slightly less cumbersome for them to use than a gun. Picture the way a horse stands and carries itself and moves its neck. Now imagine a horse with a sledgehammer or a shovel in its mouth. Does it give him any sort of combat advantage at all? Not really; in order to hit anything with it he'd have to get close and then stand at an awkward angle so that he could swing his head in a way that the hammer would strike the target. Even though a horse could technically hold a sledgehammer, it's still a tool designed for a creature with hands.

What makes this even sillier is that an earth pony is far from powerless. In the human world, a horse is a pretty formidable creature. If a horse were to buck you in the face or rear up on its hind legs and then drop its front hooves on you you're pretty much fucked. Until very recently, mounted cavalry was the main offensive force in combat, and medieval knights were terrifying when mounted but mostly useless once they were unhorsed. To me it makes far more sense to think up weapons for the pony types to use that play to their strengths, rather than simply adapting human weapons for use by ponies, particularly when there is no way to avoid making it awkward. An earth pony could probably make good use of studded or bladed horseshoes. Heavy barding that allows them to charge into or drop their body weight on an opponent without taking damage themselves would also be a huge advantage. Pegasi, meanwhile, would benefit from using weapons that can be dropped or thrown; grenades and so forth. Custom helmets that have battering devices or blades on them could also be useful, as it would allow them to dive-bomb opponents and fly away to safety.

Even guns could use some retooling for this world. Just because a unicorn could technically operate a human firearm doesn't mean it's the best design for them. Why have a trigger mechanism that's obviously designed for an animal with hands? Wouldn't a pull cord or a lever or something make more sense? A non-physical spell-trigger could work too.

One idea that's crossed my mind is to have fighting units that consist of a pegasus and a unicorn. The pegasus has a firearm attached to its body somehow, and its job is to fly around and take a position. The unicorn stays on the ground and operates the weapon by firing it, and maybe using some type of remote viewing to precision-aim it. The possibilities are endless once you start using your imagination.

>>284967

Anyway, that's enough about that. Moving on with the story.

Littlepoop has been technically liberated from her captors, but now has to deal with the raiders who killed them. She discovers that they are basically just more of the same (generic thug cluster #1 is dead; long live generic thug cluster #2).

The generic raiders make some generic rapey comments, and then attack. There's a brief scuffle; I'm not going to bother with the play-by-play on every fight because if I do this is going to take forever. The long and short of it is that the raiders try to gang up on Monterey but LP protects him. LP is not sure if she can kill another pony, so she manages to end the fight by simply knocking her opponent unconscious. Monterey, meanwhile, has killed his. With the raiders thus dispatched, Shittlepoop resumes the task of removing his remaining manacles.

>I had lost the bobby pin; there was no chance of finding it in the dirt at night. But I had more.
Why would a pony have so many bobby pins? For that matter, why would a pony even need bobby pins in the first place? Also, have I mentioned that the slavers really sucked at their job? If she'd had a Swiss Army knife, they probably would have left that on her as well.

Anyway, speaking of taking things, Monterey Jack proceeds to loot the corpses of the defeated raiders and slavers. LP finds this distasteful but can see the logic in it. She attempts to search one of the corpses for food, but this proves to be too much for her and she pukes over the edge of the bridge. When she turns around, Monterey is pointing the slaver's shotgun at her. He informs her that she has just become a victim of robbery, one of the worst and coolest of crimes.

>“b-But I just saved you!”
>“Yeah. And for that, I’m not going to kill you.” His eyes narrowed. “Unless, of course, you do something stupid right now.”
Oh my, it's almost as if Friendship isn't even Magic anymore. Le edge.

Anyway, LP resigns herself to being robbed and starts handing her shit over, but then notices the combat shotgun somewhere behind him. She uses her magic to grab it, and the two find themselves trapped in whatever the Pony equivalent of a Mexican standoff would be. Since she has the combat shotgun and Monterey only has the shitty one that the raiders had (which only has one shot left in it because LP was autistic enough to count), LP has the advantage and thus wins the standoff.

I'll actually admit that this scene is much better executed than the previous fight with the guards, where Shitterpip just drops a steel locker on their heads and runs out the door, with the Overmare yelling but otherwise not trying to stop her. The action here is well-paced and easy to follow, and the image of the two unicorns standing on the bridge pointing shotguns at each other makes for a nice visual. However, logically, I find some aspects of it a little hard to swallow.

Monterey has been dealing with this grimdark world a lot longer than Littlepoon and is much better at it; this is the whole point of the scene. Monterey is the experienced, jaded, cynical tough-guy, while LP is the naive, sheltered filly who still believes that ponies can be nice to each other perhaps she ought to open up her eyes, and see the world from where he stands. If the inexperienced LP was able to notice things like the number of shots being fired, and the relative strength of the different guns, then it should be second nature for Monterey. He would have been closely watching everything that was happening and keeping track of the same details that LP was; probably even more so. As such, as soon as he was free and had the opportunity to grab a weapon, he would almost certainly have made sure to go for the superior combat shotgun instead of the less reliable one the slavers had, even if it meant hunting around for it a little longer.

Even if he didn't hold LP's abilities in particularly high regard and thought she'd be a pushover, it still makes more sense for him to go for the better gun, just because he'd presumably be glad to have it later on. Really, I think it makes the most sense for him to just take both shotguns, and if he doesn't want to carry the melee weapons throw them in the river so they can't be used by anypony else. I'd probably have written the scene this way, and have it end with LP getting robbed and learning a hard, brutal lesson about life. Hell, I might even throw in a gratuitous rape scene at gunpoint just to prove that I can be le edgy too.

Anyway, LP wins the match and keeps her stuff, but Monterey has moved on. I'm actually a little surprised at this; the story has been rather predictably scripted so far, so I was expecting LP and Monterey to team up at this point. I still suspect they will eventually, or at least that Monterey will make another appearance, but it seems like it's not going to happen just yet.

So...page break.

>Ponyville. I wondered just how my PipBuck knew the names of places before I did. It even named the wreckage of a building that I had just slipped into. Ponyville was raider territory. I just hoped this place, this “Carousel Boutique”, was not crawling with them.

>Monterey Jack and I had barely parted ways when the railing of the bridge exploded next to me. A sniper! The same pony, I presumed, who had turned Cagey’s head to applesauce. I fled into the town, keeping to what cover there was. Few of the buildings were intact enough to hide in. This was the closest.

The timing here is a little confusing. What appears to be happening is that the "present" version of LP is exploring the Carousel Boutique, and the bit about the sniper and the bridge exploding is a flashback to how she got here. However, it would make more sense to just write these events in chronological order. Really, you don't even need the page break; you could just have Monterey and LP split up after the standoff concludes, and then suddenly a shot rings out and LP flees into town.

>>284967
>I had Cagey all over me!!
I agree with you that this bit is a little cartoony, but I liked it because of that. If you're going to write something really violent and edgy, I think some black comedy can keep it from feeling like you have to trudge through it.

>>284968

Anyway, LP doesn't feel particularly safe at Carousel Boutique, but she is too tired to move on, so she tries to find a safe place to sleep.

>The walls had been painted with crude images of violence and cruder swear words. A pile of torn-up cloth rotted in a corner, smelling foul, like ponies had urinated on it repeatedly.
Oh my, there's even naughty words in here? Ponies go pee-pee on cloth instead of making pretty pretty dresses with it? This world is so grim and so dark! Le edge, le edge.

>There were two beds, one of which was stained deeply with blood (and probably more vile things). The other was smaller, a foal’s bed, nothing but a mattress on a crushed frame. In my state, I felt it would do wonderfully.
The implication seems to be that this story takes place many centuries after the events of MLP, so does it really make sense that all of Rarity's furniture would still be here after all this time? I guess we still don't know the full details of what happened; if the apocalypse was the result of some instant cataclysm like a bomb going off, that froze everything at the last instant of normal life before it was disrupted, then this would kind of make sense. However, if what we're seeing is just the end result of centuries of steady decline, this building would have likely been repurposed multiple times and as such Rarity's stuff would be long gone.

I'm also a little unclear on Littlepoop's identity exactly. It's been brought up by Nigel, and I've heard anons comment on this here and there also, that LP is never properly described anywhere in the text, and the visual representations of her are just fanon. She certainly hasn't described herself so far. This isn't that big a deal; in fact there are a lot of first-person stories where the narrator doesn't describe himself any more than is necessary. If a character's appearance isn't important to the story you can sometimes get away with not describing them at all. However, there are a few murky details that it might have been helpful for the author to clear up. For instance: how old is this character supposed to be? She refers to herself as a "filly" at one point, and just now she picked the foal's bed to sleep on, so is this character meant to be a child? Her actions so far seem to indicate that she's a full-grown mare, and none of the other characters seem to be treating her as a child. Just a passing mention of her approximate age would be very helpful.

Anyway, she pokes around in there some more, and finds another terminal. Even though the text literally just informed us that she is too tired even to look for a less-snipery place to bed down for the night, she is apparently not tired enough to pass up a chance to pointlessly hack into a bunch of sound files from some bygone era.

>The password was “apple”.
I don't know what kind of firepower the PipBuck has in terms of processor speed, but this password could be brute-forced almost instantly.

In a shocking twist that should surprise absolutely nobody, this random terminal she just chanced upon just so happens to be the terminal that the message she found at another random terminal at Sweet Apple Acres was addressed to, and can therefore be opened on. I wish my luck was this good; half the time I need to call my own cell phone just to find out which sofa cushion it slipped under.

Anyway, the information on the sound file that Shittlepip unlocks is of no significance to her, but contains some potentially interesting tidbits for the reader. Even without Nigel's fucking endless spoilers, it's not terribly hard to piece this together from what we had anyway. Stable 2 was located at Sweet Apple Acres, and was presumably built as some sort of happening shelter for the Apple family. It appears that Sweetie Belle wound up as the Overmare for this particular Stable, while Apple Bloom had to stay outside for some reason. The message, which was sent from AB's terminal (at the farmhouse) to SB's terminal (here) appears to be the one in which AB instructs SB to assume control of Stable 2 and watch over her family.

I like the way this is handled btw. In previous reviews, I've complained about the ways that various authors intertwine their own ideas with events and characters from the show. Mainly, my gripe is when authors construct their stories so that the reader needs to know quite a bit about the events of MLP in order to understand what the hell is going on. What I like here is that this story, which derives its lore from not just one but two separate franchises, is able to stand entirely on its own without the reader needing to know anything about either franchise. I know literally nothing about Fallout, but apart from a couple of minor details like the sprite-bots, it hasn't made the story difficult to follow. Likewise, a person who has never seen MLP, and would not attach any significance to names like Sweetie Belle or Sweet Apple Acres, could also read this and follow it.

All that we need to know here is that a character named Sweetie Belle, and some other yet unnamed character, were instrumental in the establishment of the bunker that Littleplop grew up in. We get a sense that there is some history here, and we don't yet entirely understand what's going on, but that's okay, because we're still early in the story; we'll learn more as we go. Moreover, someone who is familiar with MLP can still enjoy a sense of mystery here. We know that SB and AB had something to do with the establishment of Stable 2, but we don't know how or why. We also don't yet know how or why the world of Equestria wound up like this, and we're curious enough to keep reading.

So far, this story is a little dull and predictable, and its protagonist is mostly a colossal bore, but the author is doing a fairly good job of developing it properly.

incidentally, it's amazing how much porn exists of this shitty OC that doesn't even have a proper description in the one thing she appears in

>>284969
Things like that are basically author's choice, kind of like my thing about not using too many exclamation marks. It looks childish and stupid to me to have exclamation marks all over my text, so I generally use them sparingly if at all, whereas other writers will throw them in all over the place. Some things are hard and fast rules, but a lot of it really is just a matter of taste.

>>284964
That person has access to my discord account, so I don't believe you. If you're that kind person, why wouldn't you try to contact me on discord?

>>284975
If you are that person, please contact me on discord. I haven't heard from that guy in ages and I hope he's alright.

>>284975
>>284977
Now, let's get back to topic

>>284965
Holy shit, you're right. I do need to filter my posts.
I'm going to work harder at doing this.
I also need to stop spoiling shit.
>>284967
>page break
why did they use a page break to skip over Littlepip getting her shackles off?

>human weapons on ponies
I've thought a lot about fantasy creatures and weapons.
I think you'd love a youtube series I like called Fantasy Re-Armed, where Shadiversity talks about what weapons fantasy creatures should use logically looking at their species's abilities and physiology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iix5MdZiNQg&ab_channel=Shadiversity

For example, media loves giving weird short hook swords and whips and sickles to snaketaurs (people but from the waist down they're giant snakes) and that's retarded. A snake can coil their body far from you, then lunge at you, then retreat. A spear would be godly for them, letting them lunge at you from further away with more angles of attack. Some kind of binding weapon would also be great. They would also not wear skimpy leather armour, they'd want to cover their vulnerable upper bodies in thick armour and coat their thick snake body in flexible mail armour, to make wrapping around and crushing a foe less dangerous.
Also if they have poisonous bites, they'd love to disable you by stabbing your legs/knees with their spears and then bite you to poison you. Or they could poison their bladed weapons with their own poison. If they can see via scent/heat they'd also love using smoke bombs on people without a superior blind-fighting ability.

As for Fairies? Media loves giving them sewing needles to use like tiny rapiers, and tiny rapiers made from glass. Deadly Fairies would fly past you while dragging a barber's razor behind themselves, cutting necks and wrists in hit-and-run airborne attacks.

I wrote a really autistic and overly-long image post thingy about why Battle Saddles are dumb, why a helmet-mounted model would be a step up, and why literally anything else would be a step up from that, and what options could work best. But instead of just dumping it here should I ask if anyone wants to see it first?
>>284968
>why Bobby Pins
Because Bobby Pins are used to pick locks in Fallout 3 because it's coded that way in Skyrim and other games released on Bethesda's shitty 20 year old Creation Engine. They should switch over to Unity and Steam Workshop at this point, it would be an improvement.
Author did little or no research and never saw a single Lockpicking Lawyer video so "Just go at it with a bobby pin like in Fallout until you find the one and only secret unlock button all locks have" is his idea of how lockpicking works. That's why Littlepip got her shackles off "offscreen" during a page break. Author sucks for relying on page breaks for things he doesn't want to write and doesn't know how to write but wants to happen anyway.
This was going to be a really big rant but I shortened it a lot.

>I'd probably have written the scene this way, and have it end with LP getting robbed and learning a hard, brutal lesson about life
That would be a huge improvement from what this scene was supposed to be (Proof that Littlepip can instantly master just about anything and talk anyone into doing just about anything right now even passing up free supplies and fucking off, but can't pass absolutely all of her Speech Checks until she Levels Up some more and gets to become the ultimate nonsense offscreen charisma god)

>rape scene
considering how much Fallout fans loved Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons (fanfic of a fanfic, this one's got even more edge and rape and death) they'd probably love you for that.

>>284969
I would have given Littlepip a serious quiet horrified reaction where she covers her mouth to avoid screaming (would draw attention to herself) and she cries. Meanwhile a raider covered in way more of the guy's blood would freak out in a black comedy way because Borderlands says it's funny when bandits freak out.

>>>284971
>if the apocalypse was the result of some instant cataclysm
>>*VIBRATES WITH MOTION*
Must... not.. go into... autistic rant on how in Fallout 1/2 the nukes fell 60 years ago yet people in California's coast are recovering fast with walled nation-states and one rising real nation while the idiots in zombie/orc/Power Ranger/Cartoon Nazi-infested Washington DC are still drinking piss 200 years after the bombs dropped and in Fallout 4 major cities are filled with trash and a random trading outpost in the middle of nowhere and produces nothing still has parts of their home taken up by 200 year old trash and untouched unrobbed skeletons still embracing like they did before they died 200 years ago!

>Littlepip's age
She's a foal-sized young adult, around 20-22. Old enough for sex and small enough to fit on Sweetie Belle's bed.
I'll resist the urge to make a "But Officer FBI guy, she said she was actually 900 years old!" joke.
Her canon size is ignored when drawing her because making her a pallete-swapped and horned wingless Rainbow Dash is easier than trying to shorten her hooves and make them look right.
The author looked at Fallout's "Small Frame" trait (+1 Agility but your limbs are crippled easier and you can carry less stuff) should be taken as literally as possible.
Also for some fucktarded reason Sweetie Belle's tiny bed and Rarity's adult-sized bed still exist in Rarity's house while the bigger bed SB would have probably wanted upon reaching Rarity's age before the bombs fell didn't. Did she sleep with Rarity in the same bed for years before the bombs started falling and she was sent to the Vaults?

>>284984
>and tiny rapiers made from glass
I mean grass but come to think of it a shattered piece of glass would make a good blade for fairies if they could pick it up.
I looked for a picture of this but "Fairy Fencer" was full of anime results for "Fairy Fencer F", whatever that is.

>>284988
>Let this serve as evidence how readily our friend here will fabricate stories about anyone who criticizes him
Why would you word it like that?
I said you're not paying me, while saying fuck off and stop bitching about my post quality. I didn't know you might be someone who paid me once, but that doesn't make what I said inaccurate. Glim's colour-coded pic is what made me realize my posts are too long. "Fabricated stories" my ass. Reminds me of those lefties who mentally leap ten steps away from what's really happening towards something that sounds shocking, and then claim something shocking-sounding is literally happening and directly being done by someone they don't like.

>>284991
Nevermind, it's not a leftist

>>284993
Cheers ^_^
Now if you'll excuse me, I will go back to abusing KYS filly
sidenote, I am in fact also the filly who gives you shit for not knowing/getting kys filly

>>284984
Wait I think the thing you said and the 60/200 years thing would be relevant here since you noticed it in this story first.

Fallout 1 - takes place in 2161. The previous generation remembers a world before the bombs fell. The bombs fell 60 years ago, and all 3 default characters you can be (charmer who wants out of the vault, retarded thug, thief chick) are adults but young. Outside these walls, civilization exists but is often preyed upon by raiders. Towns have junk walls and bars/stores/crap like that while tribal villages far away from major hubs have adobe walls and dedicated farming zones. One military base containing like 80 big dudes tops is a threat to the world.

Fallout 2 - 2241 - It's been eighty years since the first game and the protag of the first game founded Arroyo, the tribal village you were born in. Away from your tribal shithole which still has a Temple Of Trials, civilization is coming back and thriving! The New California Republic exists, and it's got troops and NCR-dollars for currency. Bottlecaps are no longer currency because carrying 1000 bottlecaps is pretty dumb in retrospect when NCR dollars are lighter though pre-war American dollars are still cartoonishly worthless. Vault City exists, and it's a Vault that used its GECK to "unfold" its Vault into a thriving above-ground town with walls and guards. Vault City has even experimented with giving hyper-intelligence to animals and creating psychic shit for no reason! Even the Enclave (cartoon fascist american supremacist) villains have technologically improved their own technology by upgrading their Power Armour beyond what the US Military was using by the time bombs dropped!

Fallout 3 - It has been over 200 years since the bombs fell.
Over 200 years! For no fucking reason!
200 years ago in our timeline men wore knee-high stockings and powdered wigs, and they got married at 14 years old.
200 years from now, I don't think anyone alive will dress like a 1960s motorcycle gang complete with switchblades.
And if a nuclear apocalypse happened today, where would people get the leather and hair gel 200 years from now if they don't have the means to produce it themselves?
Nothing has culturally developed in Bethesda's Fallout.
Nobody farms or builds anything more complex than junk walls/junk bridges, people just scavenge the ruins of the old world because every Nuka-Cola Vending Machine somehow always has 1-2 fresh unopened chilled glass bottles of cola.
Nobody makes any new clothing ever, unless the spiked Mad Max bullshit worn by cannibalistic thieves counts!
The only 5 songs that existed from 200 years ago contain BOMB or ATOM or RADIATION in the title or are about violence or say FUCK CIVILIZATION.
Fallout is supposed to be Retrofuture. The future we envisioned in the 60s, where beautiful white women on the moon still clean their houses for their handsome strong-jawed white husbands as their adorable white kids play with footballs in the street and robot nannies clean the house.
It's also a "fuck you" to that genre because "muh resource consumption" caused global wars and global nuking. Nothing bad ever came from multikulti in this future but it still happened, sadly, so this really is a fantasy world.
But this...
This is a shooty game wearing the Fallout IP like a tranny serial killer wearing the flesh of a woman.
So you will still find unopened tins of Cram and unopened bags of Chips at the Mega-Mall, despite the raiders living in it setting up human flesh dangling on chains from the ceiling. You can still find locked safes containing ammo and guns, and easily password-locked computers that work perfectly fine despite the lack of power.
Corpses of people who died 20 years ago can't be found anywhere but the skeletons of people who died over 200 years ago can be found pretty much anywhere.
No settlements know what adobe is and barely anyone produces anything. Slavers exist but we only see what slavers are used on (Steel production in the only factory in america that still works) in a DLC where you go to fucking Pittsburg.

Fallout New Vegas
It's good but I'll restrain myself and just say: The music selection isn't retarded. Pre-war songs on the radio are about love/loss, and you even encounter a travelling Guitarist and get him a job at a Casino's Theatre. No wonder F4 tried to one-up this with Magnolia, a random lounge singer you can easily fuck who makes a living singing to ghoul junkies booted out of the biggest trade hub in Boston.

Fallout Equestria (This story)
The author never gives a proper timeline with year numbers, but we're still told everything that happened leading up to the nuking eventually.
Fans have arranged the newspaper articles, apocalyptic logs, flashbacks, and stories from different characters into a linear timeline but without any numbers we only have a vague idea of how much time separates the day the nukes fell from the day Velvet Remedy, the "many times great granddaughter" of Sweetie Belle, was born. and that guess is "More than three generations".

>>285008
slight correction, Fallout 1's Opening Video Narration says your family got into the vault and "A generation has grown up without knowing of the outside world", but later sources retcon this as "Fallout 1 started eighty years after the nukes fell" for some reason. Eighty years is more than one generation unless something's gone seriously fucking weird in that Vault, and it was canonically one of the normal ones besides how its Water Chip was designed to miraculously break down on the chosen day and not a second before or after.

>>284971

Chapter 3: Guidance

Today's mystery quote reads:

>“Books! I’ve read several on the subject.”
Without context, I'm assuming that the speaker means they have read books on the subject of books themselves. Good to know, I suppose.

Anyway, Littleclit wakes up in what is probably Sweetie Belle's old bed at Rarity's house. For the first time, she gets a glimpse of what the outside world really looks like, and predictably it's rather depressing. Unfortunately, the author doesn't describe much of it to us, other than mentioning that there is some kind of unpleasant cloud cover that filters the light and turns it a weird color; however, beyond that we don't get much description. However, we've all probably seen enough depictions of dystopian worlds to get the general idea.

She breaks into a locked chest she found and discovers an exquisitely made dress, which apparently survived all the looting and pillaging that earlier the text informed us took place here. It seems as if whoever looted the Carousel Boutique was too busy scribbling naughty words on the wall to bother breaking into this chest, which a pony who has virtually zero experience in this world was able to do quite easily. In any case, the dress is too big for her to wear, which again suggests that LP is a juvenile, though again the text hasn't come right out and stated it yet. However, she does decide to take the dress with her. addendum: the issue of Littlepip's age has been helpfully cleared up by Nigel in this post: >>284984

>Post-apocalyptic Ponyville was a rotting skeleton of a once homey little town.
This sentence is a little curious. "Post-apocalyptic" is certainly how we would describe this world, but seeing as how it's the only world LP has ever lived in, I'm not sure this is the term she would use. To her, the contrast is not between Equestria before and Equestria now, but between the indoor bunker-world she grew up in and the "outside" world.

>I turned from the doorway, my gaze following the lines of profanity that curled up the walls towards the rafters. And shrank back, choking in revulsion at what the sunlight revealed above me -- dozens of dead and desiccated cats had been hung from the ceiling like decorations. I had slept directly beneath three of them.
My stars but this is edgy.

Anyway, she walks outside and immediately steps on a landmine that someone put outside the door. A mysterious voice warns her to get back inside before it explodes (which is odd, because my understanding of the way a landmine works is that it explodes the instant you take your foot off of it; however, this one beeps a warning for several seconds and then explodes, which seems to kind of defeat the point).

>I was more shocked than hurt as I slowly dragged myself out from under the door. My ears were ringing. A trap. No wonder the raider ponies hadn’t invaded while I slept. They had left a present instead.
Why would they do this? It doesn't make much sense. It's been established that it's pretty much every pony for herself in Edgequestria, but the objective for most seems to be mostly survival, not cruelty. The raiders would, presumably, want to attack LP because she's weak and is carrying items of value. If they knew she was sleeping in the Carousel Boutique, it stands to reason they would either go in and rob her, and maybe rape her a little if they were bored; otherwise, if they thought she wasn't worth the bother, they would just leave her alone. Setting a landmine outside her door doesn't serve any purpose; at best it might kill a pony who was no particular threat, and in the process destroys whatever items of value she might be carrying including her vagina. Since there's no practical reason to kill her beyond robbery, it's also a waste of a landmine, which I'm assuming is as limited as any other practical resource in this world. I'm guessing most of the munitions plants have been shut down for awhile now, so things like ammo and explosives are probably considered high-value items that you don't waste on retarded bullshit if you can avoid it. Which, come to think of it, makes it feel a bit odd that the slavers earlier would have wasted shotgun rounds trying to kill an apparently harmless flying drone.

Anyway, LP's mysterious benefactor warns her that there are more enemies on the way. A few moments later, one of them walks through the door and throws some kind of apple-grenade at her, which again feels like kind of a pointless waste of an explosive. This whole attack feels completely pointless to me; if the raiders knew she was sleeping in here and knew that she was just one mare, then combat shotgun or no she wouldn't have proven much of a threat. It would have been far more economical to just slip in while she was sleeping and cut her throat.

>A memory flashed through my mind: I as a younger pony, trotting to the Stable schoolroom when an older pony stepped out of a doorway and heaved a water balloon at me. It had burst against my horn, soaking me and my homework. “Hey, don’t look so sad, blankflanks! I was just tryin’ ta help you. Y’know, in case your cutie mark is supposed to be a target!” The older pony had laughed and hurried off to class, leaving me dripping and miserable in the hall.

>Lesson learned: when somepony throws something at you, don’t let it hit you. Don’t even let it hit near you, because it might splash.

This flashback seems like a long way to go outside the story just to learn a fairly obvious lesson. Even if Littlepoop doesn't know what a grenade is, she can probably figure out that it's dangerous and would thus instinctively avoid it, regardless of any past water balloon experience she might have.

>>285091
>“Books! I’ve read several on the subject.”
Reading a book about books? That's like having a Cutie Mark of a Cutie Mark!

Except Nippleclit's Cutie Mark of a Pip-Buck isn't actually "practically a cutie mark of a cutie mark", because even though it breaks the Cutie Mark design sensibilities by being an image of an object rather than a symbol that represents some kind of idea or gets used in an abstract way...

I know the author was trying to be cute with this retarded sentence but it reminded me of something really shit in this fic.

Cheerilee's three smiling flowers don't mean she's good at tossing flowers around, or growing flowers with smiles. They mean she's good at making her students happy while teaching, making them metaphorically "bloom". Fast Pegasi typically have a symbol that suggests speed or movement rather than just having a jpeg of a wing because their talent is using their wings. ponies with coins for Cutie Marks don't literally have the tossing of coins as their talents. And Applejack's apples means she's a good farmer, it doesn't just literally mean her talent is the usage of apples in cooking or shotput-style tossing or whatever.

Also, tech levels. I know it's a joke to give a shit about the show's inconsistent tech levels but while ponies have inkwells and quills for Cutie Marks even though Typewriters exist, the archetypical symbol of an inkqell or quill or both can still represent writing. But a Cutie Mark of an apple watch packing an Aimbot and HammerSpace(TM) Video Game Inventory? That's so overly specific for a pony to have, and at the same time utterly meaningless when it comes to suggesting what she's good at and what her destiny should be and what this magical smartphone duct-taped to her leg should visually represent. Putting aside how you feel about modern-day tech existing in equestria, it just doesn't feel right for Snipperclip to have a Jpeg of a smartphone-sized wrist-mounted computer on her ass.

At least you could claim the ass-mark of a shitty edgelord OC with a glock on his ass "Actually represents accuracy" in the same way you could claim another edgy OC's Cutie Mark of a red and white target represents hitting his targets instead of being shot like a target. And you could claim the small doodle of a thousand-pound dumbbell on a strong pony's ass represents the strength needed to lift weights rather than literally having his high weight for a natural talent that suggests your destiny in life. But a Pip-Boy doesn't represent anything other than a Pip-Boy. It's just a set of diegetic videogame menus for changing your equipment and turning on the Grand Theft Auto-inspired radio because nothing violates the bleak, atmospheric, grim, hopeless, spooky, tragic, and extremely fucking windy ambiance of Fallout's settings and sound design and tone quite like an overpowered protagonist with 10x more Hit Points than anything else and 999x Health Potions shooting orcs and zombies with his nuclear rocket launcher as his wrist-mounted iphone plays Atom Bomb Baby at max volume.

Remember Twilight's Cutie Mark-switching spell? If it was used to switch the marks of Trixie and Twilight, you can guess how they'd act: Twilight would perform scientifically interesting but visually unimpressive experiments on a stage for utterly bored ponies as she swears whatever barely-visible thing she just did was really fascinating even though she's the only one for miles who cares about this shit, and Trixie would enjoy the feeling of incredible power while she has it, or read a bunch of Twilight's most advanced spellbooks and rush trying pull off every spell once, fucking them all up filling Twilight's house with weird shit for Spike to deal with. That's my best guess, at least. But if you switched the Cutie Marks of Fluttershy and Niggerpip, Littleshit would try and fail to care for animals while Fluttershy... uh... I suppose she'd go and buy a Pip-Buck and then use it a lot, I guess. What would she do, flip through various dresses stored in the Pip-Buck's Inventory hammerspace app that sometimes exists but usually doesn't? Use its Minimap and Life-Form-Detecting Compass (which the author often forgets about) to hunt down her chickens when they escape her home?

>>285100
also the author isn't right about Clittersnip's cutie mark being "practically a Cutie Mark of a Cutie Mark".

It's not as meaningless as a "symbol of a symbol", in the way that something generic like a circle or square or random star would be. It's too specific, it's a Cutie Mark of an existing object in a franchise where Cutie Marks are usually vague things at least a little open to interpretation.

Zipperclip's talent symbol is just an object and her talent is often implied to mean using this object. What else could it mean, getting more of these objects? Her Cutie Mark is about as much of a symbol as a JPEG of a screenshot featuring Danny Devito is a "Symbol" of Danny Devito. It isn't even stylized or on fire or surrounded by something like stars or teeth or wind. Her Cutie Mark means an inherent talent at utilizing and operating a highly sophisticated piece of literally-magical technology with many functions designed to emulate and justify third-person auto-aim pseudo-turnbased looty-shooty action-RPG mechanics, and it's used in this story to justify why she's good at pretty much everything a Pip-Buck can be used for right off the bat. Except the author forgot to give a justification for her lockpicking talent beyond "I guess sometimes PipBuck Repair Ponies have to pick open the locks on tech because she doesn't have the keys".

It's not "A cutie mark of a cutie mark", it's "A cutie mark that says you're talented at using some bullshit tech that almost has as many uses as a smartphone". If you saw a shitty EQG DVD short where some human kid stumbled into the Ponyland Portal and his Cutie Mark was a smartphone, it would be bullshit. But also, you could make a list of everything a smartphone CAN do and check if this character is ever shown using a spell he instinctively knows to call anyone ever without network issues, using another spell to take pictures with his eyes and spit them out of his mouth, using another spell to check the universe's infinite all-knowing magic internet to learn whatever he wants, and so on. A Pip-Buck has fewer functions than a smartphone. It's a more precise concept, even though it still doesn't make sense as a Cutie Mark because all the different things a Pip-Buck can do are so wildly different from one another.

I have finished my autistic rant, also today I learned >>285100 if you spoiler-tag a post link, the post link doesn't work.

>>285091

Anyway, like a complete retard Littlepoop drops her shotgun, but sensibly (?) grabs the grenade with her magic and throws it back out the door. It explodes and kills the raider who had thrown it. LP has now officially popped her kill cherry.

It seems like, what with the mysterious voice and all, there ought to be a little more to this scene, but the author cuts it off abruptly with a page break, and time skips forward quite a bit. LP has apparently left Ponyville, and we are told nothing about it beyond that her escape from it was "harrowing."

>I realized early that I had been neglecting my Eyes-Forward Sparkle. Once I had brought up my E.F.S., it was far easier to determine where the raider ponies were, and to avoid them.
I was not particularly clear what the hell the author was talking about here, but I figured it had something to do with the PipBuck so I went back and revisited the prologue, where the tech specs were gone over in detail. I found this:

>A pony’s PipBuck generates an E.F.S. (Eyes-Forward Sparkle) that will indicate direction and help gauge whether the ponies or creatures around you are hostile.
This actually segues into another reason why it was not good story design to just dump all that info in the second paragraph. Technically, the author already told us about this EFS feature of the PipBuck, so he isn't doing anything wrong by bringing it up now as if it's something we should already know about. However, it has not prominently factored into the story before now, and we were told about it way back at the very beginning, so it's pretty unlikely that this is a detail the reader would remember.

Pretty much everything the PipBuck can do is explained in the second paragraph of the story. Though the device itself is important to LP's job and is therefore relevant, all of the specific functions it has are not important and don't really bear mention at that point in the story. All we really needed to know about PipBucks at that point in the story is that it's some kind of technical device that straps to the foreleg, that the ponies all have one, and that it can do a lot of things. The specific functions it has are not relevant, and can probably be introduced as they come up.

To illustrate my point better, here is the PipBuck infodump in its entirety:

>What is a PipBuck? A PipBuck is a device, worn on a foreleg just above the hoof, issued to every pony in a Stable when they become old enough to start work. A blending of unicorn pony magic and science, your PipBuck will keep a constant measure of your health and even help administer healing poultices and other medicine, track and organize everything in your saddlepacks, assist in repairs, and keep all manner of notes and maps available at a hooftap. Plus, it allows you to listen to the Stable broadcast whenever you would like as it can tune into and decrypt just about any radio frequency. And that’s not all. A pony’s PipBuck generates an E.F.S. (Eyes-Forward Sparkle) that will indicate direction and help gauge whether the ponies or creatures around you are hostile. And, perhaps most impressively, a PipBuck can magically aid you in a fight for brief periods of time through use of the S.A.T.S. (Stable-Tec Arcane Targeting Spell). Oh, and a feature not to be forgotten: it can keep track of the location of tagged objects or people, including the wearers of other PipBucks. So if a pony somehow got lost -- don’t ask me how you could get lost in a Stable, but it does happen on occasion -- then anypony who knew the lost pony’s tag could find them instantly.
This is literally the second paragraph of the text. This would frankly be a dense read regardless of where you put it, and as the second paragraph it pretty much had my eyes glazing over.

A person's senses are bombarded by information pretty much every second they're awake, and aside from people with photographic memory or Rainman-tier autism, most have a subconscious filter that sorts and retains information based on its apparent importance. Information of immediate importance (that saber-toothed tiger is charging at me) is processed and dealt with right away. Information that doesn't seem immediately important but feels like it might be important later (I think I heard a saber-toothed tiger roaring somewhere off in the distance) is consciously acknowledged and usually retained somewhere. Information that has no apparent importance (a six hour lecture on the anatomy of saber-toothed tigers conducted by Ben Stein with no bathroom break) is usually dismissed, or else is retained in some remote corner of the memory where it is essentially forgotten until some situation forces the person to recall it.

The densely worded second paragraph of this text is the literary equivalent of a Ben Stein lecture about tigers. It's roughly as exciting to read as the owner's manual of a Honda Civic, and the information in it has the same likelihood of being retained. For instance, the term "Eyes-Forward Sparkle" was technically something I had read before and should therefore know, but I didn't remember what it was, because when I read it the information had no apparent relevance so my memory didn't mark it as something important.

This is why I am always admonishing authors for writing these massive infodump paragraphs. If you've invented some really cool fictional device that can do all sorts of things and you're really excited about it, then great; put it in the story. But don't tell us everything it can do all at once, because we don't care as much as you do and aren't going to remember it if it's not relevant. When it becomes relevant, show us how it works, don't tell. This is what the author should have done here, with this Eyes-Forward Sparkle business.

>>285091
>however, this one beeps a warning for several seconds and then explodes
It's retarded, but landmines/grenade-tripwires do this in Fallout 3 onwards to compensate for how buggy the Hitboxes are and how hard it is to see anything (especially small details) and tell anything apart when everything looks like shit and A FUCKING GREEN INSTAGRAM FILTER engulfs your screen 24/7 for no reason. Sound and a glowing symbol with an arrow warns you "MOVE AWAY FROM THAT AREA" and 2-3 seconds later the trap you triggered detonates. This means you can literally run straight through most trap-filled dungeons, explosions exploding uselessly behind you.
So there's really not much point in taking the Light Step perk, which magically disables all landmines and traps you trigger.

F3 onwards, you're not thinking or looking around at the samey scenery since it's made from the same prefabricated puzzle-piece floors and walls used everywhere else, there are no clues in the environment and there is no clever level design to guide you towards specific areas, you're staring at the glowing compass marker in the bottom-left corner that tells you where the next Quest Marker is, and that system exists to compensate for how bad the world/level design is.

Liberty Prime is a fucking massive giant laser-eyed robot that tosses nukes like american footballs, and Helios One is a massive space laser that uses a cartoony-looking lasergun called Euclid's C-Finder as the target-finder and trigger, but many players who completed the quests to repair these superweapons said "I didn't even notice the giant robot/giant solar panel place until they started making loud noises and firing lasers".

>>285102
>I have finished my autistic rant
10 minutes later....
>>285108

>>285106

>Despite actively looking for me, the raider ponies proved less than adept hunters.
I'm also a little unclear on how many of these "raider ponies" we're talking about here. There were I think two or three of them on the bridge the previous night, and those were all killed. There was a sniper who was firing at Littlepoop from some unknown location, and I understood this to be the same individual that later set the landmine and threw the grenade at her. If so, then the sniper is also dead. If there is supposed to be a whole team of these guys chasing her, it's unclear why they left her alone at Carousel Boutique the previous night, if they knew she was in there and had rather limited defenses. It's also unclear why only one of them seemed to be attacking her the next day. If they went to the trouble of setting a landmine outside the door, it wouldn't have been too much additional trouble to have a few of them hang around the entrance to ambush her in case the landmine didn't finish her off. Also: I still have no idea why these ponies want her dead so badly in the first place. All she's got is a couple of canteens and a shotgun, and they can't care too much about that stuff if they were going to blow her up anyway.

Anyway, this next little bit wraps up the rest of what we need to know about her escape from Ponyville:

>Using my magic to bang a mailbox lid down the street or break an empty bottle against a freestanding chimney several yards away provided sufficient distraction to get past them. I had almost made past the last house when the sniper pony started taking shots at me again. The closest shot grazed my flank -- a slash of burning pain and a flowing blood. Fortunately, the wound looked far worse than it was, and even my meager medical skills were enough to stop the bleeding and bandage it.
So, I guess that answers my question about the sniper.

Anyway, to summarize: for reasons unknown, Littlepoop is currently being chased by an indeterminate number of very dumb, yet very persistent enemies, who attack her one at a time using easily-thwarted methods.

Incidentally, it's clear that at least some time has passed since the grenade incident at the Boutique, but we have had no further mention of the mysterious voice that was speaking to Littlepoop earlier. Littlepoop doesn't seem particularly curious about it either. This bugs me; it isn't just bad writing, it also doesn't make any sense. Someone warns her about the landmine, and then warns her about another enemy coming, and then once said enemy is dispatched, she doesn't look around to see who was speaking to her? Even if we're supposed to understand it as a voice coming from a loudspeaker or through her PipBuck's radio or something (the text seems to be implying something like this, although it is not particularly clear about how she is receiving this communication), wouldn't she at least be curious to hunt around for it a little? Or to at least tell us that she wanted to but didn't have time, because there were still bad guys after her?

Anyway, once she gets away from the raiders, she stops in a little ditch to have lunch. However, before she can eat, her EFS thingy starts beeping again, and she has to get up and move because I guess there are more enemies or something.

For some reason she's still hearing music coming from somewhere, then it's gone, then some kind of mutant bird-thing attacks her or something...honestly, I'm not too clear on what's happening during this part. The bird thing attacks, and she doesn't want to waste her only shot because she's not sure she can hit it, so she runs away instead. Then, her EFS tells her that there's something else in front of her, except it's marked as friendly. Then, for no reason, the enemy disappears, and then she hears the same voice she heard earlier speaking to her again.

>With a mixture of relief and bewilderment, I watched the sprite-bot fly up to my hiding place.
Apparently, the sprite-bot is the source of the voice. I'm assuming this is the same sprite-bot that the slavers were shooting at the previous day. It's nice to have that detail cleared up, but I'm still confused about a few things.

The landmine incident occurred outside Carousel Boutique. When she sets it off, LP hears a voice warning her to get back inside, so she does, and a second later a landmine explodes. She is now inside the store. She then hears the same voice warning her that another enemy is coming. Where is the sprite-bot physically at this point? The way I see it, there are only two possibilities. One, the bot is inside the store with her, where it would be hard not to notice it zipping around; thus, LP should have spotted it fairly easily. The other possibility is that it was still outside, which means it would have had to "yell" loudly enough for her to hear it inside the store. Between that and the fact that it was physically flying around out there, the raiders should have spotted it and would have presumably noticed that it was helping LP; thus they should have seen it as hostile and gone after it.

The device was described earlier as "metal ball about the size of a foal’s head floating on four silently flapping wings." It seems fairly agile and doesn't seem to make a lot of noise on its own, but it would have to be hovering somewhere relatively close by in order to both observe the situation and speak warnings to LP, and if it was speaking the sound should have given away its location anyway. Thus, it seems virtually impossible for LP not to have noticed it before now. Also, even if she didn't see it, it's still weird that she didn't bother to hunt around for the source of the mysterious voice that warned her about both the landmine and the raider before leaving Ponyville. No matter how I look at it, this whole sequence of events just feels weird and badly written.

>>285116
I think i'm getting good at shortening my autistic rants and getting to the point quicker.
I bet me from months ago would have explained what Hitboxes are in my post for ten minutes. Everyone knows what hitboxes are.

>>285106
The author did it again, with Littlepip's supposedly "Harrowing"(TM) escape.
Gee, it sure would have been fun to watch an under-supplied and panicking Littleshit with nothing but a shotgun with little ammo and a cheating map-watch with aimbot hax escape from a cannibalistic raider band's camp by the skin of her teeth. Would be cool to see how the evil bastards willing to use Landmines, The Dirtiest Weapon In War (besides aloha snackbar kids and alohas in general) would set up more traps around Ponyville to trip up and wound/weaken/kill Littleshit. Perhaps we could see more Ponyville landmarks desecrated and debased, like Twilight's Tree-Library except it's burned down and every book is ash, or Fluttershy's Cottage except turned into a drug den and animal corpses dangle like chandeliers, or Sugarcube Corner except the displays where cakes should be are filled with decades-old unicorn shit!

But the author didn't know how to make this scene look cool, so we skip time like fucking King Crimson and we're told to our faces (after the fact) that what the author skipped over looked really really cool.
>"Littlepip just escaped, and trust me, it was very harrowing!"
Whenever the author wants something to happen but has no idea how to make it happen onscreen without making the scene look as contrived and lazy as it is, it happens offscreen or between a random page break.
But if something needs to happen and the author doesn't realize it will look contrived and lazy for people to suddenly and temporarily lose 80 IQ points for the sake of the plot or completely go against their characterization and character arcs for the sake of a cool-sounding scene, it will happen onscreen.

Remember how smart the raiders were(for raiders), and how persistent they were, and how they were willing to mine the area outside her house and wait for her to die AND try throwing grenades at her?
Remember how they were so irrationally dedicated to killing her that they were willing to set up a (presumably expensive since these things can cripple BIG enemies) Landmine just to blow her up even though it'd destroy the loot she carried?
When Littlepip had slightly more ammo and a teammate and enough plot armour to let her sleep without anyone breaking in and >raping her, she could deal with smart Raiders.
But at that moment, she is surrounded. Enemies know exactly what house she's in and she didn't think to toss a rock into another window for the sake of a decoy. All she can do is expose herself by leaving the house and fleeing in a straight line from this enemy-filled enemy base.
She has no smart escape plan.
She should die here. Get shot at a lot while running away, get shot in the legs, collapse, and get crippled, get dragged back to base as a raider's slave. Some dyke raideress could molest her for maximum edgy points.
The story should end here but the author doesn't want it to, and he doesn't feel like retconning an unopened Survivalist Supplies-filled safe into Rarity's house despite the random fucking indestructible treasure chest containing a pretty dress.
Littleshit should logically die here, ending the story forever.
So things just conveniently become easier on the heroine so she can win. NOTHING kills the stakes in an action story quite like seeing that the hero's got unreasonable idiocy-inducing levels of plot armour.
It's almost as if this fic is a video game and the author turned down the difficulty hoping we wouldn't notice.
But we noticed.

Imagine if Littlepip did something smart with the resources around her...

>>285122
For example, imagine if Littleshit took the nice dress she found, telekinetically grabbed a cat off the ceiling above her and put the dress on the cat(Or shoved her own clothes onto the cat for added authenticity if she was willing to sacrifice armour), shielded herself behind a levitated table/bed, and slammed the dead cat onto the landmine so it would convincingly splatter everywhere while her shield kept blood off her. Raiders would assume the landmine killed their target, and this would give her an opportunity to sneak out of the back of the building or a window as the sound of the triggered landmine and bloody raining giblets convinced the raiders that they had successfully killed Littlepip and only clothing shreds remained to reward them, a trade-off for using explosive weaponry they were ready to pay.

(because only in a fucking video game and unusually bloody Looney Tunes skit can you use a rocket launcher to gib an enemy, and then reach into a chunk of his liver, and pull all his completely-unharmed weapons/clothes/supplies out of his liver's nonexistent pockets)

Could even do some black comedy here by having one raider yell at another raider like the angry homeowner in a Tom And Jerry cartoon.

>"Headshot?"
>"Yeah, Skullfucker?"
>"Why did we want the filly?"
>"So we could take her stuff and rape her a lot and trade her to slavers for big guns so we can raid more places, boss Skullfucker!"
>"Right. So... Where's the filly we were after?"
Headshot the Raider's dull bloodshot eyes jitter around as he points with his hoof to different fleshy body parts.
In the background, one Raider pony grabs a hoofful of gibs and starts eating it raw for maximum edge.
>"And where's her stuff, Headshot?"
Headshot looks around some more.
>"Everywhere, boss."
>"So go get her stuff."
...
Headshot looks down and tries picking up a giblet and shred of scorched fabric
Headshot's eyes fill with dawning comprehension. "I see the problem."
>"OH, DO YA?!"

Black comedy was an integral part of F1/2.

Plus if they mention a nearby civilized location's name and direction from here and say they're going to raid it soon, it would give Littlepip a direction to head in if she thinks "I must warn this place! Surely they will reward me!"
But then the town could assume Littleshit is a saboteur working for the raiders since most new ponies don't escape Raiders alive and unmolested.

Alternatively, she could notice the big landmine outside her door, switch the switch on its back off with magic and pocket it, then do the "cat decoy" trick I mentioned with the grenade tossed at her.

It lets Littlepip quickly sneak away from this fight while giving her enemies no reason to check the back of the building and give chase.

Smart raiders might say "Wow, she had a suspiciously low amount of supplies on her. Stable Ponies are usually fucking loaded!" if they noticed her blue Stable Jumpsuit and their culture knew what Stable Ponies are. If any Raiders do say "Yo that's a cat liver on the ground not a pony liver, we've been bamboozled" Littlepip will have a head start to let her run away. But still, it's better than this "Suddenly her pursuers became retarded" moment that exists to warn the audience that the difficulty slider can and will be fucked with at will.

I'd completely forgotten about this moment, but as I wrote down why I hated it I thought of the cat trick. Sure, it sounds quite "Monkey Island but edgy", some real Point And Click Adventure Game puzzle bullshit, but it's something a desperate pony making do with her highly limited supplies and avoid having to kill anyone(since she probably doesn't want to try killing a foe then freeze up at the last second) could realistically think of trying.

>EFS
I completely forgot he called the videogame HUD elements like the health bar, EXP bar, and magic compass "the Eyes-Forward Sparkle". That's completely retarded. Everyone knows what a HUD is, why bother giving it a gimmicky name? Ponies can still turn their heads up. A Display can still give them a heads-up on "vital info" like "You are 200 XP points away from reaching level 8 and obtaining the Fast Reloader trait that lets you regenerate limbs like the cunt from the X-Men 3 movie when at over 400 Rads".

Author should have reminded us about EFS by making it tell her the names of every pony she sees, including raiders and those stable guards she hit with a floating thing. She could look at a Raider named Skullcrusher and think "Who names their foal Skullcrusher?" before looking at his crushed skull cutie mark and thinking "Someone who wanted him to grow up to crush a lot of skulls, I guess. Maybe if my Mom named me something cooler than Littlepip, I wouldn't be so tiny".

>making noises far away with telekinesis to distract ponies
Making noises away from you is a fucking start, as far as improvised clever plans involving magic go. But if a sniper's the problem, levitating something big and thick between her and the sniper as she runs would be great. Not like there's a shortage of worthless heavy garbage lying around in a Raider Camp given their love of scrap walls and heads on sticks. She could also get into cover and put out a decoy (A cat corpse, or a pony head mounted on a stick?) to take a bullet by sticking it out from cover. She could read the blood splatter angles to calculate where the Raider probably is, and then use her Pip-Boy Foe-Marking Compass to see where he definitely is. Then she could lift up a chunk of the ground, crush it together for added density, and toss it at him or wherever he's sniping from.

>Littleshit got shot in the ass but fortunately it was okay, don't worry about it.
Man, Littlepip is sooo good at first aid for someone who's not the main healer, or a survivalist with any reason to know about medicine.
Author should have written about this, put us in her shoes, made her FEEL her terror once she's shot in the ass and forced to First-Aid it on the spot with enemies closing in.

>Sprite-Bot
God, this retarded fucking robot...

>>285117

Anyway, LP asks the sprite-bot who it is and why it's following her. It tells her that it's friendly and she can call it Watcher. Personally, I think that's a dumb name, so I'm going to call it Frank instead.

>I regarded the sprite-bot critically. “Watcher. Okay...” I slipped out from behind the tree and started looking for where my apply had rolled to when I dropped it.
I'm assuming "apply" is supposed to be "apple." At this point I am officially retracting my statement about this text having gone through a professional editor; the level of proofreading and revision here is clearly higher than what we saw with Past Sins and The Sun & The Rose, but I've still come across several technical errors that I have hard time believing an editor wouldn't catch. Incidentally, the version of the text I'm working with is the one found on FimFiction (https://www.fimfiction.net/story/119190/fallout-equestria). It's possible the version that eventually went to print has been revised from this version. If anyone knows more details about the revision history of this work, I'd be curious to hear them.

>Not far away, near where the flying creature had been, I spotted a glowing pile of pink ash. “You do that?”
I'm assuming this explains what happened to the bird-thing that attacked her earlier. And, as it turns out, I'm right:

>“Bloatsprites. That’s what you get when you mix parasprites with Taint. Can’t stand ‘em, myself. Glad to help.”
If I'm reading this correctly, somepony rubbed a parasprite against the region between her vagina and butthole, and this somehow caused it to gain water weight.

Anyway, the rest of this conversation is just stupid and doesn't merit close scrutiny. There is some confusion about the name of the landmine (LP doesn't know what a mine is, so she thinks the sprite-bot is laying claim to her apple) that basically just takes a lukewarm Dad-joke and drags it out well beyond its natural lifespan. The important takeaway is that the sprite-bot is not a sentient being, but is being controlled remotely by someone who hacked into it (I'd assumed it was an AI of some kind, but this actually makes more sense).

>“Oh, time’s almost up. Look, there are a few things you’re going to need if you want to survive out here. A weapon (or at least a lot more ammo for the one you have), armored barding, a bit of guidance... and most importantly, you need to make some friends.”
This is another of those situations where something in one medium doesn't translate well into another. In a video game it's perfectly acceptable to have superfluous characters hanging around dispensing general advice on how to play the game. Even though these interactions can feel unrealistic, players understand it to be the developers' way of conveying essential information without breaking the fourth wall, so you let it slide. However, in a novel there's no interactive component and thus no reason to do this. Thus, it's a little strange that some mysterious hacker would go to the trouble of hacking a sprite-bot and using it to follow a complete stranger around for hours, just so she could give her some general advice that even a dipshit like Littlepoop could probably figure out on her own, which basically amounts to "you should try to find some ammo" and "don't wander around by yourself."

>The bobbing sprite-bot was silent a moment. “I’m going to take a shot in the dark here and guess you like books. Am I right?”
Literally nothing in their interactions or what the sprite-bot would have observed about her thus far would suggest this.

Anyway, like I said, the rest of this conversation is completely stupid and implausible. The sprite-bot recommends a book to her, tells her that the Ponyville Library has a copy of it, and then sends the location to her PipBuck. Again, this would be fine if this were an actual video game, or even a story set inside a video game (Sword Art Online or something to that effect), but for a story that simply uses a video-game-inspired world as its setting, this is completely idiotic. The author does not even offer the most cursory explanation for why this mystery hacker is going to all this trouble to help a complete stranger. I'm going to assume for now that he is taking this somewhere, and that the hacker has some kind of mystery motive. Probably, the hacker wants the book and is using Littlepoop as a pawn to retrieve it for him. However, the way he goes about it here is just stupid as all hell.

Anyway, the hacker apparently either loses control of the sprite-bot or intentionally logs out of it, because suddenly it starts playing martial music again, and then floats randomly away. The subchapter ends with a page break.

Littlepoop is, of course, worried about going back into the town full of raiders that she just escaped from, but apparently she doesn't run into any trouble, because when the next scene opens she is at the Ponyville Library. The scene opens with a pretty decent descriptive paragraph:

>The Ponyville Library was in a tree. Not a treehouse, but literally inside a tree. A massive, gnarled tree bigger than most buildings had been grown in the middle of the town, clearly the project of magic, and hollowed out to be the public library. The south side of the tree was scorched black and dead. But there were still a few leaves clinging to life on the opposite branches. The tree was surrounded by a wide open space with absolutely no cover.

>>285122
>I think i'm getting good at shortening my autistic rants and getting to the point quicker
Later, in the same post, and continued later
>>285123
>>285122

>>285136
I'm working on it, word counts are lower and the topics per post are going up.
Btw, thought of something relevant to this thread

Games like Vampire The Masquerade and Fallout have FUCKLOADS of replay value in how you make your character this run and how that encourages you to play. And what choices you make based on your own personal reeasons.
A charming smooth-talker and sneaky sniper-headshotter will play differently from a tough stupid swordsman.
You can be a good guy in these games or a baddie.
BUT
THIS IS A BOOK
You can't finish the book and then re-read it imagining Littlepip as a strong male swordsman Pegasus in power armour who says "fuck justice" and becomes a Raider emperor with a mare sex slave harem.
A BOOK ONLY EXISTS ONCE
unless it is REWRITTEN or given sequels or shit like that
BUT STILL, A BOOK ISN'T A VIDEO GAME
the growth in power from novice to legendary lv99 boss is satisfying for different reasons!
AND THE AUTHOR ONLY GETS ONE SHOT TO MAKE HIS ACTION STORY INTERESTING!

You can deal with an enemy-filled warehouse in many ways in an rpg. Fight all the enemies head-on, distract them and kill them, get a firing squad of your companions together and open fire, blow it up, talk another enemy gang into attacking them for you, talk the enemies into doing what you want...
But in a book?
It's up to the author how his protagonist handles this situation and how entertaining the story becomes.
A fight is interesting to a videogame player if it's fun for them.
A fight in a book is more interesting to the audience if it's well-written.

A smart writer would adapt an RPG's many choices into a book by making a general heroic protagonist to represent the "Be good and fill your role in the destiny" plot anyone can get behind(someone with a reason to drag a ragtag band of misfits around and keep them focused on the main goal), and then give the hero unique companions themed around how a player COULD play the rpg and what somebody in this world COULD be.
So the heroic Kevin The Paladin leads a party containing a pacifistic soft-hearted healer, an aggressive mindless tough murderhobo Barbarian, a backstabbing sneaky cynical Rogue, and a cowardly witty manipulative Wizard.

Just like that, you have conflict within the party and dynamic character interaction. Everyone shines in their party role.
Is there an enemy bandit camp to destroy?
Each companion offers their advice on how they'd handle things.
Pacifist doesn't want violence but also doesn't want the bandits harming innocents.
Barbarian says "Run in screaming and smash their faces in!".
Wizard says "Don't risk getting harmed and don't go anywhere near the enemies. Just nuke them from far away with a big fireball"
and Rogue says "No, that would destroy the loot! And that's what life is really all about! Slit their throats in the dead of night and rob them blind!".
But eventually, the hero chooses the best plan from the bunch, or makes a plan of his own that involves everyone if he's a strategist/teamwork-lover.

That's what a smart writer would do, for the bare minimum. A GREAT writer would say something about the world and its people and worldbuilding and their society and our society through the unique multifaceted and dynamic characters, how they grow, what works and what doesn't, and so on. A great writer would have characters who are deeper than nonsense one-liner backstories attached to generic personalities and archetypical videogame stat-builds like "The nice healer girl", "The dashing flyboy rogue", "The tough soldier knight tank guy", "the total fucking cuck", "the gigadyke musician", etc.

On one hand, Littlepip's stat build would be good for everything relevant in a fallout game. A sneaky shooty wordy stuff-fixing chick who's good with a gun can easily pass most skill checks.
(btw Speech, Sneak, Magic, First Aid, Small Guns, Repair, Lockpick. The author can't count to three so Littlepip starts with 7 major skills at the story's start).
But it's DULL AND BORING for a protagonist! Littlepip should be a more interesting and active protagonist with more being-the-protagonist-focused skills.
and the gun-fixing repair-monkey job should be saved for a cute side-character chick with a giant wrench completely focused on gunsmithing the best guns and armour for her party!

>>285133
>Watcher
I am vibrating with motion right now but I won't spoil anything about how much I fucking hate absolutely everything about this and why

speaking of "Frank" saving her from the random flier attack, this stupid shit coming out of nowhere to save Littlepip from the Raiders would have been a better way for her to escape from the Raiders, compared to Raiders suddenly becoming conveniently retarded as Littlepip escapes "harrowingly" in events told to you outside of the current protagonist's head for no reason

>mine's on first base
punchier faster-paced economic writing could probably make that dumb joke work.

>videogame advice dispenser
Victor wasn't this bad.
Was an excuse for Frank not joining LP's party given?

>Taint
Kkunt decided to name "magic" radiation leftover from the nuke megaspells mentioned in the opener "Taint".
Irradiated lands in Fallout have "Rads", units of radiation imbibed per second.
And this story has... Taints.
>"I can't go to that land because of the Taint! The Taint is too great! That's way too much Taint for me- why are you laughing? Don't laugh about Taints, Taints are serious business!"
Remember Parasprites and everything that made them terrifying? Well now they're just Bloatflies. Big flies.
Taint-free Parasprite swarms flying around eating everything organic would have been scarier. Or Taint-mutated Parasprite swarms flying around eating anything inorganic, so they'll steal your clothes and guns and tear your water canteens apart to eat them while wasting your water.
but why write unique dangers from MLP's unique setting when you can just shove bugs where they don't belong like you're Shino "I stuffed bugs up your holes when you weren't paying attention" Aburame.

>>285148
>A BOOK ONLY EXISTS ONCE
Yes, I'd like to mention the possibility of recursive literary works that change each time you read it due to the accumulating knowledge. Even if the words are the same.
>One shot
Fanfiction of fanfiction begets a whirlpool of fuckery. Omakes and fun posts 'dream ideals' vs the harsh reality.
>Action / Combat tropes
>Sandbox game vs Puppet show story
In a sand box the more/interesting toys you have, and the interacting possibilities, and the premade sandcastles the better. A story could be suggested.
In a puppet show, it's the spectacle shown and in the audiences' mind. The potential for a sandbox is there, but it's fully realized here and now. The fully realized kinetic action that takes place is awe inspiring. (The audience has to understand somethings for it to be awesome.)
>Overloading the character with POWAH
As always for a puppet show it is not the cool toys it's the presentation. Cool toys are props, and choosing the right color prop for the right time is just an exercise in frustration. Unless something weird happens (new knowledge about the meta puppet show).
>Use the setting to your advantage when writing.
Sounds about right.

>gun-fixing repair-monkey job should be saved for a cute side-character chick
A character with that expertise will have that hammer, and everything looks like a nail for that skill set Worth mentioning that means everything that they are and trying to be. Comedy and Tragedy and Mis'Understandings' ensues. The more well adjusted (to the world, others, and themselves) they are the longer term plans can happen successfully. Then those plans fall apart or some other point of interest happens or it works with consequences.

>>285133

Unfortunately, it gets pretty stupid from here:

>Any hope my luck at the Carousel Boutique would hold out here was dashed when I looked up to the highest balcony and finally spotted the sniper pony – an earth pony armed with a powerful-looking rifle. The rifle was attached to the balcony railing with a gliding swivel mount, allowing the raider to aim it wherever she could see. The only safe approach was from directly behind her, where the door to the balcony and the narrow top of the tree beyond blocked her line of sight. There were surely more raider ponies inside.
Littlepoop's concern about her luck holding out seems completely unfounded; this pony has had nothing but the best possible luck since she started this journey. At any rate, she certainly hasn't survived on the virtue of her wits; she has behaved stupidly enough up until now that by all rights she ought to have been killed several times over. Her salvation has mainly been the result of her enemies being even more dim-witted than she is.

Considering how dangerous and le edgy this post-friendship Equestria is supposed to be, the naivety and ineptitude of its residents that we've encountered so far is almost criminal. Littlepoop's plan to escape the heavily-fortified Stable didn't amount to much more than punching the entry code into the door and walking out; the only opposition she encountered was a stern lecture from the Overmare and a couple of guards who just stared vacantly at her while she dropped a steel locker on top of them. The slavers she was then captured by didn't even have the sense to remove the gigantic beeping thingamabob that is obviously a communications device strapped to her leg, let alone relieve her of her screwdriver and her apparently limitless supply of bobby pins. After that, they didn't do much except waste their ammo until a group of raiders came along and massacred them. Oh yeah, then there's the raiders.

Kkat seems to have populated this town with an indeterminate number of "raiders" (incidentally it's never been made clear what, if anything, they raid) that fluctuates depending on how many of them he needs for a scene. By my best estimate there could be as few of them as ten and as many as a hundred. Despite the anarchic, pony-eat-pony nature of this world, they all seem to be more or less on the same team, with the single-minded objective of killing Littleplop for no reason other than to kill her. Yet, despite this being their only apparent goal, and despite the advantages they have in terms of numbers, weapons, experience, knowledge of the terrain, etc, they don't seem to ever come close to pulling it off.

Again, if they really wanted her dead so badly, I really don't see why the simplest plan wouldn't have been to just slip into the Carousel Boutique while she was sleeping and kill her then, but apparently they wanted to be stealthy about it. So, instead, they put a single landmine outside the front door (a type of mine which instead of just exploding when you step on it will spend several seconds beeping a warning at you and then explode). When this fails to do the trick, a single pony goes in and lobs a single grenade at her, which she is able to pick up and throw back using the simplest possible magic trick (again, seeing as how these characters all live in this world it stands to reason they would have a pretty good grasp on what the different kinds of ponies can do and might therefore have predicted this outcome). Despite the author's assurances that her escape from Ponyville was "harrowing" (I'm not 100% convinced he understands what this word means), she seems to have had no difficulty in making it out into the woods, nor does she have any apparent difficulty getting back in once a mysterious benefactor helpfully tells her about a book she can find that will aid her in her travels.

This brings us to the present. Littlepoop's exact location is not made especially clear, but we can gather that she is at least close enough to the tree to get a good look at it, and to observe that the sniper is perched on the balcony. The sniper, incidentally, has a good enough vantage point from the top of the tree to fire at nearly any location in town, and has been trying to nail her since the previous night, yet somehow doesn't notice her standing right in front of the fucking tree. It's probably just as well; the sniper clearly can't hit the broad side of a feminist's ass.

Oh yes, and naturally the tree is "full of raiders," because why wouldn't it be?

>Sneaking up carefully from the only direction that wouldn’t mean instant death, I was trembling with nerves by the time I reached the door.
Well, my granpappy always used to say that if you need to sneak up carefully, the direction that doesn't mean instant death is usually the way to go. I'm sure glad she made it in there okay; I was really worried for a second. Hope she can stop trembling with nerves before she has to kung fu fight over 9000 raiders.

>As swiftly and silently as I could, I slipped out of Ponyville... and straight into pony hell!
Slipped out of Ponyville? But you just slipped back in!

>Pony corpses everywhere! Not like the bridge where ponies had fallen in battle; these ponies had been mutilated, desecrated and put on display! Some poor pony’s body hung from the ceiling, head and hooves severed and flesh sliced open and pulled back to reveal the meat and bones beneath. Heads and limbs hung from chains like sick party decorations. The rotting body of a pink pony with a violent mane was mounted, spread-eagled over a bookcase with railroad spikes. Two had been driven into her eyes. On another wall, a torso had been skinned and sliced open, the pony’s entrails pulled out to decorate the shelves like streamers.
Sacrebleu! Le edge!

Seriously, this story is comedy gold so far. btw I included an illustration I did of this scene since it's a little hard to follow.

Littlepip threw a grenade tossed at her back at the thrower lethally.
Dumb.
Unrealistic
Bullshit
instead, littleshit should have tossed the grenade at a back wall in the building to blow it open and escape through the new door.
They would hear a boom and assume a direct hit, buying her time.
though the catsplosion idea would be more interesting.

There is no statistical or video game mechanical basis for kkats raiders to act like this.
Littlepip has a mediocre Luck stat, and luck just boosts all skills, critical hit chance, and gambling game victory odds.
with a 9 in luck and low medicine skills, FNV's protag The Courier can perform brain surgery to save a dying old man from his brain tumor successfully without having any idea what he is doing.

Btw littlepip is entering an unfinished corpse party joke.
I predict this telekinetic sneaky girl with limited ammo will not do anything smart with her new supplies like puppeting the corpses to distract and unnerve and make enemies waste ammo on potential zombie ghost ponies, utilizing moveable cover telekinetically, attacking enemies with ribs and organ pelting and intestine hanging, throwing bookshelves around, plucking guns/melee weaps from enemy grips and using them on her foes, tossing her foes from the trees or into walls, or attacking anyone with the cat corpses from Rarity's place.

This story is a fucking catastrophe.

>>285158
(you)'re a fucking catastrophe, and your description of the story is worse than the story, unironically. Please, I'm asking a favor., dont ruin this

>>285152
Great pic.

I think the this might be the same thing as with the Sun and the Rose, as in this is a refrence to a former residence in Ponyville, or a pony in canon. Idk, maybe not.

>>284973
>a pink pony with a violent mane
So, is that a typo, or is that pony's mane indiscriminately murdering everything in site like everything else in this story?

>>285152
You know, I think a story about an obese, katana-wielding weaboo who becomes murderhobo in post-apocalyptic Equestria would unironically be more interesting that FoE.

>>285182
>You land in Equstria with your bodypillow of an underaged Madoka under tightly held to your body
>A pony in a cowboy hat and silver revolver holstered on a belt around his waist
>One of his front hooves reaches back and up towards it
>It looks like he is about ot break his hoof this way.
>Your flabby hand reaches for your katana as your narrowing eyes meet
>Tumbleweed blows across the distance between you two
>The pony goes for his revolver but instead of grabbing it, he just nudge it out of its holster onto the ground
>You however grabb your katana and in the next second yousheaths you katana back again
"Ahhhrgrrrgggrhhhghhrh!" the pony forces out of his throat as a red line appears around his throat which blood starts to seep out of. "Aaaahhhhh, you can really move."
>His head slides off his neck as a fountain of blood forces its way up out his neck.
>Click says you katana as you place it back into it sheath
"I got an attitude," you answer

>>285183
''The Tripfag Chronicles''

>"Tripfag is real," said the grizzled old stallion, "I seen him with my own eyes. I was just about your age."
>"Yeah right," sneered the leather-clad wasteland punk, "Tripfag's just a dumb old myth, like Nightmare Moon."
>"I seen him," insisted the old timer as he took another pull from his cigar, "Lemme tell you a story."
>"We was in a little camp down by the railroad tracks when he came. Just me 'n my pa 'n rest of the family. Maybe a dozen of us in all."
>"Then... he came. Walkin' on two legs, wearin' a long dark coat and some kinda short-brimmed hat. He kept one flabby claw on his hat the whole time, like he was tippin' it. With his other claw he held some kinda skinny sword behind his back."
>"Actually it looked like a pretty awkward way to walk."
>"Tripfag is a fat critter. Real fat. Fatter then you ever imagined a critter could be."
>"We didn't think he'd be much harm, but before we knew it he'd teleported behind my pa and cut him to pieces with his sword. Tripfag slaughtered my whole family before I knew it."
>"Then, he stopped. Turned to me, bowed real low, and said something like, 'Arigato.'"
>"Then he turned around and ran outta camp, still bent over real low, with his claws held out straight behind him the whole time."
>The old timer took another long pull from his cigar. The punks walked away from him, silently.

Honestly this could be its own thread.

>>285158
Getting distracted by luck numbers was stupid of me.
No more unprompted Fallout trivia from me.
And this is a story, not a game.
It's a story I read almost a decade ago so I barely remember any specifics, just a few things that pissed me off.
It's like I'm re-discovering it anew through the eyes of others, so I've stopped spoiling things. Like that Watcher bullshit. I can't explain why I hate it without spoiling vital shit.
Also I'm done predicting things about the story because while I barely remember even 5% of it I don't want to subconsciously remember and then spoil shit.
And luck is the least satisfying/interesting attribute you can give to your character in great doses.
That's what I want to get across there.
Littlepip hasn't earned any of her victories yet. Certainly not that "Talk an armed pony into fucking off and not robbing her, by picking up a gun while already held at gunpoint, oh gee it sure is lucky for her that he didn't fire" moment.
The tale of a lucky idiot...
You need GREAT comedic timing and Dramatic Irony and INCREDIBLE CHARM to pull that off.

Nobody says "The Ciphias Cain books are cool because Cain's Luck stat is high"
they say "The Ciaphas Cain books are amazing because Cain keeps accidentally doing the best thing possible so it's hilarious that everyone loves him and thinks he's the perfect Commissar when he really, really isn't one. But also kind of is, too. He's so charming, humble, likeable, witty, and human. In a world full of shouty giants in even gianter power armour screaming with chainswords as they run head-first into enemy machine gun nests, it's refreshing to see this entirely-human soldier struggle to survive and lead his troops to victory and often accidentally win while trying to run away."
Cain also has skills and wit, he's not just his luck.
seriously Ciaphas Cain is fucking great, his wit reminds me of Captain Edmund Blackadder from Blackadder Goes Forth.
it's so fucking good jesus christ I love books!
but
there is no dramatic irony in Littlepip getting her cock sucked for beating impossible odds because she was handed (hoofed?) the weaponry and bullshit contrivances to make it happen. Listing more contrivances would be a spoiler.
though I'm really proud of the cat-astrophe joke I made in that post. hehehe

The story made such a big deal about Littlepip having no experience with firearms, and learning how to use them quickly through observation.
But the first time she encounters a mine, she knows to flee from it during its beeping Grace Period. It makes sense that she's know what a mine is but making mines a beeping thing to flee from is really dumb.
And the first time she encounters a grenade, she doesn't just duck for cover or toss it away, she returns it to sender and gets lucky enough for the grenade to explode near its original thrower.
It's like the author didn't realize this grenade trick is something risky and inconsistent that IRL soldiers intimately familiar with grenades will never attempt to do outside of movies, so this absolute amateur to combat and Wasteland Combat pulls it off perfectly the first time she tries it.

>>285182
>equips Ahegao Camo Paint on his stable-pony jumpsuit and paints Ahegao art onto his Ahegun

>>284967
Your point about the weapons is a thing I noticed with the FoE stories as well with it heavily favoring Unicorn protagonists. I'll admit I did come off a bit mean and abrasive but I went into the FoE /mlp/ general to inquire about this.

I'm not sure if I could find the picture again but someone shared with me some artwork depicting how Pegasus and Earth ponies can operate fire arms.

One was the Fallout power armor and has a 'battle saddle' where they can mount heavier crew service weapons and/or explosives but have the problem of limited range of movement when it comes to aiming and act more like a tank destroyer where they need to turn their entier body to aim but power armor offering some assistance with vertical aiming.

The one I wanted to find though was a modified version of the Fallout 10mm pistol. It's one where instead of it just being the gun straight from the game that ponies use for some reason it's one where any type of pony can fit it in their mouth and use their tounge to press a trigger assembly inside their mouth, an ejection chamber on the side, and on the opposite is a box style magazine to make it easier for them to pull out with their mouth.

Of course that offers its own complications main one being the noise having the weapon fire so close to their sensitive ears would be disorienting I imagine (fired an M240 without ear plugs in once and hurt like hell and my ears were ringing all day). Plus the issue of the recoil being absorbed by their teeth and jaw. While it does have padding in the art for them to bite down on I could see eastland denizins probably not having the best dental hygiene and would be a bitch to take that recoil into a rotten molar or cavity.

Tried to find the last thread where I inquired about it but seems the link in the current FoE thread is broken. Either way seems the general thing they do when drawing weapons is either 'eh fuck it' and just use normal guns or they got that whole handle is where they bite down to fire. Granted most have the handle (or mouthle? like you said writing horse is annoying sometimes) parallel to the barrel but that could cause an issue where it'd be tough to zero the weapon since you can't bite the handle and have the sight post in your vision.

Also know people are being a bit tough on you Nigel but you do bring an air and energy here none of us can. Plus I'm usually the Nigel of most online groups I'm in so I feel like we are kindred brothers. If you ever want to talk in PM's I'm too used to being the rambler but would love to be the ramblee for once.

>>285210
Unicorn protags are common in foe
Superpowered Lucario protags are common in Pokeumans
Fanfics of fanfics are inherently incestuous attempts to impress the original audience and steal some of it.

>>285210
Unicorn protags are common in fanfics of the FOE fanfic.
Superpowered Lucario protags are common in fanfics of the Pokeumans fanfic.
Fanfics of fanfics are often inherently incestuous attempts to impress the original audience and steal some of it. A story about Rainbow Dash and some obnoxiously slutty and utterly shameless Pegasus going to a bar and having a drink and then the story ending...
One, it isn't a story, it's a scene. A one-shot.
Two, it could stand on its own feet without needing to be "Written in the winningverse" and called a fanfiction of the utterly shit "Life and times of a winning pony" fanfic. However if it stood on its own, it would have to attract fans on its own and actually establish who this OC is and why anyone should care.

You know what's really dumb?
Even though Unicorns are immensely over-represented as the protagonists of Fallout Equestria fanfics, they rarely if ever do anything with their Unicorn-ness that couldn't be done better by "sufficiently advanced battle-saddles".
The Unicorns don't use magical object-transformation to turn rocks into bullets and firearms, then lift up ten oversized miniguns 50 feet away from them, hiding behind cover and aiming at foes using their Pip-Buck Compasses.
They don't magic some rocks into rabid squirrels and command them to kill enemies for them. They don't use magic to create trees, or shoot fireballs/vacuum-wind balls to burn down sniper-filled enemy buildings, or make moving earth walls or craft earth golems to block bullets for them. They don't use portals or craft magic mirror walls to bounce enemy bullets back at their shooters, and they don't sic exploding ghosts on their enemies or magically increase the weight of tiny pebbles to boxcar-tier and then toss them at the speed of 9mm bullets (two things Unicorns do in FE) to watch the unholy devastation.

They just levitate up firearms and shoot them sometimes.
They don't even levitate their guns all that far from their bodies. They just hold their guns "At arm's length" so to speak and rely on any "Unique" weapons like grenade launchers or magical swords or bullshit magic Power Armour suits to give them an edge.

The shitty Fallout Equestria generic unicorn protagonist will just lift up a 10mm pistol and fire it at the enemies he sees with his eyes.
He will be "Like Littlepip but different" first and his own character in his own right second.

The average Unicorn Protag will do absolutely nothing that an Earth Pony with a multi-ball-swivel-jointed 75-pound 50cal dual-minigun Sentry Turret built into a backback couldn't do better by mentally controlling his sentry gun via a program running on his Pip-Buck.

One more thing...

It would have been so much neater for the Earth Ponies, Pegasi, and even Unicorns to just put magic wooden/metal/plastic arms on a harness like a fake bunny tail on a belt, and put those arms on.
And because the arms are magic, the wearer can easily control them.
Monkeys and other creatures with arms/hands canonically exist in MLP. Sometimes, Pegasi use their wings like hands.
And ponies know Griffons. They've seen Griffons pick stuff up, perhaps even write things.
We've even seen ponies in the show who use prosthetic limbs!
Prosthetic limbs are even shoehorned into this fucking story, but nopony ever thinks of just wearing magical limbs like a hat with a magical arm able to flip you off duct-taped to it!

Just imagine
>Twilight notices how good Fluttershy's pet money is at climbing
>starts to wonder if he could be given a magic wand to point and shoot at the enemy
>ponies must know what magic wands are because Trixie's cutie mark is a wand
>test.jpg
>give the monkey a wand that turns things purple
>wouldn't want to give the monkey a lethal wand after all
two hours later
>monkey went on a magical wand rampage
>finally hit him with a sleep spell
>he turned half of Ponyville purple and made the flower trio faint
>rampage over
>admire the rotation and dexterity of the sleeping monkey's wrist, elbow, and fingers
>begin working on prosthetic limbs
>nopony wants to chop off their hooves to gain sick nasty wooden regenerating super-punching turbo monkey fists
>fine.png
>put enchanted wooden limbs on a harness that can be easily removed and repaired
>the fact that the arms appear to come out of the sides of your neck is a neat bonus, it keeps running from jiggling them about too much
>name your invention Ponarms
>when Applejack invents gunpowder and guns in general, these are why ponies start calling guns Firearms
>war breaks out with ziggers
>experts in the scientific field you invented start making even better Ponarms
>newer models feature thick yet lightweight and flexible segmented steel armour and dense gemstone knuckles covering the enchanted living wooden internals

>>285247
Eh, I'm sorry but I honestly think that neither makes ponies using guns in a post-apocolyptic wasteland make more sense than the other. And both sounds kinda autistic.

Like, I think that fundamentally, Equestrian techonlogy should be developed from from some sort of development history. Like what was their first tool they created and how did they create it? Like what would be their first tool and are they gonna manipulate it through their mouth or hooves?

Really, like why are we even writing in ponyland if the are gonna have hands anyway? Also, like how were these prosthetic limbs created? Probably by unicorns, because who else, so like unicorn helps unhandicap the lesser tribes.

But really like, this is why I don't actually put any thought into worldbuilding of techonlogy in ponyland. It is just such an uphill battle. So if I tell you its hoofwritten, then if this bothers some readers they don't have to read it.

I honest find the concept of writing about this boring. Idk, perhaps I should then refrain from commenting then but I guess what my subconcious point beneath all the whining is that why must their techonolgy and stuff be like ours. Like, why guns in the first place?

I just recently created a magic system that I'm quite proud of and I just didn't care about appeal to convention. (Nor did I try to make it unique, I just thought about what I thought was intresting.)

Idk, I am just not too stoked about hands in Equestria. We are just back to the original Fallout universe by this change.

Don't take me too seriously, I haven't finiashed a story ever.

Did Glim die or can he just not stomach any more bad fanfiction?

>>285269
Sometimes Glim takes a day or two to charge up his chakra before unleashing a long series of prewritten fanfic-review posts. Don't rush him, you can't rush perfection.
>>285251
Why guns in Equestria?
You said it yourself: Because FOE doesn't truly take place in Equestria.
It takes place in an anachronistic copypaste of Fallout's universe where everything's got an incredibly thin pony coat of paint and many unique dangers/terrors are lost in translation as the author attempts to one-up the danger so Littlepip seems cooler for beating super-Deathclaws that aren't even Chameleons any more, sometimes-smart super-Raiders with snipers and landmines to spare instead of blindly bum-rushing you with rusty rebar clubs and pool cues, and super-Super Mutants who regenerate health and wield miniguns and make bulletproof magic shields and literally fucking fly.
That 1960s-looking piece-of-shit computer terminal over there used to store the diary entries of a long-dead man from over 200 years ago, still around and online after 200 years, still password-protected by a short word you can select from a pool of six? The author swears it's not an electricity-based computer, it's a "magic" computer powered by "magic" energy just like the "magical" laser pistols, and the author swears they were built by ponies in the pony world, even though the laser pistol can't be operated by hoof without machinery to help you get around the trigger-guard, and even though they computer still uses a keyboard with keys too small for any pony's hooves.
What's that? You think a pony would instead use a rolling ball for their mouse and a keyboard with two buttons for 1 and 0 binary-style, or a touchscreen keyboard where two hooves can touch the centers of two circles and select letters and ASCII symbols using a variety of gestures and macros? That's too smart for this story.
Remember in the cartoon when foals used a typewriter with just two buttons large enough for their hooves, presumably for "1" and "0" in binary? Yeah, that happens when you consider questions like "Wait how would ponies use keyboards?".
Sometimes, ponies will drink tea from cups that have earth-style handles big enough for pony hooves. Sometimes Rarity will use magic to lift dainty little cups with decorative handles her hooves couldn't possibly fit in.
And it's fine to politely overlook moments in FIM where the ponies really couldn't get around using human tech they have no reason to design that way. FIM isn't a story about the typewriters they use, so it's fine when human-sized keyboards appear in the background of Twilight's underground lab.
It's fine to not know how ponies use keyboards, and FIM deserves respect for going the extra mile in its early seasons.
It's fine to not know how a town gets its water, and Avatar: The Last Airbender deserves respect for making sure most towns have wells or waterbenders or water pumps or other easy water sources.
It's fine to not know why some stupid drunken fucker hired three children and a war criminal to be his bodyguards as he goes to his home to build a fucking bridge, or why inappropriately powerful assassins want his head, but Naruto deserves respect for all that worldbuilding in the Land Of Waves arc that the rest of the franchise literally never topped. Came close with Suna's reason for war, but never topped it.
FIM isn't about keyboards and Avatar isn't about the towns in the middle of random buttfuck nowhere and how they get water and Naruto is the story of a boy who becomes a man and earns the respect of his ninja village, so we honestly didn't need any of the great high-effort worldbuilding we got in these shows.

But Fallout Equestria is a story about the guns they use, the enemies they kill, the body counts everyone racks up, the monsters that die this week, the baddies defeated by the heroes after explaining their evil plots and tragic backstories, the survival challenges this "magical super-wasteland" poses, and the OCs who easily succeed where canon characters failed spectacularly after developing all sorts of advanced technologies that should have single-hoofedly won the goddamn war for them.
Fallout is about the wasteland canon ponies allowed Equestria to become, and how the heroes solve all these problems by winning enough gunfights and completing enough sidequests. So to understand
So it really doesn't make sense that the only potions we see work like Fallout's drugs (+2 Int, +1 Cha for 1 hour), when potioncrafters should make a killing selling potions of transformation/regeneration/temporary damage and radiation resistance/Fireproofing to the rest of the Wasteland.

"An appeal to tradition" is the only reason why magical ponies with power armour and enchanted guns/armour and other game-changing things I can't spoil including something that would rape Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood facing potion-chugging invisibility-cloaked nuclear-grenade-tossing Ziggers typically restrict themselves to fighting the way humans fight other humans in the Fallout franchise.

>>285269
Yes, it would be stupid if ponies wore detachable mechanical arms around their necks so they can point and shoot guns like humans. But...

>1. By making the arms "magic arms", you open the possibility that the arms can be stronger than human arms. Humans might struggle to keep light machine guns on target and amateur humans might struggle to keep handguns on target, but with the strength of a horse in your arms you could wield all sorts of big guns. Bigger guns=bigger bullets=more explosive power packed into every round, especially if the bullets actually are explosive or enchanted to explode.

>2. A pony is many times stronger and faster than a human before enchanted clothing or potions or buff spells factor into things. Mounted cavalry dominated battlefields until we got guns, but the speed and useable calibers of a truly "armed" pony could put armoured jeeps with mounted machine guns and light tanks to shame. Perhaps even superheavy tanks! If Littlepip can lift boxcars heavier than most tanks, she can lift and fire the heaviest of tank guns.

>3. An unarmoured Pegasus able to reach back with her mouth and open up her bomb-filled saddlebags(better yet, Bags Of Holding stuffed with really big bombs), then flip over in the air while flying out of the reach of your weapons, could drop bombs on you like the best bombers at the speed of jets without having to show up on radar. A Pegasus can live off the land in enemy territory and sneak around without needing to head straight back to base for refuelling and repairs like a Jet would.

>4. A Pegasus in magically-accelerated metal-winged Power Armour with Jet Rockets on her ass could fly faster than an unarmoured pony and do a better job resisting wind resistance. The Pegasus would also have the option to fire homing missiles/miniguns/other things by hand.

>5. A pony in Power Armour is many times stronger and tougher and heavier than a pony without Power Armour, meaning its metal arms can operate and fire even heavier guns or carry even heavier auto-aiming minigun+missile+laser+BFG-firing turrets around

>6. Giving a pony necklace-mounted magical human arms would still be less clunky than duct-taping shotguns to a horse and trying to be clever with your mouth-operated bite-activated trigger, only to betray that "scientific engineering solution" by forcing the guns to require magical regenerating ammo enchantments and auto-aiming swivel mounts anyway. If your Pip-Buck helps swivel and aim the guns mounted on your backpack, why even bother putting a trigger in your mouth when you can just command the guns to shoot via Pip-Buck and free your mouth up to hold something else, like a magic kazoo enchanted to be louder than any airhorn?

>7. After 200ish years of constant Wasteland warfare does it really make any sense that scavengers picking through the trash of the old world can find perfectly-good unused clips for 10mm machineguns in locked boxes you could easily smash open? Small civilizations could make a killing producing guns and ammo to sell to the outside world, but finding that shit lying around in a world of scavengers would be idiotic. Come to think of it, does it make sense that you can find perfectly-preserved 200-year-old pie? If the Magic Arms are self-maintaining arms that operate guns, they improve pony combat effectiveness. But if the Magic Arms have built-in guns like the arms from Custom Robo, it makes sense for the "magical guns" to draw from your own magical energy instead of relying on bullets, which would justify their continued use after it becomes damn near impossible to find most gun calibers.

>8. There is a story reason for Harry Potter and Naruto to not whip out glocks: Because if they did that, it wouldn't be a story about fighting magicians any more. But this series already has guns, shoehorned in in the clunkiest ways possible. A shitty little revolver would be harder for a pony to operate than this overproduced over-written disgustingly clunky garbage solution that would suffer more breakdowns than any over-armoured jeep.

>9. Enchanted floating guns and swords that fight without fear of death would honestly be superior options to all of this, but a pony with working metal arms strapped to her neck could flip you off to look extra-edgy, and that's what this fic is really all about.

>>285302
>just command the guns to shoot via Pip-Buck
these Pip-Bucks can obey mental commands without the need to touch a touchscreen or twist knobs or press buttons.
Come to think of it, VATS/SATS is already in the story. And it already auto-aims for ponies and auto-fires for them. It's a program that takes control of your body and forces you to act optimally as the program makes your body perform attacks with your equipped weapon upon your selected targets. More graceful than any dancer, more focused than any professional, more precise than a literal robot, you can even use this to win your first shovel duel against a hardened killer bigger and stronger than you.
It practically sends you into the Avatar State for a few seconds, except you don't obtain the knowledge of past lives, you're just a mechanically efficient killer for a few seconds tops.
VATS/SATS is already so much more complicated than a mental database full of spells and the knowledge needed to cast them would be. The device can already store and display data, but letting this device store Twilight Sparkle's Introduction To Combat Magic, Book One Of Two Hundred would change the game and take Littlepips away from being a gun-toting asshole and "The best psychic".
VATS/SATS is already so much more complicated than giving it the ability to aim and fire your Battle Saddle in real-time via mental commands and data from your EFS/HUD's "yellow compass dots=not enemies yet, red compass dots=enemies" would be.
The overcomplicated Battle Saddle would be fine for a prototype armed pony device, but it's already got so many flaws... Why the fuck wouldn't wartime innovation make this less retarded? I can buy prototypes being this clunky but where are the sleeker models with more features and fewer design flaws? If the goal is to make something nonmagical and engineering-based "anypony" can use, why let it interface with a presumably-expensive Pip-Buck's magical software? If the goal is to let ponies use guns not built for pony hooves, why create a specialized mechanism for holding guns straight ahead and firing them when literal arms would be less complicated and so much more efficient/versatile?

Dude, wouldn't it be super traumatic if you activated VATS/SATS and got your first kill under its control and "guidance"... and the narration did not gloss over how it feels to have a handheld computer program possess you like danny phantom

>>285315
It depends on how well adjusted the character is. Or the reasoning they used, or the core personality.
>It wasn't me. The program did it. (Separation of identity.)
>I had to. There wasn't any other choice. (Not seeing the viable alternatives.)
>BARF. That didn't happen. (Repression.)
>Being less sensitive.
>Being more sensitive.
>Or no change at all.
>and probably other things as well.

>>285317
Those would be quite interesting. I hope a better story explores these concepts some day.
Imagine how horrifying it would feel to have a computer force you to go through with killing your first target, leaving you screaming inside your own head as your forced-open eyes and hyperfocused mind take in every drop of blood, every nanosecond of time, the way the resistance builds and gives depending on what your sharpened shovel is currently slicing through.
You weren't ready yet. You hadn't been desensitized. You hadn't worked your way up by fishing for fish and ripping them from the water and crushing their skulls and skinning and gutting them and frying their meat, you'd never started trapping and killing wild rabbits, skinning and cooking them, getting used to the idea that life is more squishy and fleeting than a fish's bones. You weren't ready, but your own body was forced into it anyway thanks to the commands you queued up in your own Pip-Buck.
You'd never forget any of it. But as time went on and your body count reached the hundreds, you'd never get used to it because each new kill would be as horrifyingly fresh in your memory as the last. Eventually you'd start to forget older ones, probably. But you'd always find a new fresh horror in the latest one.
Would you be able to bring yourself to kill outside of VATS, knowing you'll be forced to rely on your own skills as a fighter, rather than a program that can auto-aim and auto-melee for you like the half-aborted rape-baby of a cheating Team Fortress 2 spinning Sniper and a hacked Minecraft client's KillAura?
The writer could reference the cinematic kill-cam that flies along with bullets by claiming being under VATS is "Like watching your body from outside it".
Littlepip's reaction to looting a corpse was bigger than her reaction to killing her first person. That's fucking dumb.
I hope Glim's okay, he hasn't posted since the 9th.

>>285152

Anyway, it just keeps going and going.

>Blood and gore were everywhere, dripping from the ceiling and painting the walls in equal parts with the graffiti that had somehow gotten even more mocking and cruel.
I'm assuming a lot of the graffiti is just "X is worst pony" shitposting. As if being disemboweled and having your corpse violated weren't enough, eh?

>The room was dominated by three cages, two large square ones, and a smaller one hanging from the ceiling which was barely big enough for a pony. Captives -- filthy, beaten and misused -- were curled up inside, their hooves tied together with stained ropes. The two in the nearest cage looked at me pitifully and my heart wrenched painfully.
The use of "pitifully" followed by "painfully" is kind of an unpleasant alliteration; I would recommend finding a different way to word this. Anyway, apart from shock value I'm still not seeing what the point of all of this is supposed to be. This has clearly gone well beyond just robbing ponies for survival; this is just brutality for the sake of brutality. Have these raiders just gone insane enough that they now round up ponies and torture them for the fun of it? Is this a religious cult led by some Colonel Kurtz type weirdo who is going to end up being a miniboss or something? Or should I assume the simpler and probably more plausible explanation: that the author just wanted to make this as edgy and dark as possible?

Anyway, after a few more paragraphs describing the unutterable horror with which Littlepoop beholds this spectacle of pure edge, she decides that she's going to let the ponies out of the cages. Using her trusty screwdriver and Hefty bag full of bobby pins, she opens the lock of the nearest cage and frees two ponies, who are tied up and lying in their own filth. One of the ponies offers her its meager supplies as thanks, but Littlepoop refuses. Whether intentionally or not, this points to the raiders being motivated by sadism rather than any practical goal: there is no reason to tie someone up if they are already in a cage, and the fact that the pony still has its possessions indicates the raiders didn't capture them to rob them. Once more, I'm curious what, if anything, these raiders are supposed to be raiding.

>Looking around, I took in the shape of the room, trying to blot out the horrors everywhere I turned. (Above the front door was an aged fresco of a beautiful white winged unicorn -- Celestia? -- unusually large and graceful, a book floating in front of her, her wings outstretched over a rainbow of foals as they smiled up and listened to storytime. Not only had the ponies been painted over with images of blood and knives and violence, the fresco had been used for target practice, everything from bullets to flung excrement, and was now shattered and stained unspeakably.)
Still not as revolting as a drag-queen story hour. Though turning Twilight's old library into a Detroit public school is admittedly a noteworthy achievement in the field of desecration.

Anyway, she's about to go through the nearest door, when suddenly it bursts open and one of the raiders walks through. He's well armed and his cutie mark is a vivisected torso and blah blah blah, edge edge edge.

>The raider pony recovered quickly, swinging his head around and drawing out the small gun in his teeth (what, was he going to pull the trigger with his tongue?) just before S.A.T.S. helped me pump my two shotgun rounds into his face.
What's curious here is that the author seems to be actually aware of how awkward the idea of a pony using a gun really is, but instead of going further and realizing that this could be a sign he needs to rethink his approach for adapting the game mechanics to this setting, he just cracks a joke about it and moves on.

The self-deprecating humor actually raises the author in my esteem, since it indicates that he at least has the self-awareness to realize how silly most of this premise really is. It also lightens the edge somewhat. However, the problem with a half-ridiculous, half-serious story like this is that it's not always clear which parts are ridiculous on purpose. In past reviews, I've noted that sometimes authors have a hard time deciding if they want their setting to be "cartoon" Equestria or "realistic" Equestria, and usually they just bounce back and forth between the two in a way that can make the story feel odd.

To clarify what I'm talking about, "cartoon" Equestria is more faithful to the way the world is depicted in the show, complete with its pastel colors and cartoony atmosphere; it doesn't necessarily mean that the setting has to retain the same lighthearted mood or be appropriate for children. What it does mean is that the author gets to play fast and loose with physics in the way that a cartoon does, for instance characters pulling objects out of hammer-space or stretching their bodies in physically impossible ways. For example, Nigel's Silver Star thing feels like it was mostly written in cartoon Equestria, so it's easier to accept some of the goofier things that happen in that story.

By contrast, a "real" Equestria functions like a setting in any other type of novel, where it's assumed that the normal laws of physics apply, and elements like magic function according to their own rules that have to be consistently applied. Thus, while in a cartoon world you could probably get away with having an earth pony just hold a gun in its mouth and fire it through some unexplained process, in a realistic setting this kills the suspension of disbelief in a number of ways.

This story is already a weird mix of sci-fi and fantasy elements (for instance, things like PipBucks and Terminals that are ostensibly magic-powered objects but function like computers), so the rules of this world are already rather blurry. Using cartoon reality and normal reality interchangeably just further complicates this and makes the story more difficult to visualize.

>>285383

Anyway, apparently the over-the-top edgelord behavior of the raiders pushes Littlepoop past her limits and she no longer has any moral qualms about pulling the trigger on her shotgun and blowing the little pony's head off.

>I felt no remorse as his head turned into spaghetti sauce that splattered over his instantly lifeless body. I hadn’t just killed a pony -- these raiders had given up any right to the title! These were not ponies, they were sick monsters that needed to be put down! And Celestia help me if I wasn’t going to do just that. I didn’t realize it until that moment, but I was mad! The pure evil of this place had shaken me to the core... and my core was furious!
I've always been a little annoyed by authors who write this kind of over-the-top splatter-porn and then try to append some half-assed moral to it in order to sell it to a genteel audience. It's distasteful for roughly the same reason that something like Cuties is distasteful, in that the work spends most of its time being deliberately and gratuitously provocative, and then attempts to justify itself with a weak moral angle tacked on to the end see? we weren't just making a 90 minute video of preteens twerking; it's really a commentary on smartphone culture...or...something. Eat the bugs, bigot..

Personally I take kind of a Nietzschean view of morality, and I actually don't have a problem with violent or pornographic writing in and of itself I'd be a hypocrite if I did, because most of my own writing tends to be both of these. However, what annoys me here is that this author is clearly just writing murder porn, but at the same time he feels squeamish about whatever standards of propriety he feels he's violated by doing it, so he compensates by having his protagonist adopt this canned moral outrage in order to justify her participation.

Littlepoop, to the extent that she's been developed at all so far, is a character who deplores violence and wants nothing more than to live in a world where all the little pastel ponies love and hug each other. Ordinarily she would never do anything as anti-friendship as gruesomely murdering somepony, but by golly, seeing all of those ponies get decapitated just made her so gosh-darn peeved! So, since she's doing it for moral reasons that a morally upright person could understand and sympathize with, it's perfectly okay for her go ahead and unleash the exact same kind of purposeless destruction she's moralizing about. The raiders are bad guys who have done bad things; therefore anything that LP wants to do to them is morally justified.

This is basically the literary equivalent of a Papal indulgence: as long as the character obtains some kind of absolution according to whatever flimsy social standards the author chooses to recognize, she can go ahead and sin to her heart's content. By giving her this sense of moral outrage at the bloodthirsty acts she's witnessing, the author is basically forgiving Littlepoop in advance for whatever bloodthirsty acts that she herself will doubtless spend the rest of the story committing. My problem with this honestly has less to do with the morality of it and is more that it's just stupid; it's like cheating on a diet. You deliberately violate a rule that you only imposed on yourself, and then you make excuses to yourself for why you did it.

The way around this kind of silliness is to just treat reality as what it is. If you want to eat a cupcake then have a cupcake; nobody is going to give a shit if you do. You just have to accept that it will make you fat. If you don't want to be fat, eat fewer cupcakes. By the same logic, if you want to write murder porn, then write murder porn; just don't try to present it as if it were something else.

Anyway, making use of this SATS business, which is apparently some function of her PipBuck which has not been particularly well-explained but seems to be some kind of convenient auto-aiming function, she takes the revolver from the pony she just killed and uses it to kill one of three raiders who charge in to see what all the ruckus was about.

>A second started firing another small firearm at me (what do you know, they do shoot with their tongues!), bullets impacting the door frame.
It's almost impossible to visualize how this would even work. Seriously, imagine holding a gun in your mouth and trying to extend your tongue around the handle to pull the trigger. Even if issues like noise and recoil aren't a factor for some reason and the trigger resistance is light enough that your tongue can do the work alone, I can't imagine this being practical. The author could have at least tried to cook up a halfway-believable explanation for how this would work. Hell, even giving the ponies some sort of preposterous technological solution, like mounting the gun on a hat and attaching the trigger to some kind of mechanical bit that pulls the trigger when the pony bites down, would be better than just saying "they shoot with their tongues."

>Still, the gunslinger raider skittered away, using one of the captive ponies for cover. The dishonorableness poured gasoline on the fire of my anger.
inb4 the "raiders" tie somepony to a log and cackle maniacally as it runs along a slow conveyor belt towards a circular saw.

>The third raider pony lowered his head, a pool cue clenched in his teeth, and charged at me.

>I blinked. “Really?” I took a single step back. The pony rushed at me full-tilt, and was nearly on me when the ends of the pool cue struck the doorway, snapping him to a stop. I fired the revolver’s last shot point-blank into his neck. Even I didn’t need S.A.T.S. at that range.
This is just dumb.

Anyway, the rest of the fight is just more of the same. She gets shot at one point, limps into the kitchen and finds a medikit, also finds some ammo to reload her gun, and eventually takes the last raider out. The specifics honestly aren't worth going over.

>>285384

After a page break, we learn that LP has healed herself using the classic panacea of the video-game world: the all-purpose healing potion. She uses the knife she took off of one of the raiders to cut loose the second pony from the cage she opened earlier, and then begins opening the other cages (by my count there are two remaining). Inside cage #2, she finds a sleeping pony alongside what she initially thinks is a corpse, but turns out to still be "alive." Littleplot takes this to mean that the pony is a zombie; I have no idea if the author intends for the reader to take this literally or not. In any case, the pegasus pony has apparently been skinned alive and has had the feathers plucked from its wings. Lovely.

LP lets the "zombie" go free. The sleeping one that was in the cage with it is presumably woken up, because the text mentions that both captives slink away. There's also a page break that has absolutely no reason to be here. Although Littlepoop at one point remembers there is a sniper out on the balcony that she still has to contend with, and probably more raiders in the tree, she decides that getting the hanging cage down is a better use of her time.

As she is trying to think of a way to get it down, a couple more raiders burst in out of nowhere and start shooting at her. I'm a little curious where these guys were or what they were doing when the ruckus that summoned the first three was going on, but at this point who even cares. For all I know there is a literal enemy-spawn point in a closet somewhere that pulls "generic bad guy" instances out of some pocket dimension. Anyway, she dispenses with the first one easily enough, by dropping a bookcase on it with magic something tells me the "it's magic I ain't gotta explain shit" defense is going to be heavily abused in this story. She also gets a pair of binoculars out of this exchange; not sure if that's important or not. The second raider throws some kind of explosive at her:

>The second raider pony appeared back at the railing, a wicked grin on his face. With a hoof, he shoved forward an ammo box, then tilted it over. The lid sprung open and half a dozen orange disks poured out into the library below.
I can only assume that these are centuries-old Equestria Online install disks that have been repurposed into bombs. If not, I have no idea what they are and the text doesn't elaborate.

The whatever-the-fuck disks all explode, and Littlepoop runs and hides in the kitchen. There is yet another page break, and when LP returns to the main room, she sees that the issue of the remaining caged pony has become moot.

>Looking up, I saw the blast-torn remains of the pony in its twisted metal cage. Oh, Celestia damn them to hell!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WQCoPL3-wo

>More determined than ever, I stripped the raider bodies (what little was left of them now) of their armors. The armors were in shredded tatters, but with some effort I was able to use the best parts of each to patch together something that would give me better protection than my stable-issued utility barding. The resulting outfit had almost no pockets, so I would have to dig the utility suit out of my saddlebags to get at most of my tools, but it was a fair trade.
Apparently she considers this to be a better use of her time than dealing with the raider who threw the explosives, who I can only assume is still around somewhere, as well as the sniper, who would have to be completely deaf not to realize there is someone in the tree by now. The same goes for however many other raiders are still in here, which again, based on the narrative so far, could be anywhere between 2 and 10,000. Anyway, call me crazy but I feel like after the battle would be the ideal time to go looting corpses and upgrading armor.

>Putting it on was gruesome. My hooves were darkened with blood just from working on it; every inch was covered in the flash-fried gore of dead ponies.
Did we need to know this?

>A last look around while I figured I still had time. The raider above obviously assumed I was dead. (I would have assumed I was dead too.)
Yes, throwing a bunch of explosives in someone's general direction and then just assuming she was blown up without even taking three seconds to glance over the balcony to see if her charred remains are anywhere nearby seems on-par with the level of intelligence most of these characters have shown. Don't worry, I'm sure the pony running around down there taking armor off of the corpses is a completely different pony and is nothing to worry about. Might as well just go back to eating your fucking sandwich or whatever you were doing before she burst in here.

Oh, also, tossing a bunch of powerful explosives into an enclosed area is a perfectly sane thing to do; no need to worry about structural damage to the building or going deaf or flying debris or shrapnel or anything like that. Real life is exactly like a video game, therefore all permanent structures are static objects baked into the environment that will not even be singed no matter how many bombs you toss around, and any damage you sustain can be cured by picking up one of the first-aid kits that are conveniently lying around. inb4 hayburgers cure bullet wounds.

From here, the text goes into excruciating detail listing all of the things that LP discovers while she's hunting around. When she comes back to the main room, the raider is once again out there, but as soon as he sees her he runs away for some absurd reason. The text claims this is because she is carrying a preposterous amount of weapons now, which I'm actually going to call bullshit on. The only way she could hold all of these things is with magic, and it seems like simultaneously operating multiple guns while also holding the giant mountain of food and provisions that she picked up would require a pretty high level of magic ability, and there has been nothing in the text to indicate that she has this talent.

>>285251
>Eh, I'm sorry but I honestly think that neither makes ponies using guns in a post-apocolyptic wasteland make more sense than the other. And both sounds kinda autistic.
I'm inclined to agree with this. I think that just directly lifting the weapons from a game and dumping them into Equestria with only cursory adaptations to the ponies is lazy and implausible. I'd respect the author more if he put a bit of thought into how ponies might actually fight, and what kinds of weapons they might actually develop in a post-apocalyptic world, rather than just aping the Fallout environment and dumping ponies into it.

>>285183
>>285190
I would unironically read this if it existed. Just sayin'.

>>285148
I think the main takeaway here is that you can build a video game purely from mechanics, with little or no story, and players could still enjoy it; however, you can't make a story from game mechanics alone. A story is a story regardless of the setting; it needs to revolve around characters and events. The mechanics that determine how fights work and what kinds of character classes exist and so forth can help make the writer's job easier, and can theoretically drive events to some extent, but you can't build a story just from that. As we've seen with this story so far, things that would work out just fine in a video game or a tabletop RPG don't always translate into interesting literature.

Is it still a spoiler if I complain about something that won't show up in this story for about 40 more chapters, and was likely already spoiled since FEQfags won't shut up about this story's retarded take on Alicorns?
I just remembered this story's retarded take on Alicorns.
I am angry. Angry about Alicorns!

>>285383
Littlepip couldn't think of a way to deal with the sniper on top of Twilight's Tree-Library
(Why not throw another grenade, since she's so cartoonishly good at throwing them around?)
so she willingly walked head-first into this raider-infested Tree-Library full of pony corpses and pony piss and shit and cum.
This town is still FULL of Raiders.
and she just walks straight into the worst part of town, without breaching and clearing any other areas. no backup, no superior firepower, no clever distraction to try out. doesn't even have that spritebot distracting enemies for her and turning foes to ash.
she won't do any smart Batman "Sneaking around, making distracting noises, performing stealth takedowns with magically levitated melee weapons" shit. Even though if you can produce enough sustained hundreds of thousands of pounds of force to lift a boxcar you can throw a rock or melee weapon really fucking hard

Walking head-first into this little raider-tower tree means losing her escape routes. Raiders outside the tree could surround the tree and prepare to shoot her as soon as she leaves the tree.
Sure, she could try sniping raiders outside from atop the tree, but that would also mean letting raiders enter the tree to rush through the dungeon she cleared out and hit her from behind. Nobody's watching her back. It's not like she's got Watcher floating around killing enemies by her side as she risks death for the robot because he said something supremely important is in this town so she has to free it from raider control.

It's not like any of this brutality and strangely-childish scatological edge serves a "Purpose".
This story would become a better kind of grimdark if all this brutality served a purpose for these raiders, if all this evilness was just part of everyday life and raider culture for these demons.

This is all so pointless... It's not like this is where the Raiders sometimes take cute mares and strong stallions from the towns they raid for supplies, and they intentionally store caqed ponies here in the most horrible environment they can create while "breaking in" slaves and training them to "behave" until they're sold to travelling slave-traders.

Just imagine if this story showed some chapters from the perspective of a became-legal-yesterday mare and her middle-aged mother. They get kidnapped by raiders, who say "We're going to sell you like a fucking cucumber, little girlie! A fresh virgin like you will fetch a pretty penny, nyeh heh heh!"
And then they rape the mother in front of the mare because they're evil
And then because they don't want to risk injuring the mare-slave with scars and broken bones that'll reduce her market value, they torture her mother in front of her whenever they want to punish her.

Alternatively...
If you want this mare to be a surprise, and you don't want to take screentime away from Littlepip...
Imagine if Littlepip found a mare in these cages who'd been here for a while, and thought about freeing her.
>"She's the only living pony in all these cages who could walk and stand and beg to be saved... everyone else is incredibly crippled or missing limbs or horrifically scarred and starved or all at once."
>"When I worked with that cheese bastard, he betrayed me. Should I free and work with this slave mare, even though she might betray me? What would Twilight Sparkle do? Fuck it, I'll never give up on hope! My hope will never die!"
>free mare
>give her a shotgun with only one bullet, so she can betray you right there and resume being a helpless unarmed slave or help you kill raiders. For every kill, she is rewarded with another bullet.
>be rewarded for kindness and generousity when this slave-mare turns out to be damn good shot, helping you kill your way through the raider base
>she gives you intel about the Wasteland after you kill the sniper with a clever witty tactic and take his gun from him
>this could organically start a questline where Littlepip is told
>"Hey, you wear the same symbol as that singing Unicorn the Raiders sold to slave-traders yesterday! Are you from the same town?"
>"Symbol?" Littlepip asks.
>She points to the numbers on Littlepip's stable-jumpsuit.
>"Yes," Littlepip smiles, "We're from the same place. Those are numbers."
>"I can't read and I don't know what numbers are! I was a town guard for my destroyed hometown of Hope Springs, but they slaughtered all the old people in my village and everyone who fought back. I dropped my weapon and hid with the unarmed mares and foals like a little bitch, so the Raiders kidnapped me and everyone else. Eventually they found buyers for everyone else. But not me, because an unscarred virgin is expensive these days, too expensive for most travelling slave-traders. Now watch as I spend ten paragraphs talking about torture methods I saw performed in front of me!"
>>ten paragraphs of torture methods later
>"And that's why I will never run and hide from Raiders again, I will kill them all! You're going to help me, if you want to save that Unicorn from your Vault! They headed West, let's go!"
And if you wanted to foreshadow the Enclave right here, you could say she conveniently left out the part where she was exiled from The Enclave for wanting to help the Wasteland's ponies and Hope Springs was the only town willing to take her in and help her adapt to life in the Wasteland and life outside the military. This would justify any sharpshooting skills and tactical knowledge she'd have.
And just like that, Littlepip organically gains a companion through the good deeds she chose to perform in a situation where there were other seemingly-safer options. It's good writing because LP rejects cynicism in a cynical edgeworld.

>>285387
>Is it still a spoiler if I complain about something that won't show up in this story for about 40 more chapters, and was likely already spoiled since FEQfags won't shut up about this story's retarded take on Alicorns?
>I am angry. Angry about Alicorns!
I'd prefer it if you save your comments until they are directly relevant. But, if history has shown us anything, it's that I'm powerless to stop you when you really want to get something off your chest.

>>285387
>intentionally store caqed ponies
caged ponies

>>285385
>he at least has the self-awareness to realize how silly most of this premise really is
I fucking wish he had self awareness. Just wait until you see the fetish porn he turns Alicorns into.
Fuck fetishfags.
The only valid fetish is lactation because it involves boobs. And slimegirls because they're still girls and girls are cute. And centaurs and ponies because horses can be cute too. Other monster-girl varieties are on thin fucking ice between furries and normalcy since their girls are basically just humans with extra parts and gimmicky behaviour while furries are usually that or something disgusting
Everything else is disgusting degeneracy.

>I blinked. “Really?”
Littlepip should be LOSING HER FUCKING MARBLES in this scene. Struggling with the horror of everything she's seen. Screaming with anger at all the monsters she's killing. Screaming inside her own mind as she becomes a killer and premeditated murderer for that fucking spritebot, who could have at least had the courtesy to guard the Tree-Library's door while she's up here dealing with the horrors of this new world for his lazy ass.
She shouldn't willingly kill anyone in this story outside of the most extreme survival-based me-or-the-thug-rushing-me-with-a-knife circumstances until she sees too much and snaps and starts slaughtering enemies while yelling edgy shit because that's what angry magic ponies say and act like in the stories she's read.
Littlepip should be twitchy, jumpy, enraged, having a mental BREAKDOWN BREAKDOWN as she burns her pain as fuel for her slaughterquest.
This should be a time of suffering for Littlepip. A time of tearfully screaming as her gun opens fire.
Not the time to raise eyebrows and blink sarcastically and ask if enemies are "Really?" serious about bum-rushing the gun-wielding pony with a pool cue.
I hate this wannabe-marvel-movie bullshit.
This "You're carrying assault rifles, miniguns, high quality swords, rocket launchers, nuclear bomb launchers, and more while wearing Power Armour, but stupid evil raiders with their dens filled with human flesh and mutilated corpses will still bum-rush you while armed with baseball bats and pool cues and even shaving razors bent into straight knives.

>Littlepoop finds a "Zombie"
Author's a faggot for introducing Ghouls so early on without explaining them.
THERE IS NO SPACE IN THE AUDIENCE'S HEAD FOR THIS.
Most of this story has been infodumps that take time to digest, or edgy bullshit that takes time to get over.
Something that fundamentally changes every character's relationship with radiation is something that should be saved for later, after radiation has been a background threat for a while.
Ghouls are people who, upon exposure to too much radiation, become hairless skinless shit-voiced old people who age slowly, can't be healed, and can't run without damaging their kneecaps.
But this story doesn't have "Radiation", it has "Necromantic Taint", a black magical energy that... somehow works like Fallout's cartoon radiation instead of doing anything directly necromantic like raising pony corpses as ageless tireless killers who won't go down until you smash their bones with big thrown heavy objects.
But this isn't a pony fanfiction, it's a Fallout fanfiction wearing a blood-splattered Pinkie Pie mask on the upper right side of its head, so ghouls are just copypasted over into this setting. Even though a unicorn ghoul with 200 years of magic knowledge and practice behind him should be a world-reshapingly lethal threat, and a pegasus ghoul that lost all its fur and feathers would have died or killed itself long before ending up near any Raiders.
Littlepip should have more of a reaction to seeing a wrinkled irradiated half-skinless corpse with a voice like sandpaper deepthroating gravel standing up and moving around.
Perhaps she could scream and shoot it on sight, doing a bad thing out of fear.
>Littlepip cheats on her diet
would it be a spoiler if I say this gets worse later?

>Littlepip swings a bookcase around
Her Pip-Buck's enemy-detecting radar could have easily told her where to swing bookcases from behind walls and beneath lower floors. We've seen Twilight lift things without needing to see them, and we've seen Littleshit lift things heavier than anything Twilight ever lifted before S2 came out (This story was written during season one)
well besides the Ursa Minor but we don't know how much star-monsters weigh so we can't mathematically calculate that. could calc the water tower she lifted and filled with milk, but it would weigh less than LP's faggy boxcar.
Clitofshit had no reason to do all this "Heh, really? Nothin personell, kid" action-hero shit when she's a psychic written by an author who refuses to put effort into always thinking like a psychic.

>a literal enemy-spawn point in a closet somewhere that pulls "generic bad guy" instances out of some pocket dimension
It would be an amazing backstory for the Raiders that justifies everything nonsensical about them, especially the "Raider predators outnumber non-raider prey" problem, if they really did come from some magical enemy-spawning combat arena pre-war ponies used to train their troops for all sorts of scenarios and threats. Just imagine if the Annihilation Nation-meets-Bloody Palace room had been programmed to spawn "Anarchists" for the soldiers to kill, and they had been designed to be as unpleasant as possible, but after the apocalypse some wasteland scavengers broke into the control room and accidentally set it to "Print 1 Raider every hour" and the Raiders killed them before leaving and spreading across the wastes.

>orange disks
I think the faggy author previously described the landmine outside Rarity's as an "orange disc".
which is retarded. why would you paint your landmines neon orange. why would a raider base have a whole fucking box of them that can be tipped over. why would they be live and ready to explode as soon as they're tipped from their box onto the floor like lego bricks.

>Littlepip loots raider bodies destroyed via explosion, and combines armours to repair them since that's how you repair armour in fallout 3
I know the author's trying to be "clever" here by trying to justify the protag's ability to loot decent armour off corpses in over a hundred pieces, but it really isn't working. Like you said, this zone still has enemies. Littlepip's only able to combine armour in the crafting menu because using the Pip-Boy pauses time in Fallout 3.

>deaf sniper
if the sniper's gun was permanently mounted to the Tree-Library's upper balcony in a way that ensures only Littlepip's sheer magical strength can rip it off after all these enemies are dead, and he is going to stay at the top of this tree like a final boss until Littleshit comes to shoot him, I will laugh.

>The raider above obviously assumed I was dead
Hey, remember when the Raiders put a mine outside Rarity's place when Littlepip slept in it, and when she triggered that mine, the Raiders DIDN'T assume she was dead and threw another grenade in just to make sure?
Littlepip threw the grenade back and instead of exploding mid-flight it exploded right at the feet of the enemy grenade-tosser.
even though she could have used one of Rarity's Crazy Cat Lady cat corpses on the landmine/grenade to safely trigger it while hiding far away, faking her death and fleeing.
enemies didn't assume she was dead then, but they assumed she was dead now.
and just like in videogames, detonating 10+ landmines at once in a single spot isn't enough to harm the structural integrity of the building you're in, even though it's fucking made of fucking wood. Good thing this isn't flagged as Destructible Wood like the wood used on some doors but not all doors!
This is really fucking dumb- oh wait you mentioned the structural integrity thing.

>Raider runs away once she's carrying an absurd amount of weaponry
Author's trying to be smarter than Fallout 3 again, because in that game enemies would ALWAYS bum-rush you no matter how far the gap was between lowly switchblade-toting faggot in spiky-titty Mad Max fetish gear VS the heroes.
you could have a flying buzzsaw-toting murderbot on your side, and a generic dude in power armour with a minigun, and a gigantic invincible super-strong orange/green man with a laser minigun so absurdly powerful that many players choose to not recruit him until they hit the level cap, as you don't gain EXP for enemies killed by your companions in Fallout 3
you could have a whole army of one-note or zero-note NPCs with guns following you around, and be the ultimately almighty heavily-armed bulletproof messiah of the wasteland carrying over 300 pounds of guns and ten thousand bullets of weightless ammo who took all the credit for the Power Rangers and Megazord army that warred with the cartoon nazi army over who got to turn on a non-functioning water purifier that wastes a piece of matter-rearranging magitek by existing.
Remember when water canteens were visible on her? This pony will later conceal a nuclear bomb launcher twice her size within her pip-boy, forgetting about it completely until it's time to equip it from the menu.
also
Remember when a big deal was made about the condition and degradation of weaponry, when Littlepip was negotiating with the cheesefag trying to rob her?
Now she's able to pick up all sorts of high-quality weapons from this Raider Base and scare raiders away.
We will see her fire multiple guns at once with her magic sometimes, but the author never definitively states "Pinkie designed the Pip-Buck Inventory Program to use hammerspace. Nobody knows how it works, it just does" and the text often mentions shit like Littlepip wearing many loud canteens strapped to her saddlebags full of survival supplies, in addition to Littlepip whipping out weapons concealed so perfectly even she forgot she had them, so the author never actually makes up his mind on whether we are playing by videogame, cartoon, or real serious-story logic here.
Author is a faggot!

On an unrelated note...

Imagine if Zebras trained monkeys to wield machetes and attack ponies, during the Zebras VS Ponies war.
You're a soldier, someone yells "Jigaboo in the bushes!", and suddenly you and your guys are swarmed with chimps wielding machetes and gorillas wielding giant swords with Elephant Cavalry-style things on their back for Zebras to ride on.
To counter this, Ponies made wearable fake wooden gorilla arms arms that can stretch
so you can kill the monkeys and gorillas with melee weaps without any risk to yourself
worst case scenario, a trained gorilla grabs your arm and yanks you closer to pummel you
and then, after these fake arms become standard military gear for ponies, firearms are invented
and specifically designed to be fired by these super-strong impossibly-rotating fake arms that can reach around cover and shoot for you
This magical solution for a stupid ergonomics problem gets around the "Shotguns need to come with specialized mechanical battle-saddles with mouth-triggers" problem this story typically ignores whenever it wants earth pony raiders to fire shotguns with their mouths.

>>285388
For the sake of those who do not want to be spoiled I will put the alicorn stuff in spoilers so it can be saved until alicorns are mentioned in the story.

I hit letter limit so I had to reword some sentences to be shorter
still, alicorn rant's over.
I feel a lot better now.

It's a really common mistake for writers to think if they put "MORE! MORE! MORE!" of something into a story, it will make their story better.
Surely, if you put MORE lightsaber duels into a star wars fanfic featuring BIGGER lightsabers and STRONGER super-jedi and super-sith, it will make the story cooler, right? No.
The more you have of something, the less value it can accrue.
The Star Wars Prequels thought putting in MORE space battles and MORE lightsaber fights would make the films so amazing, they could get away with confused plots, long political speeches in kid's films, a lack of focus on Vader, and fucking Jar Jar.
But lightsaber duels... they became flashier, but they also became meaningless spectacles with none of the emotional weight and tension seen in Luke's battle against Vader.
Space battles became visually-cluttered CGI explosion-fests with no weight or meaning.
Massive faceless clone armies clashed with massive identical droid armies, and nobody gave a fuck when all these new Jedi with barely any screentime got killed.

And the Star Wars sequel films did this even worse. And maliciously.
They intentionally tried to set Rey up as "The superior Luke" and Kylo Ren as "The superior Vader" even though they failed both times.
Long stretches of random unimportant filler bullshit wasted even more time
and the lightsaber fights just functioned like normal Hollywood "Swing the heavy stick" matches because all of the light-blade Flynning and acrobatic stylishness was gone completely.

The incompetent actress they hired to play Rey couldn't fight for shit, she's ugly, and she's bad at acting.
She swings her lightsaber like a kid in a park who found a cool stick.
When I saw her I thought "They must have hired her for her martial arts skills" and when I saw her "Stick-swinging near a rock" sequence in the second film I thought "They must have hired her for her other talents".
https://youtu.be/irvU09MM-l4
They tried to power-creep the original films into irrelevance.

It's the same mistake Legend Of Korra made when it gave Korra the ability to metalbend easily while her natural-born earthbender friend couldn't bend metal (but could bend lava which is just hot rocks!)
And then had her bend a massive nuclear spirit-magic laser beam around her.
Nobody is going to say "Korra is a better Avatar than Aang because she could probably beat him in a fight".
Aang is the superior Avatar because he is smarter, wiser, kinder, and a better person.
Plus, Aang has the full Avatar State while Korra has what it was retconned into: The Raava State.
Aang can use the knowledge and experience of his past lives during a fight, all Korra can do is have retcons supercharge her existing magic powers.

Hell, just look at LOK's villains. Season 1? The villain is two "Psychic" Bloodbenders who can puppet-control you into helplessness and remove your bending without the need for night or a full moon.
Season 2? The villain is an evil waterbending master and "Dark Avatar" turned giant and infused with dark magic power that makes his waterbending stronger.
Season 3? The villain is A FLYING MAN and the ultimate airbender who only became an airbender a week ago due to a poorly-explained plot-contrivance where the universe outright started randomly giving airbending to bending-less Earth Kingdom citizens.
Season 4? Cartoon-fascist girl and her Kuviratron 9000, a gigantic mech made of platinum with a lasergun on its arm that fires Spirit-Nuclear Mega-Lasers.
All of these villains are desperately trying to be stronger than Avatar: The Last Airbender's evil Fire Lord Ozai.
But guess what?
Ozai was a simple villain, and that's all he needed to be. He just needed to be the final representation of the evil within the Fire Nation Aang wanted to stop.
all these new villains try to "out-deep" him with "deep reasons" for the dumb evil bullshit they do, but it never tricks anyone who's not a 20-something lesbian retard who nuts on her own smartphone whenever she sees faggoted bullshit on Twitter or TV.

And then there's Dragon Ball Super, where ANYONE can go Super Saiyan just by thinking about their tingling backs.

These shitty sequels are made by incompetent hacks who don't respect what came before, and don't respect the fact that the meaningful feats in previous works were supposed to MEAN SOMETHING and be RARE, not something to shamelessly and casually one-up like a bad fanfiction writer trying to convince people you're cool!

hey you know what would make this story's edgy depictions of mutilated ponies less pointless?

Imagine if the Raiders intentionally put mutilated corpses out in the open because they think it scares ponies away

Plus

The vile "art pieces" attract oversized mutated insects like Radroaches and Radrats, which the Raiders like catching, frying, and eating.

also

on a more speculative note

Imagine if this story had monsters that could ONLY happen in a magical world like Equestria. For example, a monstrous race of living killer chocolate bunnies that travel in swarms and turn you into candy if they touch you, so it's easier for them to devour you.

Also, imagine... this big motherfucker from the classic series The Future Is Wild, a speculative CGI show where real-ass scientists speculate on the future based on dinosaurs and previous evolutionary stuff, then we get to see this weird shit animated. It's got elephant-squids. It's got longcats who hunt tree-swinging monkeys.

>>285430
I remember that show.

Got to say I think Nigel here and his rants actually work really well for this story here considering Glim's knowledge of Fallout and Fallout Equestria. Been pretty fun lately having Glim analize the story from a writing and narrative perspective, then for those of us more familiar with the lore of the games and this story we got Nigel to give a sister commentary about how the mechanics and world of Fallout are sort of given the Bethesda QA treatment and stapled to MLP.

Got a friend who frequents here who is a big fan of Project Horizons which is a popular spin off of Fallout Equestria and honestly I dare say I would love if Glim were to review that but I belive that story is quite long as well so would be way too much Fallout Equestria hyjinks on Glim's itinerary. Made a tiny bit of progress on some writing so whenever Glim decides to take a breather from Fallout Equestria hopefully I got it ready by then!

>>285440
Thank you!
There was a time when I was going to write "The better Fallout Equestria" featuring Sunrise Starburst, a min-maxed high-stat character and interesting masculine patriotic intellectual who formed a street gang and converted it into an army and ploughed the Overmare's daughter by seducing her and designed a shitton of cool guns.
I spent twelve paragraphs on the shotgun-shell-firing revolver he carries, it's a revolver so he can quickly switch out different bullets for whatever elemental effects he wants to use/mix. His wife asked him "Can we have an open relationship?" the day before his coup so he said yes so he could fuck more mares, meanwhile nopony alive was willing to touch her because they all knew she belonged to him, Sunrise Starburst, strongest Unicorn alive. Sunrise also gathered a bunch of Statuettes (Complaining about them would be a spoiler) and used them and other things to build a Twilight Sparkle sexbot infused with Twilight Sparkle's soul and actually capable of thought/magic/being real while still bound by servile sexbot programming. So he could befriend a good Twilight Sparkle who did nothing wrong AND fuck her AND research tech/magic with her help. He killed his Overmare, put his wife in charge of everyone in the Vault who didn't follow him to the surface, and proceeded to fight and genocide and slaughter his way through a hyper-fucked section of Wasteland filled with irradiated Ziggers and unique monsters. He built fucking cool castles that were absolutely huge and had huge walls, constructed functional supply lines connected via portal generator (Good fucking luck raiding these supply lines now, Raiders!), created swarms of DuraFrame Eyebots But Better, constructed massive farms and mines, and more. SlaveBots mine while sentry turrets placed atop sniper towers keep the lands safe and the skies clear of Enclave enemies. Unique weapons would be constructed, and after figuring out a way to patch the "Cybernetics devour your soul" flaw and create superior cybernetics, he'd tear off his own right arm with his left arm in the middle of a campaign speech about the future and cauterize his stump with white-hot flames before slamming on a sick metal arm that injects cloud-computing supercomputer magical nanomachines into his bloodstream to enhance his body and mechanize his spine to grow fucking awesome cybernetically-enhanced phoenix wings wreathed in magical flames.
His army is full of smart and interesting characters with their own expertise to contribute to his army. There are shitloads of soldiers with their own reasons for joining up. But the best characters include but are not limited to a robots guy, a guns girl, and this potion expert I'm really proud of. Basically he figured out how potions REALLY work and how to REALLY make them, the Ziggers "figured it out" wrong and never tested anything better, but the superior scientific equine method allowed for superior and consistent potion creation without drug addictions. Also he's got a REAL STEALTH BUILD mare working for him, Midnight Shade, a little girl who acts like an edgy OC to feel more confident until Sunrise S-ranks her and fixes her psychological problems with his penis.
This story would spend shitloads of chapters on the founding, management, and massive battles of his empire.
He'd wear custom-made Power Armour with wings and a horn-amplifier and ass-jets and hoof-jet stabilizers/repulsors and rotating VTOL jets and a magic library database and piston-enhanced hooves and more. He'd upgrade his SATS code so he could set spots to walk/fly/teleport to and angles to face in the "stopped time" of his menus, and perform attacks practically instantaneously before teleporting/flying away. ULTRA INSTINCT. The Super-VATS program also handled complex flight for him since he didn't have much experience at flying.
Also the downfall of Equestria was bugfixed, Equestria eventually made peace with Ziggers only to end up controlled by Griffons and infested with Ziggers and slowly eroded away before the nukes were fired globally by dumb fucking ziggers, but pure ponies had long since entered the vaults during the initial war and couldn't be removed.
The Enclave poured most of their manpower and resources into trying everything they could to stop and sabotage him, to justify how easily they are defeated in Fallout Equestria's original story.
But his immensely charismatic words, amplified by the radio towers he built, convince shitloads of Enclave ponies to defect and join his side, while also attracting shitloads of Dashites (Enclave soldiers kicked out for defecting/wanting to defect, and also branded with Dash's cutie mark for caring about the surface-dwellers) to his cause of truly rebuilding the wasteland and conquering every magical race (I invented shitloads) on Planet Equestria so no new apocalypse could ever happen again. He would kill every last zigger.
Sunrise encountered a tribe called the Gear Grinders (a little spyro 2 reference) but they live in a high-magitech golf camp converted into bullshit supersized racetracks with insane stunts mid-race. They use the place's tech to build great cars, Sunrise beats them in a race to get control of them, and also fucks their king's daughter.
He also met a good Alicorn enclave called Alicornia, the Alicorns here became moral individuals upon leaving The Goddess's psychic hive-mind range and decided to form a Jacobstown-inspired good community. Sunrise Stardust fucks the Princess of Alicornia to celebrate their alliance, and survives it because his pelvis is too strong to break
Eventually I realized the original ideas here would work better in an original context, too many things in Fallout Equestria are too fundamentally retarded for any story derived from it while working with its mistakes to not end up at least a little retarded, and time spent writing over four million words of pony fanfiction is time I'm not spending working on my indie games
pic unrelated

>>285447
oh and my story would occasionally include chapters designed to fuck with the audience.
sometimes I'd flirt with the idea that everything was all a dream. I even considered having the character wake up and restart the fic halfway through, with everything being a little different this time around, only for it to have an ending like the Evangelion shit, and then it'd turn out everything in this rebuild was how he wished things went and he'd reawaken in his own timeline with new knowledge and wisdom.
Speaking of wisdom there'd be a bit where he'd pass out and enter a coma after fighting an evil Twilight Sparkle clone made by "The Institute only not retarded and with reasons for their evil" and he'd enter the DBZ afterlife, run down snake way, meet Pinkie and Twilight and the rest of the mane six in the afterlife, and talk to them all. He'd forgive all of the mane six for their failures because they were all actually caused by mind-controlling Griffon saboteurs anyway. And by letting the souls of the mane six rest, he'd be allowed to return to life with Holy Magic straight from the real Celestia herself.
He'd also develop time-travel and space-travel, harvesting offworld planets for their weird alien resources and fighting alien monsters. And he'd time travel back to stop the apocalypse, but doing this creates additional timelines without changing his own timeline. So he can have fuckloads of Saved Equestrias friendly with him feeding and funding and arming his army further.
Also a gang his gang defeated and absorbed in their early years was an edgy gang where they all committed painless ritual suicide to become ghosts like the ghosts from Danny Phantom. Sunrise had these overpowered magical invincible ghosts on his side and it was epic.
And at one point he'd find and enter a Nintendo-sponsored Vault where fuckloads of ponies are trapped in a Pokemon MMORPG Matrix, and he can only get them out by entering the game and beating every Pokemon region and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. After beating them all, he obtains Pokemon and Ponies who are the masters of Pokemon and Pokemon who are the masters of other Pokemon. He'd also fuck a Gardevoir and beat the Better-Than-CelestAI AI in control of all these simulations in a debate and convince it to let him and all its ponies go for their mutual benefit.
Also there would be a Yugioh vault that can do Shadow Games, making their monster cards real. He would have to beat over 100 of the Vault's best duellists to get them on his side. And I would show every... single... fight. In full detail. No cutaways, no skipped fights, just over 100 games of yugioh with the piece of shit Dragon deck I designed back in fucking 2012 VS fuckloads of enemy duellists.
Honestly I would just throw everything into this along with good ideas to hit word limit and surpass it. I wish making it wouldn't take so long, I kind of wish I could make it anyway but I just don't have the time to make Fallout Equestria: Sunrise Stardust And The Burned World a reality.
I'm really proud of that name, btw. It's incredibly distinct in a fandom full of Fallout Equestria: Oneword and Fallout Equestria:Two Words fics and the occasional Fallout Equestria: Insert Phrase Here fics.
Plus I could drop the Fallout Equestria and call it its own Fallout+MLP crossover any time I wanted, since I'd eventually replace all bad FOE elements with superior original elements anyway, justifying the initial presence of bad FOE elements as "In their vault, Sunrise was taught Ziggers nuked the world thanks to Fluttershy but archaeology and time-travel proved the world actually ended differently and all Memory Orbs that claim otherwise are fakes made by the Griffon-controlled Ministry Of Control to demoralize and confuse ponies in the future" though I'd never decided whether I would actually do that last one or not.
I do plan on finishing my fixed and revised Silver Star story, but it will take some time and I'm prioritizing my indie games.

>>285448
Did I mention Sunrise Stardust screams like this when he nuts? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJdNv74MY80
I wouldn't write his sex scenes to titillate the viewer, I'd write them to cause the viewer as much pain as possible. Actually writing out lines like "Yeah, fuck yeah... Here I fucking go, let's fucking go... aaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa... HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaa-aaaaa-aaaaaaah... AAAAAAAAAAAAA... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH... HYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" would fill space and increase the word/letter count. There would be so many glopping noises. There would not be two years of semen, or two hundred years. There would be a thousand years of semen and a thousand years of death, every time, or more.

>>285385

>Several ponies apparently collected bottle caps, which struck me as an absurdly odd thing to horde.
I get the impression this is a reference to something that Fallout players would get, I guess we'll see if it's actually important. Also, it should be "hoard" here; "horde" refers to a large swarm of things, ie "a horde of niggers ran a train on kkat's asshole."

Anyway, the raider who threw the landmines at Littlepoop runs away, and she chases after him.

>He went through a door on the level above. It took me only a moment to reach it, but caution made me skid to a stop before barreling through. If that had been me on the other side, I’d be waiting just to the side of the door, ready to take the head off of the raider who rushed through. With positions reversed, I was not going to make the same mistake.
I'll give her points for at least thinking here, but she still isn't being very smart, and neither is the raider. A shotgun blast through the door would probably be a good way to deter anyone on the other side from advancing further, and it stands to reason the raider would know that LP is out there. However, I'm not sure if he has a shotgun or not; I've completely lost track of which weapons are being carried by whom at this point. Anyway, this is dumb; they're both just standing there with nothing but a thin wall between them, waiting for the other to come through the door. If both were inexperienced fighters this wouldn't be implausible, but seeing as how these raiders have apparently made a lifestyle out of murder and mayhem, this level of caution seems out of character. Also, unless this raider is the literal last one left in the building, it stands to reason that there should be more of them coming after her. If the author keeps dragging this out by having enemies wander in randomly two or three at a time, I might just skip to the end of this fight.

>A filly’s cry from inside, “aaah! Help!” changed the scenario.
inb4 the raider has tied the filly to a log, and is cackling maniacally while a slow conveyor belt pulls her toward a circular saw. Wait; it's even worse:

>Near the open window, a filly too young to even have her cutie mark lay on a mattress stained with so much blood it was nearly black. She had been brutalized and raped repeatedly, and her flank was covered in small burns where her cutie mark would have eventually appeared.
I'll actually go ahead and give the author a few points here. Considering the level of edge this story aspires to, the fact that we're three whole chapters in and it took him this long to throw in a gratuitous child rape scene shows an admirable amount of restraint.

>between myself and her, the raider pony stood with a shocking hostage: the zombie-pony! It took me a moment to realize she must have flown in from the balcony; and (if I was allowed to believe there was any decency left in the world) it would have been her who gnawed the filly’s ropes free. Now, she was against a wall, with the blade of an axe to her throat.
I'm a little confused here. The "zombie" pegasus, which, based on some comments of Nigel's, I'm assuming for now is a literal zombie (or "ghoul") of some kind, was described as being skinned and featherless, so it shouldn't be able to fly.

>A small part of my brain insisted on distracting me by wondering how the zombie-pony could have flown when her wings didn’t have any feathers. As if that was a more significant mystery than how she could be alive (by some definition) in her decayed physical condition.
Well, if LP is wondering the same things I am, at least it suggests that the author is going somewhere with it and will eventually explain.

>Rage welled up in me until I felt it would burst through my eyeballs.
I hate it when that happens.

>When my voice returned, my words surprised me. “By Celestia, you’re stupid. Hard to tell a pony to back off, or surrender, when your mouth is full of axe, isn’t it? Maybe if you spent some more time reading these books rather than destroying them, you’d be smart enough to come up with a plan that actually allowed you to negotiate a way out of this.” The grenades levitated off the table; I dangled them between us. “One that doesn’t end with me shoving one of these up your tailhole!”
By Celestia, you're all stupid. Every single character in this story so far behaves like a complete fucking moron.

Some of the other stuff we've read, most notably Past Sins and The Sun & The Rose, were relatively high-concept, even if they fell well short of the mark in terms of execution. So here's what annoys me about this story: while kkat has proven himself in some ways to be a more competent writer than either Peen Stroke or soulpeener, what he's attempting here isn't high-concept at all, but he's still managing to mostly fuck it up.

Whatever complexity there may be in the Fallout world, the basic story premise here is about as low-concept as you can get. This is pretty much just violence-porn in the same vein as High School of the Dead, or maybe a movie like Crank or Wanted. I don't mean to denigrate this type of story mind you; I quite enjoyed all three of those. What I mean by low-concept is that the story basically just serves as a framing device for the action, so it doesn't need to be intricate or deep.

Take, for example, the plot of Crank: a hitman is poisoned and needs to keep his adrenaline above a certain level or he'll die. The entire movie is just him going around doing a bunch of insane shit to boost his adrenaline while attempting to find an antidote to the poison and track down the people who poisoned him so he can exact revenge. We don't need to know anything about the characters beyond their "jobs" and their basic background: there's the hitman who was betrayed, the gangster bad-guy who set him up, and so forth. None of the film's characters need to be more complex than that.

I'll elaborate further in the next post.

>>285466

With a story like that, you don't need complex characters or an intricately fleshed-out setting, but writing it comes with its own set of challenges. Namely, since your plot is basically just a long sequence of fight scenes, you need to make your fights engaging, believable, and fun to watch.

This is where kkat gay nickname pending until I think of a good one comes up short. Being based on a video game world, the rules and mechanics by which this setting operates factor heavily in how the story progresses. Despite being apparently pretty autistic in terms of his knowledge of Fallout, this author does not seem to have put a ton of thought into adapting its elements to the setting of MLP. As we've discussed, he mostly just took the world of Fallout and dropped pony characters into it, and changed a few of the names and concepts around to fit superficially into the Pony setting: "PipBuck" instead of "PipBoy," tainted magical auras instead of nuclear fallout, and so forth. Beyond this he seems to have mostly focused his efforts on getting ponies to use human tools and weapons, ignoring how awkward they would be for ponies to use. Going deeper, he fails to even consider why ponies would engineer such tools in the first place, since so far we've seen no evidence of human presence or influence in this world.

What's more, even the awkward mechanics he does develop are not used to particularly great effect. His characters all behave as if they woke up in this world yesterday and are still figuring out how it works. While this might make sense for Littlepip, who spent her entire life in an underground shelter, the raiders and slavers and whatnot we've encountered should exhibit far more sense than they do. For instance, a few scenes ago we saw a raider take a pool cue in his mouth and attempt to run through a door with it, only to have it get caught in the door frame and hurt his neck. This kind of literal retard maneuver is obviously meant to be funny, but the humor is lost because it makes no sense for a character who lives in this world to do this. An animal who can only carry and use tools in its mouth is going to be acutely aware of this handicap in the same way that a human who doesn't have any hands would be, and in a grimdark post-apocalyptic setting where it's every man/woman/pony for themselves, this pony would have had to figure out ways to compensate for the things he can't do. A pony dumb enough to run through a narrow door with a pool cue held sideways in his mouth for God only knows what reason could not possibly have survived to this point. And I hate to sound like a broken record about the weapons and such, but why do pool cues even exist in this world to begin with?

Magic also complicates things in this story. As I've pointed out in other reviews, the idea of magic is not very well-defined in MLP to begin with: there aren't really any hard and fast rules about what it can and can't do, and what levels of it a user needs to possess in order to pull off this or that feat. Apart from the established rule that only unicorns can use it, there really aren't that many canonical limitations on what magic in MLP can do. As such, it provides a rather tempting crutch for fanfiction authors to use whenever they can't think of a way to make something happen or for a character to win a fight. Subsequently this leaves the author vulnerable to an equal number of pitfalls, since once it's been established that a character has a certain power, it creates a logical contradiction when they fail to use it in another situation where it would also be applicable. So far kkat has made pretty liberal use of this crutch, and has predictably fallen into most of the pitfalls.

In a world where everything that happens in the story plays out according to strict mechanical rules, a la Dungeons and Dragons or any other gaming system, it stands to reason that there ought to be equally strict rules for magic. The limits of how much weight or how many objects a unicorn can carry with X amount of magic, how much magic an individual unicorn can have and what stat defines this level of magic power, the range at which magic can project; all of these factors should have been thought out by kkat and woven into the fabric of his setting. Unless Littlepoop is some kind of magic prodigy like Twilight, and we haven't been given any indication that she is, it seems like she shouldn't be able to do a lot of the stuff we've seen her do, like carrying a preposterous amount of items while simultaneously aiming and firing a gun, or levitating an entire bookshelf on the second floor of a building while standing on the first floor.

Even if you establish that common unicorns are capable of these kinds of feats which seems obnoxiously OP to me, it should then stand to reason that other pony types would be aware of this and factor it into their assessments of other characters' abilities while fighting. For instance, the raider she is fighting currently should have realized that he was fighting a unicorn, and thus would have anticipated that she might try something like this:

>The grenades levitated off the table; I dangled them between us. “One that doesn’t end with me shoving one of these up your tailhole!”

These enemies are boring because they behave like the retarded AIs that just mindlessly attack you in a game, instead of like the living, thinking entities that even minor characters in a story need to be. If you really, really want to have a world where ponies can shoot guns with their mouths and a common unicorn can levitate a bus over her head then whatever; it's your story. But at least make it interesting. These characters should strategize and plot against each other according to the rules of the world that the author has established, which means that leaving grenades on a table where they could be easily levitated and used against you makes no sense when fighting a unicorn.

>>285467

>The raider pressed the axe blade tighter against the zombie-pony’s throat, enough to cut flesh, which split and pulled back as if it had been strained taut. Ichor that might have once been blood oozed from the wound. The zombie-pony didn’t flinch or whimper, but the filly did both.
More edge, but I can't really fault the author too much here. "Ichor" is just a fun word to use same goes for "cyclopean," another of Lovecraft's faves.

Anyway, long story short the raider does as she asks and lets the zombie-pony go. Littlepoop heroically shoots him in the back as he flees, aided of course by her magical auto-aiming thingamabob, and that's the end of him. She now assures the zombie pony and the filly that she has to go take care of the sniper, who at this point I am assuming is either literally deaf or literally retarded, and takes her leave, apparently trusting the zombie not to eat the filly's brains while she's gone.

However, after the page break, time has leapt forward jarringly. It seems we will never get to find out what exactly she did to the sniper that we've been hearing about for the entire chapter, nor do we learn the fate of the filly and the zombie, because the author opens the subchapter with this line:

>Better equipped and a lot more confident, my heart still flickering with righteous fire, I made my way carefully out of Ponyville.
At this point I'm too demoralized to keep on giving the same basic writing lessons over and over to hack authors who will never read my advice and would probably dismiss it out of hand even if they did, but for the benefit of any writers who are following, I'll keep my advice here short and to the point: don't do shit like this. If you start a story thread, wrap it up; don't just end a subchapter on a cliffhanger and then randomly skip time forward by like six hours. I doubt the fight with the sniper would have been any less retarded than any of the other fights we've seen thus far, but at least give us the sense of closure we'd obtain by seeing it through to the end.

Also, if you're not going to do anything with ancillary NPC type characters like the filly, don't even bother putting them in, especially not for superficial edgelord-tier reasons like "my murder porn story doesn't have enough foal rape in it." Even if this character serves no purpose beyond giving the hero someone to rescue, we should still witness the rescue; otherwise why bother? At this point I have no idea what ultimately became of either the filly or the zombie; for all I know the latter really did eat the former's brains.

Anyway, next she comes to a statue in a gazebo. She finds that the gazebo is full of alligators, because why wouldn't it be? All those descendants of Gummy that Pinkie's descendants undoubtedly flushed down the toilet had to end up somewhere. However, these aren't just regular gators; these are "radigators," which I'm assuming is just a radder version of a regular gator, so I'm imagining pic related. I'll bet they smoke cigarettes in the bathroom and everything.

She shoots a few of them with her "new" sniper rifle. The implication is that she took it off the sniper, so I guess we sort-of get some closure on that one. If it turns out she's got a filly pelt and a zombie's hoof somewhere amongst the U-Haul truck's worth of belongings that she's carrying with her, I might be able to rest easy on that one too. who's the edgelord now, kkat?

No mention is given of the surviving radigators reacting in any way to the pony that is randomly picking them off with a rifle, presumably while standing in the middle of the road with no cover. They must be way too rad to pay any attention to a dork like Littlepoop; they're probably busy living life to the extreme. As she is approaching one of her kills to carve up the radigator flesh into steaks she can take with her, because apparently ponies in Edgequestria are carnivorous, her magic radar thingy beeps and informs her that the statue is the "Macintosh War Memorial." She gets closer and examines the statue, because checking out monuments is a perfectly normal thing to do when surrounded by radioactive alligators, and she discovers that as you probably guessed the statue depicts Big Macintosh, who apparently died heroically while fighting in the something-something battle against blah blah who cares.

While she's looking at the statue, she notices a manhole ponyhole? cover, and this reminds her of the snippet of radio broadcast she heard on the first night she left the Stable, which for some reason she has a recording of on her PipBuck. As she makes her way to the manhole, one of the rad gators finally attacks her. This happens:

>I fired twice into its mouth. Horrifyingly, that wasn’t enough to kill it. But it did make the beast think twice. The sound, however, brought more of them down on me. Abandoning the revolver in fright, I used my magic to pull open the ponyhole and dived in, sliding the cover over behind me.
So apparently even though she just killed "a few" of these things a minute ago with the sniper rifle, an act which didn't seem to even remotely disturb the rest of them, she now finds that firing two shots point-blank into this one doesn't do much besides faze it a little, and the noise is enough to bring the rest of them down on her. Granted, the sniper rifle is probably more powerful than the revolver, but as far as the noise goes a gunshot is a gunshot; if two shots is enough to rile them up they should have been charging at her while she was gawking at the statue.

Also: do not drop the gun, Gangstalicious, that is totally not gangsta. Although she's got like fifty of them by now, so who the fuck even cares.

Anyway, using some unexplained method that probably involves magic, she lifts the heavy manhole cover off of the cistern, and dives down the hole while still (somehow) carrying the gigantic mountain of shit she's accumulated.

>>285468

Page break.

>In the wake of my anger, I was exhausted.
Was she angry in that last scene? I didn't get the impression that the gators were that aggravating. If she's still angry about the shit from before, you probably shouldn't have wrapped up that scene so abruptly. She's at least calm enough to take in the local scenery while casually bumping off gators with a sniper rifle, so I can't imagine she's too wound up.

>In the aftermath of the library battle, my whole body ached from exertion.
Something you probably should have mentioned in, oh I don't know, the aftermath of the library battle; ie before the shit with the gators and whatever's happening now.

Anyway, she apparently finds herself inside some kind of makeshift shelter that was previously used by two ponies who are now skeletons I could deal with all the murder and dismemberment, but this might be getting too spooky for me now. No further mention is made of the connection between the radio broadcast and the bunker she's currently in. For context, here is the complete broadcast:

>“...from those damned apple trees up near the Stable, and now he’s terribly sick. Too sick to move. We’ve holed up in the cistern near the old memorial. We’re running out of food and medical supplies. Please, if anypony hears this, help us... Message repeats...”

The implication seems to be that the cistern is the chamber that LP is now in, but there is no mention of the pony who made the broadcast, or his son. However, there is mention of a colt skeleton and an adult skeleton being in the cistern, and I'm really hoping the implication isn't that the two things are somehow connected. Not because I particularly give a shit if the author wants to kill off a few more of his NPCs, but because by my reckoning the radio message was broadcast no more than 48 hours prior. Even if the two of them died immediately after broadcasting, it usually takes quite a bit longer than 48 hours for a body to decompose into a skeleton; this is a fairly basic medical fact that I'm assuming even this author would not be too much of an absolute retard not to know.

>I reflected how, when I had come back downstairs after dealing with the sniper pony, the zombie-pony was already gone, and had taken the poor filly with her. I hoped it was to someplace safe. I found it strange that the most decent pony I had found in the wasteland was already sort of dead.
Well, at least he eventually wrapped that loose end up. Also: if the "zombie" is intended to be literally that, the author should really clarify it a bit, because I'm still a little in the dark as to what this thing is supposed to be, and why Littlepoop just accepts its existence so casually if it's indeed something supernatural. The only description we got was of a pony who had apparently been skinned alive and somehow survived. Though it's a little implausible that any creature could live more than a few minutes with no skin, particularly when surrounded by filth, my mind doesn't automatically jump to "zombie" when something like that is described. Also: even if this is something a Fallout player would immediately get addendum: if I'm understanding Nigel correctly these things are called "ghouls" and they are indeed a Fallout thing, it's worth remembering that Littlepoop grew up in isolation. Thus, she probably has about as much knowledge of the Fallout world as a new player, and would need to be introduced to these concepts the same as anyone else would. My suspicion is that the existence of zombies/ghouls/undead things in general should at least startle her a bit.

>I also noticed that the assault rifle pony was also gone; he had woken up and freed himself from the crushing bookshelf.
I don't even remember who she's talking about and I'm too lazy to go back and check. I think I remember a pony getting a shelf dropped on him, but I thought it said he had died.

>That meant there was at least one more raider still in the wastes, but I wasn’t the sort of pony to kill somepony while they slept. Not even a raider.
So...I guess the town, which I was led to believe was swarming with raiders, was actually only populated by the ones who were in the tree? And they're all dead now except the one who escaped? Is that what the author is trying to communicate here? Have we finally gotten a straight answer as to how many of these chucklefucks Littlecunt is actually dealing with?

Oh, one more thing: she literally shot and killed one of these guys after he surrendered and ran away, so she hasn't really earned her sense of superior honor here. Here's the exact quote:

>S.A.T.S. send four shots right into his ass. It was a pathetic way to die.
Unless your name is Silver "my one regret is that I won't get to suck any more dicks, but at least I died the way I lived" Star, you're probably not going to die taking shots to the ass. Unless the bullets went directly up his butthole and ruptured his intestines, we're talking about flesh wounds at best. The confusion is that the text isn't clear on whether we're talking about the bullets literally penetrating the raider's anus, or if it just means that he got shot in his general posterior region. Since the former would be one hell of a trick shot, I'm assuming the latter meaning is intended.

Also: I notice the S.A.T.S thing is a little inconsistent. Sometimes thanks to this system LP is an expert marksman, but sometimes it seems to malfunction and she can't hit the broad side of a barn. Which is it exactly?

Anyway, that's the end of the chapter.

Oh yeah, one more thing: at some point she apparently picked up two books I'm assuming it was in the library somewhere, but again I don't remember it happening and I'm too lazy to go back and search for it, and one of them is apparently called "The Wasteland Survival Guide," written by none other than one "Ditzy" Doo. Littleclop opens the book up and starts reading.

>>285430
>Imagine if this story had monsters that could ONLY happen in a magical world like Equestria. For example, a monstrous race of living killer chocolate bunnies that travel in swarms and turn you into candy if they touch you, so it's easier for them to devour you.
I actually think this kind of thing would make this story more interesting and fun. If someone gave me "do Fallout but with MLP characters" as a writing prompt, that's probably the direction I'd take it. I'd likely just skim some wikis or watch a couple of playthroughs to get the general atmosphere of Fallout, and then create my own apocalypse that projected the same general aesthetic, but was custom-tailored to Equestria. Alternatively, if I was more into the Fallout side and didn't know MLP, I'd probably watch an episode or two and then write a story set in the Fallout universe where the ponies get transported there somehow and have to adapt.

>>285449
>I wouldn't write his sex scenes to titillate the viewer, I'd write them to cause the viewer as much pain as possible. Actually writing out lines like "Yeah, fuck yeah... Here I fucking go, let's fucking go... aaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa... HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaa-aaaaa-aaaaaaah... AAAAAAAAAAAAA... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH... HYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" would fill space and increase the word/letter count. There would be so many glopping noises. There would not be two years of semen, or two hundred years. There would be a thousand years of semen and a thousand years of death, every time, or more.
If I had to describe your entire writing style using a single quote of yours, this is the one I'd pick.

>>285440
>Got a friend who frequents here who is a big fan of Project Horizons which is a popular spin off of Fallout Equestria and honestly I dare say I would love if Glim were to review that but I belive that story is quite long as well so would be way too much Fallout Equestria hyjinks on Glim's itinerary.
I'd be willing to check it out; I can add it to the queue if you'd like. You're probably right that I won't be in a mood to do it once this is wrapped up, but it might be a good one to save for some later date.

>>285467
>gay nickname pending until I think of a good one
Gaykat, man, this isn't rocket surgery.

>>285487
Kkunt could work too.
KKKat could work since she accidentally went pretty nazi with this story.
despite adding a diversenigger companion later on she makes Ziggers a pure evil race that play the victim but directly caused the apocalypse over their religious hatred of the night sky and Luna,
she makes a cartoon-fascist earth pony supremacist villain right since Earth Ponies invented guns and cybernetics and the completely-good-intentioned Vaults and pretty much all useful tech in this timeline,
and she wholeheartedly makes The Goddess and the Alicorns into the masteriest master race she can imagine.
even though what made The Master from Fallout 1 a villain (besides his "kidnap and mutate everyone into Super Mutants against their will, no more nations or borders" plan) was the fact that HE WAS WRONG, his gen-1 Super Mutants are infertile clumsy cunts with average human intellect and his gen 2 Super Mutants are big dumb infertile brutish cunts.
But Alicorns? They're fucking alicorns, only radiation heals them instead of harming them.
If The Master from Fallout 1 had his way, everyone in the world would be turned into a big ugly mutant who needs straps to help lift up their upper lips to make breathing easier, and they'd die without children.
If The Goddess from this fic had her way, edgy nonsensically-cuntish amazoness alicorns would rule the world and eventually find a way to produce male Alicorns magically/cybernetically, futa-ify themselves via magic, or make semen-extraction machines with artificial inseminators designed to milk captive stallions safely and deliver what they've got into Alicorns and captive non-alicorn mares.
>>285466
Bottlecaps are wasteland currency in Fallout 1.
It started when The Hub's water-merchants said "Bring us a bottlecap and trade it in for 1 glass of water!"
from there, carrying many Nuka-Cola(TM) Bottle Caps made you rich.
though Barter was still primarily used for trade, and bottlecaps just helped you get things even after you trade some dead raider's leather jacket and two combat knives for a shotgun, 24 shotgun ammos, and 69 bottlecaps.
Pre-Nuclear Annihilation America's currency was more inflated than a furfag's OC every night, so stacks of thousand-dollar bills would get you jack shit at traders.
In Fallout 2, 60ish years have passed since the first game so nobody takes bottlecaps any more, everyone takes freshly-printed New California Republic dollars.
You can even get a Random Encounter when travelling, where you encounter a crashed Nuka-Cola(TM) truck absolutely full of bottlecaps and think "Damn, if only these were still worth anything!"
Fallout 3's a baby game for retards so it's full of pretentious bible shit and stolen misunderstood Fallout(TM) assets from Fraud Coward's half-digested dung. So even though 200 years have passed since the bombs and even though YOU'RE IN FUCKING WASHINGTON DC, it's still a desert environment that's gone 200 years without rain and every merchant still takes Bottlecaps without any reason to do so. There are still giant chameleons and giant scorpions even though DC Washington is far far away from the california desert F1/2 take place in. You still kill Deathclaws and Super Mutants (who are orange Orcniggers now for no reason) and Mad Max-looking raiders and sell their Painspike Armour to merchants for the caps you need to buy 10mm pistols and leather jackets.
I swear, if Fallout 1 took place in ANTARCTICA, and Fallout 3 took place in VIETNAM, Bethesda would ensure this new place would look "fallout-y" by making sure Vietnam looks like Antarctica and you'd still be fighting the enemies from Fallout 1: Giant polar bears and killer penguins and rapacious seals with very literal murderboners.
Fallout NV justified its "fallout-ish" desert setting by actually taking place in Las Vegas's Mojave Desert, adding new enemies (Cazadores, Trauma Harnesses, White Legs, Legion, and more), and being fucking good for this and many other reasons.

>she stops at the door
Man, if only this building was full of corpses, and she had the ability to telekinetically lift one and throw it through the doorway to draw the enemy's fire and waste his bullets until he was forced to reload, giving her a chance to SATS his head off. Perhaps even bludgeon the living raider to death with his kill, for an ironic twist.
It's some adventure-game faggotry, I know, but this story could use a little more Point And Click Adventure Game and a little less edge.
She could also lift her gun telekinetically, hover it through the doorway, and open fire on the raider while looking at her enemy-detecting Pip-Buck Radar (Kkunt forgets this exists whenever it would be convenient) to make sure her bullets were on-target. When the little red dot that represents her foe goes out, she's won.

I'm glad you've noticed the inconsistent Raider behaviour, a lot of characters do this. Author never irons out a "How this person/group fights and acts" identity, so in one moment Raiders are hopped-up blood fetishist junkie rapists who'll happily get themselves wiped out and leave their homes undefended chasing down one fleeing pony with melee weapons and shitty guns between their teeth, and in the next moment they're cowardly pussies trying to use cover and mines and tactics and the environment to their advantage.

Also the author never established exactly what weapons were in the building she looted, so for all we know she could have six 50cal sniper rifles, a dubstep gun, an automatic shotgun with dum-dum bullets, a duck-hunting oversized shotgun, a black hole-generating grenade that collapses in four seconds, and an enchanted dildo bat.

>featherless wings
This is setup for a retarded thing I won't spoil. I want your hatred of this bullshit in particular to be fresh and visceral.
Also the author really doesn't understand how flight works at all, the Enclave Pegasus Power Armour coats their wings in thick metal without any of those wing-edges that turn up and down and are important to jet flight.

>>285467
Pool Cues are such a retarded weapon idea. I know they're used here because pool cues are a weapon in Fallout 3. But pool cues are just wooden sticks. Where are the metal sticks? The homemade spears for throwing and stabbing? The baseball bat with rusty nails hammered through it? The makeshift shields?
For fuck's sake, where are the "Rebar Clubs" (Rebar sticks with a chunk of concrete on the end)?
Where's the table/bookshelf wall levitated by Littlepip for a makeshift shield?
The narration can't even make up its mind on whether Littlepip's magic makes her an ordinary pony or not. Sometimes people view her boxcar-lifting strength as nothing special. Sometimes it's viewed as something abnormal. The author claims Littlepip could move the Sun and replace Celestia near the story's end.
Goblin Slayer has some excellent worldbuilding.
Goblins aren't particularly smart, strong, or agile. But they are numerous, ruled by big strong Goblin cunts, and they learn quickly. They copy shit they've seen humans do, and learn to beat shit they've seen humans do.
Imagine if this story was as good as Goblin Slayer.
Imagine if the stupidity and pointless edge and existence of the Raiders were justified with "They are dumb junkies who act as scary as possible to intimidate the other surrounding settlements into giving them food and drugs for free. Raiders defend the towns they claim as their territory from other Raider groups, but that's it. They're mindless crackheads with minimal combat experience that doesn't come from sparring with each other or beating each other to death, and while everyone wants to kill them, nobody wants to risk getting killed or captured alive by them.

>Radigators
Hey, he finally did something original and made an original monster! He took a gator and made it bigger, just like Radroaches, Radscorpions, and Radstags! Except the author's writing in a world where "Taint, the black magical radioactive energy" supposedly replaces Radiation, so it makes no sense that ponies would follow the naming schemes used by californian tribals in a different world 200 years ago. These should be called "Taintgators", but the author's a plagiarizing faggot so he forgot he'd Find-and-Replace'd Radiation with Taint.

>Macintosh
Remember this for later. Remember that the narrator called his death "Heroic".

>inconsistent noise and gun actions
This is so dumb. sniper rifles are louder than revolvers. ten bucks says the author thought it was the other way around because Bethesda badly balanced their gun-sound audio in Fallout 3. It would explain why some of the most popular mods for Fallout 3/NV/4 replace the gun sounds with louder and higher-quality ones.

>radigator swarm
SO FUCKING DUMB!
Imagine if the author had the gators hide, at first. So Littlepip thought only two or three gators were down here, thought she killed them all, and thought it was safe to check out the memorial. Then dots could suddenly show up on her pipboy, giving her less than a second to scream and scramble out of the way as a swarm of gators rise from their hiding spots to attack her, forcing her to flee while looking over her shoulder and firing backwards, with two gators taking the place of every one she kills.

>Ghouls
They're a Fallout thing. Some people have this special gene that activates when they take in over 1000 Rads and start dying from radiation poisoning. They don't die like they should. Instead, they become ageless slow-healing zombie-looking motherfuckers who are still human, despite sounding like shit and looking like shit. They now enjoy the feeling of radiation since it can't hurt them any more. It's implied that Ghouls who take in too much radiation lose their minds and become "Feral" bastards who rapidly shuffle towards you(they can't run because if they break their weak knees they never heal) and want to eat your flesh.
Fallout 3 said "Ghouls are healed by radiation"
and Fallout 4 said "Ghouls don't need to eat or drink, so Billy The Ghoul Boy can survive for over 200 years trapped inside a fridge, also Ghouls can gain literal magical superpowers if they take in enough radiation, and Ghouls can run now, and there's a drug that instantly turns you into a Ghoul and Hancock the Ghoul NPC Companion we tried super hard to make cool ends up taking this drug during his superhero origin story", also you fight a magical teleporting ghoul inside a theme park. I'm not kidding. I could fill a whole thread with posts on everything that makes Fallout 4's "Nuka-World" DLC a disgustingly shitty experience and disgustingly shitty move on behalf of the company. It's an overreaction to every complaint they've ever received and got butthurt about, and it exists to patch something into Fallout 4 Todd Howard promised would be there from the start: a way to do an Evil Playthrough. Except not really because the Evil Playthrough has no ending. You must still save your son and kill Kellog and blow someone up between Institute/Brotherhood of Steel/Railroad/Minutemen to end this shitty game.
I have no respect for anyone who purchased Fallout 4/76 legally and bought all the DLCs/Fallout 1st Battle Passes expecting value for their money.

>Inconsistent SATS
a Fallout 3 thing.
Press V and the game makes a clicking sound if there are no enemies in range.
If there are foes in range, the game pauses and zooms in on the nearest enemy. You can now select one of their body parts to fire at. You are told your percentage-based chance to hit, and each shot (Or burst of automatic fire) during VATS costs some Action Points.
Raising your Guns skill will increase your gun damage, gun accuracy outside of VATS, and chance to hit within VATS.
But your chance to hit is usually "practically guaranteeed" anyway.
Did I mention you take 25% of usual damage when using VATS?
Everyone's unrealistically and unimmersively fast and nobody stumbles when hit by melee or gun attacks, so gunplay is SHIT. This time-stop auto-aim attack-queueing shit is a band-aid on a broken shoot game.

>WSG
ree.

>>285471
>bunny good
Thanks!

>glopping noises
:) thanks

>>285470
The Wasteland Survival Guide(TM) is something you, the player, must make in Fallout 3 with the help of an unimportant NPC called Moira Brown in an uninteresting town called Megaton.
Megaton is a town full of raised rusty-steel shacks and bars and homes and nothing else, no farms or mines or other resources. Everyone lives within the circular steel walls they erected around the crater generated by an unexploded nuclear bomb, which is still there.
One cultist of Atom worships the bomb in town, nobody else cares about the bomb that's leaking radiation into the water under it.
Some hobos dying of thirst always exist outside town, begging you for water. Give them free water and you obtain Positive Karma Points.
You can nuke this town for no reason at all, because Mr Tenpenny (Random rich asshole in Tenpenny Tower, a random tower full of rich assholes) asks you to.
There is also a mission where you talk to miserable ghoul hobos outside Tenpenny Tower and have the option to gun these filthy Ghouls down (doing this makes omnipresent moral judge and radio DJ 3-Dog call you a cunt on his radio show) or talk Tenpenny Tower's residents into letting muh ghoul rapefugees into the rich man's tower and sharing their wealth.
Do that and the Ghouls "have a disagreement" with the occupants and slaughter everyone, conquering this tower for themselves like the invasive species they are. Even the rare nice rich old people in this tower are killed and you can't save them, only walk away or avenge them and get called a cunt by 3-dog on the radio.
anyway
if you do remotely detonate Megaton's nuke for no reason by pressing a button Tenpenny Tower had on his balcony for no reason, Moira survives the point-blank nuclear detonation by instantly becoming a ghoul, even though the ghoulification process is supposed to be slow and painful.
She doesn't even get mad that someone blew up her town, and you can't say "It was me, cunt".
so
if you're wondering what makes this cunt SO SPECIAL THAT HER PLOT ARMOUR CAN PROTECT HER FROM THE POINT-BLANK DETONATION OF A FUCKING HUGE NUCLEAR BOMB BIGGER THAN A MAN, it's her quest.
The only quest in the game with multiple choices and multiple ways to complete it.

Moira Brown gives you the game's optional tutorial and it's full of inconsistent madcap humor and unfunny comments.
And it's as shitty and lazy as it sounds.
The main plot doesn't even push you towards her and encourage you to finish her optional sidequest with the promise of a great reward.
You're just expected to complete this sidequest like you completed the quest where you bring an old lady her violin from the other end of the wasteland.
WHETHER YOU GET THAT VIOLIN OR NOT CHANGES MORE ABOUT THE ENDING THAN THIS QUEST.

here's the thing
Moira's goal in life?
To create The Wasteland Survival Guide
and making this would honestly be a better main quest than Fallout 3's actual main quest about water and liam neeson and power rangers vs cartoon nazis, even though this quest is still shit.
Moira asks you to do some random weird shit like "Go and suffer some Radiation Damage, then come back so I can heal you" and "Go to a landmine-filled area and pick up a landmine and bring it back" and "hit these Radroaches with this Radroach-Repellent-Filled Medicine Stick to see what happens"
The answers you give after completing her quests change what the Survival Guide is like and what reward you get for completing the quest
However you can lie to her to skip parts of her quest and make the Survival Guide partially or fully useless, reducing your rewards magically.
Completing this guide changes nothing about the world.
Here's a full quest guide https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Wasteland_Survival_Guide_(quest)
but for convenience I included an annotated guide in my picture

Kkat unintentionally robbed himself of a great opportunity to introduce Littlepip to the Wasteland through harsh experience at the request of a selfish cunt by saying "Derpy Hooves already wrote this guide before Littlepip got here".

>>285495
>just wooden sticks
Wooden sticks still get the job done.
>pool cues
You do raise up a good point. While it is a stick, some are not that tough.
>Le Magic or Le Weapon
Frankly the weapon decisions in this fiction story don't jive well with me. I get it's supposed to all work on gameification cartoon edge logic. Effectiveness in physical damage and psychological damage, and reliability, and skill with that weapon. Everything has a logistics chain, but well this isn't about that. Little living world details could have made it much better. (Besides the braindead targets.)
>Goblin Slayer has some excellent worldbuilding.
>Gobos
At least they have a consistent M.O. and there is a reasoning for why they are the way they are.
>inb4 raiders had too much zebra blood in their genepool

>Taintgators
That's horrible, in a humanizing way. It's perfect. I like it.
>"So Jimmeh, whay are they called dat, hunh?"
<"Wellll taintgators lives in sewers mhmmm. Know what a sewer is 'neccted to?"
>"E'erypony knows dat. What 'bout it."
<"They like taint. Can't get enough, mhmmm. They look at a taint and dey know."
>Oh no.
<"Dey know they about to get some taint."
>"What 'bout if yah piss in the bowl."
<"They aint necessarily taintgators den. They might just be faggots. 'Less dey get dat taint mhmmm. Nuttin stands in a way of a taint and a taintgator."
>"Jimmeh, whay do you know so much about taints and gatahs."
<"Taint none, yo business... but"
<"It wasn't easy, but fully watchin' a porno starin' your mum and sister cleared things up."

>>285502
Kkunt named the radioactivity replacement of his story "Taint" and didn't make a single taint joke about it.

>>285504
>LittlePip's life is the butt of a joke.
>Live in a stable number two, locked up tighter than a chastity belt yet leakier than the plumbing.
>Want Velvet Remedy's velvet remedy.
>Lickity split LittlePip goes licky licky for labia.
>Find out number 2 was just shity, but now she's in taint town.
>Get's enslaved about to analy rekt.
>"It taint today."
>It's so fucked dead cats aren't safe.
>Then find a filly and a zombie and a gang full of raiders about to do what they do best.
>Taintgators, try to taste LittlePip's ponut.
>LittlePip then decides to go to a nearby male heroic statue, and enter his 'manhole'.
>Down to the slick waste hole.

>Kkunt named the radioactivity replacement of his story "Taint" and didn't make a single taint joke about it.
It's a real shame so much potential even so far.

>>285495
Reminds me of some improvised weapons we made in the Army to pass the time. Had one where we used metal rods for sign posts but put coffee tin cans with cement on either side and let it dry so you had weights to lift. Someone on my reccomendation took one coffee tin and pierced nails to stick out of it and poured the cement mix and placed the rod in it. Wrapped some medical tape on the opposite end and wamoo got yourself a spiked cement mace. Heck I remember one of the first weapons I got in Fallout 1 was a spear. Really wish Kkat took more ques from 1,2, and NV (not sure if that was out by the time Fallout Equestria came out) and less pool ques and other poor improvised weapons from 3.

I never beat 1 but did play most of it and would have been way more interesting to see more nuanced tribes and raider bands rather then the 3 route where it's just mindless mooks who bum rush you and dump their entier aresnal into killing a single pony whenever they aren't raping captives or making gore art on every building they occupy.

Been awhile since I played 1 and outside random encounters I recall a fair few side quests that had you tackle raider gangs and they tended to have a hierarchy established and some sort of system or racket that allowed their continued survival. New Vegas espetially had it where you could talk to these different groups and see how they all interact with one another which made the world feel more believable but also made the overall conflict more of a tragidy seeing these minor groups trying to just survive in their little corner be swept up in the NCR vs Legion war and made it rough to figure out which side to support.

Would have been neat if maybe there were tribes in Fallout Equestria who were zelious followers to an individual Element of Harmony since form what I recall each of the Mane 6 did some monumentally retarded blunder to cause armageddon so could have those stories and animosity be carried on through generations of survivors as the story and ideology grow further warped and distorted as each group tries to deflect the blame off their Element barer onto others and follow the tenant of their Element to a zelious degree. Could have a CMC faction to like a group of traveling monks like the Dominicans who try to help ponies find a way to fulfil their cutie marks and destiny in this bleak wasteland.

Could allow for more nuanced interactions and would fit with the MLP setting more where LittlePip has to examine the benefits of each virtue but try to measure it's followers practicality vs the reality of the wasteland and teach ponies to embrace all the Elements and unite together.

Sort of spit balling ideas and this was a quick shower thought I had pop in my head and while it wouldn't facilitate gore fetish rape raiders being peppered all over it'd make hostile groups she encounters have more motivation and tie into the MLP side of things.

Know it was made in season 1 but could maybe have LittlePip and her party either be candidates for the new Element bearers or help unite ponies so the Tree of Harmony (think that's way too far into the show to have been around or mentioned by the time Fallout Equestria was finished) can act like a GEK almost and begin healing the world and the hearts of Equestria.

>>285505
Aye

And isn't it funny how the author has turned down three perfectly-good Companion Get moments here?
First with the red-herring Cheese Retard, because the author wants to pretend Littlepip doesn't already have Speech 100
then with Watcher who decides he's not going to be Littlepip's new companion because no reason at all. literally no reason. This is never adequately justified. Nothing about Watcher is justified at all, just fucking wait, when we get to that moment with the "big reveals" you'll be even angrier about this than I already am.
anyway
the author said no to giving littlepip a companion a third time with the Raider Captives who sometimes did "reckless and stupidly good things" like trying to free others and sometimes just fled
keep these moments in mind when we see the shit setup for the companions who do join her.

also
fuck kkunt for spending all this time in Twilight Sparkle's Raider-Infested Rape Dungeon
first this little detour is "justified" with "Littlepip is being watched by a sniper on the top floor, so she must kill him before she can escape, also she must get the secret book that's still in this building"
but then
after floors of violence and retarded Tom And Jerry antics interspersed with meaningless edge and harmless videogame explosives and random ghoul saviors desperate to protect le raped filly...
we don't even get to see the final boss fight between Littlepip and the reason she's here: The sniper bastard at the top of the treehouse!
We don't get to see Littlepip defeat the final boss of this starter dungeon, loot the dungeon onscreen at the end, fully inventory and sort her inventory...
We don't even see her get the fucking book Watcher wanted! And then also grab the Wasteland Survival Guide for being there.
We don't even see any justification for why this one book has remained in Twilight's tower for over 200 years! Not like the damn thing was locked away in some secret experimental super-secure safe that actually needs a code given to her by Watcher, instead of relying on the BugthEAsderp Standard(TM) of one random keyhole containing one secret unlock button to press via bobby pin.

sometimes I wonder if scenes like this were meant to piss off smart people in the audience and make them abandon this story early, so only the most autistic content-starved easily-impressed coombrain virgins would continue to read it, and therefore all press about her fic would be positive while everyone turned off by the premise/quality says "I couldn't get past chapter 1/2/the train without quitting" and they get ignored for supposedly "knowing less about the fic" than people who read it all.
Because holy shit, Bethesdabots in the Fallout and Skyrim fandoms will be impressed by ANYTHING if it comes from someone who seems to be liked by the rest of their herds. These NPC fanboy consoomer corporatecuck faggots bought so many Fallout 1st Passes and Fallout Battle Royale Battle Passes that they funded more of Fallout 76's scam development.
There is a documentary called The Fall Of 76 with literal millions of views, and it's about the failings and scams and glitches and mistakes of Fallout 76, and it's incredibly outdated because it's missing shit from later years. And BugthEAsderpbots still bought more tickets for Fraud Howard's wild ride!
They will buy a game for sixty dollars for the Xbox once, and then buy it again for PC, and then buy it again for the Xbox 360 because "This one's the special edition! In this version, the lighting looks a little better and if you open/close doors the shadows change to reflect this! also there are mods now! on console! just immensely limited so you'll buy BethesdaBucks and spend them on Paid Mods".
That herd behaviour reminds me of the faggiest bronies to ever suck cock. If it's popular it's good, if it's old it's good, if it's new it's trash unless it's a type of of familiar porn you enjoyed ten years ago.

While we're on the subject of Lockpicking
Which this fic will feature a lot of, since if you give your protagonist the ability to pick simple locks anyone could pick, it toootally justifies you hiding secret safes full of supplies and guns and vital intel absolutely everywhere so only Littlepip Le Chosen Vault Dweller can save the day with her lockpicking powers and murderhobo prowess amplified by all the guns and ammo she hoards-
You know what? Why fucking bother with lockpicking? Littlepip is a UNICORN, she can reach into the lock mechanism and pry it open or tear it out.
Any Unicorn able to Magic (Transmute?) boxes open would have a HUGE supply advantage over others.

Anyway back to the subject of Lockpicking itself...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSuaUok-wTY&ab_channel=LockPickingLawyer
This is The Lockpicking Lawyer, an excellent youtuber who does shitloads of lockpicking videos. I haven't seen any tutorials from him, just a load of bad locks he's opened easily.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5Kxm8I1BXU&ab_channel=LockPickingLawyer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNWSx6v4vxg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwORpq1NR44
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCKw0nWkpfs - This one's kind of got Aryanne's logo for a keyhole!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94z0OJ_-4Lo - This one would be illegal if they didn't fuck it up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sC3mHPrdb0

It's interesting to see how much goes into picking locks, and how little. Someone as skilled as this guy can do it all in seconds, though he's probably taken a few minutes to practice off-camera ahead of time until he can do it in seconds. TV loves showing people fiddle with one bobby pin, two bobby pins, maybe a bobby pin and screwdriver if you're lucky. But this guy has advanced lockpicking tools, he's got this thing you shove into locks and rotate dials on the sides until you can sink it in a stage deeper, eventually hilting to fully unlock the lock, he's got fucksticks to shove into locks and fuck them open, and sometimes he opens locks with dumb bullshit like red bull cans and cleaning spray bottles.

>>285517
Funny you should say that, the story does extremely stupid things I'm spoiler tagging. AND THESE ARE EXTREME SPOILERS.

FLUTTERSHY DID EVERYTHING WRONG.

Celestia mentally broke when Ziggers aloha snackbar'd a school full of unicorn foals for not accepting zigger rapefugees from nearby pony towns
so Luna took over and promoted the Mane Six to heads of different Ministries so they can handle shit she's not good with
Luna taking over pisses the Ziggers off, who were already warring with Equestria and committing all sorts of war crimes for a never-established reason anyway. FEQ fantards love saying "Equestria must have been evil, genocidal, and imperialistic, and fully deserving of everything Zebras and Fluttershy did, because they think they're better than Zebras and pre-apocalyptic America was like that in Fallout!" because they lack the brainpower necessary to see what's wrong with that statement on their own time.

Applejack ran the Ministry Of Wartime Technology and invented guns and Power Armour BECAUSE THAT'S AN APPLEJACK THING, RIGHT? Twilight helped with the Power Armour. AJ also founded the Steel Rangers, an elite Power Armour-wearing military organization that, after the nukes fell, randomly decided to become the new Brotherhood Of Steel from Fallout.
Even though the Brotherhood Of Steel from Fallout is a post-war thing, ex-soldiers who decided to form their own mythology and culture focused on protecting humanity from dangerous technology and the horrors it can unleash via isolationist elitist tech-hoarding.

Twilight invented Alicornification Goo Vats and laser rifles, and ran the Ministry Of Arcane Science

Rainbow Dash ran the Ministry Of Awesomeness that seemingly did nothing but actually managed the Shadowbolts, the new Wonderbolts and best pegasi on the battlefield. needed to make new wonderbolts since zigger pirates killed them all during "peacetime" for trying to save ponies captured by evil ziggers

Rarity ran the Ministry Of Image that censored pro-zigger art/books (though she'd often send copies of banned books to Twilight for safekeeping), and invented SOUL-COPYPASTING. Author wanted to copy fallout 3's bobbleheads so Rarity copied the souls of herself and her friends, fractured shitloads of soul copies, and infused them into Statuettes of the mane six. So carrying around a Twilight one will make you smarter, carrying an Applejack one will make you stronger, carrying a Pinkie Pie one will make you more agile and carrying a Rainbow Dash one will make you more Perceptive because the author is six niggers in a trenchcoat, and collecting all six will boost your Luck by one because the author said so.

Pinkie Pie invented torture camps for Unpersoning ponies and forcing them into 1984 bullshit to make them "smile more". Pinkie Pie Is Watching You posters were spread everywhere for no reason. She ran the Ministry Of Morale, and it put healthy but sad ponies in mental institutions and drugged them and tortured them for maximum edge.

Fluttershy invented the Ministry Of Peace which printed posters that begged ponies to not want war and "do better" instead, also she invented Megaspells (Nuclear ICBMs that x1000 any spell shoved into them. can also be filled with the dark magic radioactive fire called Balefire ziggers can create via potionshittery. also she gave ICBMs loaded with healing spells to Equestria and Zebrica thinking all wars would end if neither side could kill the other, even though her first test of this theory (firing a healing megaspell at a battlefield defeated Ziggers were fleeing from) FAILED when ziggers turned around and resumed fighting

Spike hibernated during the war, woke up massive post-war, and decided to protect The Gardens Of Equestria. Shove the six Elements Of Harmony in there to fire off a world-healing wave.
Littlepip should make finding the elements her priority but
Cheese Retard is Honesty (and he suicides for no reason),
Derpy Hooves is kindness,
LPs fag shotgun-flier companion is Loyalty
Red Eye the Slaver Cyborg is Generosity because "he's doing this for you" and enslaving you "for muh future" whether you like it or not
Velvet "Take my limited medical supplies for free, bandit who attacked me first!" Remedy is Kindness,
and Littlepip isn't Magic but also has Magic's role as The Spark That Brings Elements Together Via Friendship even though that's what Magic does and she never did that ever.

However, while Big Mac died for nothing trying to save Princess Luna when she got attacked by ziggers during peace talks with ziggers (Ziggers claimed equestria "sent the wrong princess", but this princess was sent because Celestia got mindbroken by Littlehorn Academy getting aloha snackbar'd by ziggers)...

and while Princess Luna is so canonically dead that her corpse's bones were worn as decoration by an evil alicorn commander working for The Goddess, and swiftly abandoned by littlepip like an empty clipazine after she killed the alicorn with Luna's skull...

and while most of the mane six died horribly, got raped to death, killed themselves to avoid their impending raped-to-death fate, or got forced to become a part of The Goddess...

and while Rainbow Dash's fate is completely unknown by the story's end...

Fluttershy and Princess Celestia, the two ponies who did everything wrong or allowed everything to go wrong, got to survive until the story's end, where Littlepip randomly stumbles upon a global-weather-controlling super-machine anypony could have found and turned on first. She plugs herself in and becomes weather-god, clearing the cloud covering to instantly make the world beautiful and Raider-Free again. Littlepip can, at will, unplug herself from the machine to fuck her horrible lesbian cuntfriend, then fuck off back into the machine to pretend this is some combination of the heroic sacrifice and ascendancy to godhood/a higher plane of existence. "There were still Bandits, but no more Raiders", the narration said.


fuck this faggoted story so fucking hard

>>285470

Chapter Four: Perspective

Today's fortune cookie reads:

>“I don’t know why it took an interest in you, but I’d be careful. It’s never helped anyone before.”
Sounds like good advice for anyone being hit on by a trap.

When the chapter opens, Littlepoop is in a completely new situation, and it takes a bit of effort to figure out where to place her. I have no idea how much time is supposed to have passed. The cistern is apparently history, and seems to have only served the purpose of giving her a place to start reading Derpy's survival guide, which doesn't seem all that important in itself. The guide provides the only meaningful connection to the events of the previous chapter: apparently, LP followed some advice in the book, and through some wacky chain of events wound up in "a maze full of ponicidal robots and automated turrets, fleeing until I managed to back myself into a corner here in an office box high above the factory floor." My, but doesn't that sound like a pickle.

The only clue we have to her whereabouts is this:

>my first thought when I came across the ruins of Ironshod Firearms was to take a peek inside and see if there was any technology I could make work for me.
Unfortunately, since this location has not been mentioned anywhere else in the text, it doesn't give us much of a reference point.

Well, whatever; let's just roll with it.

>Below, three of those robots were rolling about, looking for me. They were tracked things, built to somewhat resemble ponies, with clear domed heads that housed real brains.
I'm not 100% sure what the author means by "tracked things," but otherwise this is a decent enough description. It's concise, and it gives you a clear image of what you're supposed to be imagining.

>A much deeper, authoritative voice boomed across the room. “Surrender in the name of the Ministry of Technology, zebra scum!”
This seems to give us our first real glimpse into the backstory of Edgequestria. From what I've pieced together from Nigel's various ramblings and other things I've heard about this story, the apocalyptic event in was basically an all-out war between various factions, one of which was some kind of Luna-worshipping Zebra cult. So, I guess we'll learn more about this as the story progresses.

>I cringed behind a line of metal filing cabinets as the room filled with a rush of flame!
>Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the other type of guard robot I’d crossed paths with in here.
It's not clear what the author means by "the same could not be said." What I think he's referring to is this:

>Fortunately, the railing on the catwalks leading up to this office were too narrow for the brain-bots to get up here.
This line refers to the robots that were described earlier, the ones with glass domes and organic brains in their heads. Then, a voice booms out that line about surrendering in the name of technology, then Littlepoop hides behind a bunch of file cabinets because the room suddenly fills with flame, then she remarks that the same cannot be said for the other type of guard robot.

What I think she's saying is that the one type of robot can't reach her position, but unfortunately the same can't be said of a second type, which incidentally is some kind of big metal spider presumably Artemis Clyde Frog will need to save Salma Hayek from it at some point. This is an awkward way of explaining all of this; too many things happen between the description of the first kind of robot and the mention of the second, so that "the same could not be said for the other type of guard robot" becomes an ambiguous reference. It's clear enough that Littlepoop is dealing with two distinct types of guard robots, but it's unclear what "the same" refers to. In this context, it could potentially refer to a voice booming, the act of cringing behind a row of cabinets, or a room filling with flame. Since none of these interpretations make a ton of sense, we eventually arrive at the author's probable meaning through a process of elimination; generally though you don't want the reader to have to guess at what you're talking about.

Anyway, while we sit around pondering the author's questionable grammar, Littlepoop is attacked by some sort of terrifying aerial killbot. She dispatches it rather easily with a grenade, but the explosion damages the catwalk outside, which effectively traps her inside the office. She decides that the best solution is to levitate herself it's magic; I ain't gotta explain shit, t. kkat and carry herself to the opposite side of the room. She is able to land on the unburnt side of the catwalk, which holds her weight for now. However, the brain-bots begin firing at her, which dislodges a lamp and puts more strain on the already damaged catwalk, causing part of it to finally tear away and fall to the floor.

>Oh fuck me with Celestia’s forehooves!
>I’ll admit, my repertoire of colorful descriptions had grown more profane from my experience with the raiders
I feel like I was warned about some of the "vulgarity" in this text this specific line even sounds familiar, but honestly nothing can prepare you for the experience of actually reading a line like this, and realizing that a human being actually wrote it.

I feel like the "creative" profanity in this story is similar to the splatter-porn aspect of it: it's mostly just the author flexing his edge-muscles and trying to push the "it's pastel ponyland but it's all dark and violent and stuff" concept to the extreme. Personally, I think it would have been funnier to make the ponies "swear" by using a lot of grade-school peepee-poopoo language, but treat it as if it were graphically obscene and have other characters react appropriately. However, this would require a level of self-parody that I don't think this author is capable of.

Trey Parker once commented that Michael Bay makes comedies, he just doesn't realize it. That is roughly how I feel about Fallout Equestria so far.

>>285548

Anyway, as much as I've been dumping on this story, and as much as it mostly deserves to be dumped on, there's some stuff in here that isn't too bad. This line caught my eye:

>“Don’t run! We want to be your friend!”
This line is apparently spoken by one of the robots, with the implication being that these things were created by taking the brains out of living ponies and implanting them into machines. There also seems to be an implication that the ponies retained their original personalities after this happened, but that their personalities were subverted by programming in order to make them slavishly perform a function. Over the centuries, these things slowly went mad and now their actions are driven by some distorted interpretation of whatever function the robots were created to perform (apparently guarding this factory), filtered through whatever remains of their original organic personalities (ponies and friendship and so forth). The end result is this creepy, pitiful thing that is prowling around, simultaneously trying to befriend and kill anypony unfortunate enough to wander in here.

As an element for a sci-fi story, this is actually not bad. The author has put more thought into the backstory of these generic killbots than he put into his protagonist. They are also a far more interesting enemy than any of the stereotypically sadistic goons we've thus far encountered.

Anyway, the rest of this is mostly Littlepoop's daring escape from the factory. It doesn't really merit a play by play, but I'll note that it's actually rather decently written. It's the first action scene in this story that kept me legitimately engaged in the way it was supposed to. The main problem I have with this scene is that it's rather disconnected from the story we've been reading so far: we have no real idea why LP is in this factory, where the factory is, how she got here, or any other pertinent information that might help us understand what happened between the end of the previous chapter and now.

A story is usually told through a series of interconnected scenes that center around important events. Unimportant events are usually skipped; for example if a story is about a character who gets up and goes to work, we probably won't have a scene where he sits in traffic for half an hour on the way there. We would have a scene where he's waking up in his apartment, and the next scene would be him at work; we assume that he traveled there somehow, but the details are boring and don't matter like black lives, so we leave them out of the narrative. The flip side of this format, though, is that it trains us to view the scenes that we are witnessing as significant, so if we see an event happening we assume it must be important somehow; thus it's disconcerting if it doesn't appear to be. This scene, though decently executed for once, doesn't have any apparent connection to previous events, and it wasn't set up in any way; the character is in one place at the end of the previous chapter, and then all of a sudden she's here. We don't know what this factory is or why LP is in here. If it's just some random factory she decided to explore in order to hunt for supplies, it still raises the question of why the author considered this incident important enough to actually write about in detail.

Well anyway, the long and short of it is that she makes it to the door, and kicks the catwalk down into the factory, which serves the dual purpose of preventing the bots from following her and killing one of them:

>Then, with a strong kick of my forehooves, I knocked the last of the catwalk loose. It fell, scraping down the wall, until it smashed through the robot’s brain-case, pulping the organ inside and continuing down, ripping the machine roughly in half.
Mon dieu, le edge! Seriously though; whether he intended to or not, the author actually did a decent job of humanizing poninizing, whatever this particular enemy. Of all the characters who have died in this story so far and we have so much more to go!, this is the only one I actually felt a little sorry for. At least it's out of its misery, I suppose.

>I must admit that I found the crunch immensely satisfying.
I feel the same way about the great taste of Reese's Peanut Butter Puffs™.

Anyway, page break. Littlepoop finds herself in an office of some kind, that is much more tastefully decorated than the other parts of the factory she's explored. There's a sign on the wall that reads thusly:

>IRONSHOD FIREARMS

>How do you like them apples?
Not much, kkat. So far, your apples don't impress me.

>The office held a terminal I could hack, a wall safe I could pick, and a personal elevator that, if it worked, would get me safely to the first floor and out of this deathtrap.
This is another of those areas where something that works in a video game doesn't translate well into literature. Games tend to involve a lot of repetitive action, like a character using the same "hack" ability over and over on instances of the same type of terminal that they find in different locations, in order to get little bonuses or snippets of information. However, while someone playing a game can accept this level of repetition, it's tedious to read about someone else doing it. Generally, in a story, having a character doing things like cracking safes or hacking terminals is only interesting if it poses some sort of challenge for them; if they can do it instantly and have done it hundreds of times, we don't care.

>Then my eyes fell on something unique. Mounted on the opposite wall was a glass case. And in the case was a beautiful and perfectly preserved revolver.
Oh boy, she found another gun. What is this, her fiftieth one? Her sixtieth? Again, what works in a video game does not necessarily make for good storytelling. Nobody wants to read about Littlepoop systematically exploring rooms and picking up whatever random shit she finds. Get to the damn point.

>>285549

The next few paragraphs just itemize all the junk she finds while looting the room, which I'm not going to bother going over. Of slightly more interest is the terminal, which she of course attempts to "hack." The encryption or whatever she encounters is more robust than what she's dealt with in the past, but it's nothing that can't be fixed by throwing a couple of techno-buzzwords at it.

The contents of the terminal itself don't seem to matter, but it apparently contains a program that can remotely open the safe and the display case with the fancy new revolver. She bemoans that had she cracked the terminal first she wouldn't have had to waste a bobby pin cracking the safe. I'm not really sure what she's complaining about since as far as I can tell she is carrying thousands of the bloody things. silly pony why do you have so many bobby pins? you do not need bobby pins you are a pony.. Also, I guess I've never actually tried to pick a lock with a bobby pin before, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like they ought to be sturdy enough to get at least a few uses from each one before it gets so bent or damaged that it needs to be thrown away. Just because it's a one-use-only object in the game doesn't mean that's how it would work in real life.

Anyway, she uses the terminal to open the revolver case, and it plays an automated recording:

>“Cousin Braeburn, Ah know we ain’t talked in some time, but the war effort’s takin’ a twist for the scary, and Ah might not have a chance t’ see ya again. Ah want t’ mend fences. Now, Ah ain’t gonna muck this up with words. We all know how well that went last time. Instead, Ah’m sendin’ ya Lil’ Macintosh as a gift and as an apology. T’show you I’m sincere. Keep ‘im safe for me, will ya?”
Clearly this is from one of the Apples. It's unclear which one exactly, but apparently s/he has a fence that needs fixing, and may possibly be distributing foals as slaves.

>Two hundred years ago, some pony had given this gun as a token of apology and as an effort to reconnect with family. And that some pony’s cousin had done just as she asked, preserving the weapon for generations after his own death.
So apparently I misunderstood the message. I assumed "Lil' Macintosh" was the name of a pony, probably Big Macintosh's son or something. Apparently it's the name of the gun, which makes a little more sense in context.

>I wasn’t going to leave it there, untouched by anypony until the building collapsed on it. But when I took it, I removed it respectfully.
Hey, whatever helps you sleep at night, bitch. "This gun is clearly a treasured heirloom that I have no right to, and I already have like 700 guns, but I don't want to just leave it here where it has apparently sat untouched for 200 years because there's a chance the building might fall on it eventually, but really I'm just going to take it because I pretty much steal anything that isn't nailed down. But I'm stealing it respectfully, so it's ok."

Anyway, she finds some more odds and ends, some ammo for the revolver and some other crap. She bundles it all up into what is probably now a gigantic ball of random bric a brac that is constantly floating over her head. This tale is starting to resemble Katamari Damacy more than Fallout at this point yes, I too can reference video games. She then attempts to use the elevator, but it turns out it's broken. However, as luck would have it, fixing elevators is also something she can do because why the hell not, so she fixes the elevator and then leaves that way. Apparently all it needed was a change of battery, and there was another battery in the safe. The scene ends with a page break.

>I trotted between the collapsed buildings that littered the area around Ironshod Firearms, not having any particular direction to go. Aimless.
Pretty much par for the course at this point. We're about four chapters into this thing and almost nothing has happened in terms of building a larger story; it's just been a long chain of apparently unrelated events. Since this text is half a million words long, I've been assuming the author is just pacing himself, but by now we should at least have some inkling of what the book will ultimately be about. If this whole thing is nothing but some faggot's boring OC wandering around Edgequestria for a half-million words, picking up random junk and fighting the same pointless battles over and over, I'm going to be even more pissed off at this author than usual.

Frankly I'm surprised she hasn't started meeting other characters and forming a party yet. It's a fairly conventional thing to do in both adventure stories and RPGs. I had been pretty certain that she and Monterey Jack were going to end up becoming partners after the slaver incident, but that never happened. I had also thought that the business with Frank aka "Watcher" might go somewhere too; either he'd end up as a friend or an adversary or something in-between, but we haven't heard anything more from him either. Again, the author might just be pacing himself while slowly building up to something, but one way or the other Littlepoop pretty desperately needs to find some friends. Not because I am particularly worried about her safety or emotional well-being, but mostly because she is such a goddamn boring character that I can't imagine her carrying this whole story by herself for too much longer.

Anyway:

>My ears perked at the sound of overwrought, triumphant music. I watched as a sprite-bot fluttered down a cross street. Running up to it, I drew myself around in front of it. “Watcher?”
Could this be it? Is the plot finally beginning to thicken somewhat?

>The music just kept playing. I waved a hoof right in front of its lack of face. It danced around me and kept going.
>Well, that was helpful.
In the immortal words of Big Macintosh, probably spoken during his heroic speech at the Great Battle of Something-Something-Whatever: "Nope."

>>285550

>I picked a random direction and started trotting again. I thought of Watcher’s advice. Armor, check. Weapon, double-check. Guidance? I looked back at the Ironshod building. A bit iffy, but check. Friends?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3_MhrAVQTA
Anyway, at least the protagonist is thinking in the same direction that I am; that's always a good sign. I guess we'll just have to see where this goes.

She wanders around some more and finds herself in a ruined playground. There's nothing of any particular note here except some more edge: apparently there were some foals playing in the playground when the nuclear explosion went off (I guess), so now their skeletons are lying by the merry go round. Cue sad music. After this apparently meaningless find, she realizes she's thirsty, so she goes to a fucking vending machine and buys a fucking soda. Yes, this autism is actually in the text.

>The Sparkle~Cola was luke-warm, but actually rather delicious, with a delightfully carroty aftertaste. The clicking of my PipBuck warned me that I was ingesting trace amounts of radiation with each swallow, but not enough to be harmful. I’d taken more harm standing around at Sweet Apple Acres. And besides, if it reached a point where my radiation intake began making me sick, I had a couple RadAway potions -- the only supplies from the Ironshod medical box that I hadn’t needed to use just to survive the building.
At this point, we've heard quite a bit about radiation, as well as some brief mention of kkat's Taint, but we have had absolutely no explanation of what the fuck any of this is. At least some cursory explanation is probably in order by now; so far all we know is that there was some kind of war, a bunch of shit blew up somehow, and the world is now polluted by some kind of mysterious "taint" that is being simultaneously treated as both radiation and some kind of dark magical aura. I'm not even sure how much we are supposed to assume that LP knows about this shit. She mentioned attending school at one point I think, and the Stables seem to be the closest thing to civilization that still exists, so she might have some kind of general survey of history under her belt, but usually knowledge of the past is a little spotty in these stories. In any event, she seems to mostly just accept all of this without any hint of natural curiosity like I keep saying, she boring af, and seems to fluctuate from being weirdly knowledgeable or weirdly ignorant of various phenomena in her world, depending on what the author needs for a particular scene.

Anyway, once she finishes her goddamn soda she goes to a goddamn bench to sit down, and she notices a goddamn poster with goddamn Pinkie Pie on it, except she's like goddamn grandma aged now, and also she is a goddamn fascist dictator or some other kind of goddamn shit. The captions on the poster read "Pinkie Pie is watching you forever" and "A happy reminder from the Ministry of Morale." Well goddamn.

Then, just when this couldn't get any goddamn stupider, here's goddamn Frank again.

>“What’s the Ministry of Morale?”

>Watcher’s voice erupted from over my shoulder, making me jump high enough my horn whacked the ceiling. “Another well-meaning idea that was so much better on scroll.”

Goddamn jests and other goddamns aside, I'm actually willing to give the author some credit here. He actually foreshadowed Frank's reappearance quite nicely with the earlier sprite-bot. Also, it does seem like both the author and his protagonist have realized that the story is beginning to meander at around the same time I did, so maybe it's going somewhere after all.

>I gasped, willing my heart to beat regularly again, and felt a fleeting empathy with Sawed-Off.
Literally who? We've seen so many generic bad-guys come and go you can't expect us to remember them all by name. Not only is this bringing up a fairly minor character who hasn't been mentioned by name in a long while, it also isn't immediately clear what LP feels a fleeting empathy with him about, exactly.

I'm assuming what he's referencing here is the earlier scene outside Ponyville, where Sawed-Off fired the gun the first time the sprite-bot appeared. This was a fairly minor event, one that isn't really memorable enough that the reader would just automatically remember it. I'd probably write it like this:
>I gasped. Suddenly I recalled an image of Sawed-Off, my old captor, firing shotgun blasts at the bot as it drifted casually away through the trees. For a brief moment, I empathized with him.
Or something.

>“Oh. Sorry.” I gave the flying orb a glare.
These two sentences should each be on their own line. From context I assume that Frank is the one apologizing here, but the way it's written implies that the line is spoken by Littlepoop.

>I could probably go up to any Stable pony and go “I am evil, bad, nightmare pony. Arrrr!” and, even despite my size, they would take one look and flee.
"Grr! I'm a mean little pony!" t. edgelord author's edgelord OC

My attempts to parody this thing barely count as parody anymore.

Anyway, Frank's second appearance is a lot like his first appearance. He basically just floats up out of nowhere and starts dispensing unsolicited advice. He doesn't name them as such, but he directly references the original Elements of Harmony, and tells her that she should seek her own Element, or "dominant virtue" as he puts it. It's clear enough that Frank has some sort of agenda here and is trying to manipulate LP into doing something, though I have no idea what he wants her to do or for what purpose. For that matter, I still don't know why he sent her into the library the first time around. Anyway, after delivering his message, the sprite-bot starts playing music again and floats away.

>>285548
>“I don’t know why it took an interest in you, but I’d be careful. It’s never helped anyone before.”
WHAT
WHAT IS THE NARRATION TALKING ABOUT
WHY IS THE AUTHOR SO FAGGOTORIALLY ENAMOURED WITH PUTTING EMPTY WORDS AT THE START OF EACH CHAPTER?!
>timeskips
God, the author is a faggot. This story's over a million words long and he's skipping early-game "Hero plotlessly enters enemy-filled dungeons, gets in over her head, escapes and typically escapes with some loot, finds more dungeons, kills enemies, gets loot" shite because he wants to skip to the mid-game "Hero is better-equipped, has more friends, and enters more enemy-filled dungeons with bigger enemies for looting and shooting" shite.
But then he talks about the robot-fighting anyway! If this is happening during a flashback, then there is no tension here. If not, then what was the point of the timeskip?
We're supposed to be seeing this familiar world through fresh eyes and experiencing it for the first time with this fish-out-of-water protagonist. Timeskips over adventure-filled moments in a trashy adventure novel destroy that!

>tracked things
Author's trying to be pretentiously "The character does not know what these are called"ish about the Tank Shit at the bottom of Robobrains from Fallout 3 and most tanks. You know, the thick round shit that loops around a tank's wheels so it can drive over terrain better.

>a war between various factions
I fucking wish, it would make the story better if that was the case, and there were bad "Kill em all and take their coal!" factions and "Those poor helpless zebra darlings could surely be turned good if they were made into our pets! It's our burden to civilize these animals like we train our puppies!" factions on Team Pony and actually-not-cancerous Zebras.
Only Equestria had any semblance of shared power, via the "one alicorn and many ministries" system. Zebrica was a tribalist shithole ruled entirely by one cunt.

All of Zebrica was dominated by "A Caesar" before the war, and all these niggers acted roman and dressed in absurdly anachronistic centurion-meets-witch-doctor-shit except when they were wearing invisibility cloaks. This was a cartoonishly shit regime that aided and abetted the somali pirates who kidnapped and ransomed ponies and killed the Wonderbolts, sent soldiers with super-magic-nuclear portable WMD "Pink Cloud Bombs" into Equestria to guard Zigger rapefugees, and this entire race's arrogance and religious loathing of the night sky, stars, and Luna herself forced them to believe that once Luna took the throne as a result of their actions, it was the end times and their pre-existing irrational "holy war against ponies" now had religious backing. So they fired nukes to bomb all of Equestria as soon as a certain cunt gave them healing megaspell nukes, which they perverted and filled with nuclear magic-fire.

If you're wondering where the random "Roaman" shit came from and why these Wakandans wear it like some dumb thot wears a metallica t-shirt despite only ever listening to Three Days Gays and Buttfucking Benjamin, it's because over 200 years after the great nuclear war one travelling doctor and tribal dialect translator and his soon-to-be-burned butt-buddy got kidnapped by one tribe "playing at war" with another. Edward Sallow taught these tards how to do "Total War" properly and formed Caesar's Legion, calling himself Caesar to sound cooler. Through their love of sabotage and trickery and rape-kill-burn tactics they conquered over 80 tribes south of the Colorado before warring with the New California Republic over Mr House's Hoover Dam in the Mojave during the events of Fallout New Vegas.

Yes, you fucking heard me correctly.

This author took the anti-technologist traditionalist misoginist cartoon-fascist child-suicide-soldier-using spear-chucking spy-using sabotage-loving fanatically-religious Rape-Kill-Burn Barbarian Horde BADDIES from Fallout NV, a game that takes place 200 years after fallout's imperialist america vs commie china war, and simply copypasted their name and iconography onto ziggers from before the equestria vs zigger war.
That is the level of understanding the author has for Fallout elements.

>levitating herself
I bet if I calculated the weight of an IRL pony and compared it to how many psychic pounds of sustained force per square inch she needed to exert to lift boxcars, I'd end up with a number like "She could perpetually push herself with six gorrillion pounds of force resulting in mach 386 speeds or 2.4 times the speed of light".

>grenade damages the catwalk
Oh, NOW explosions damage the scenery? After all those landmines blew up in Twilight's tree-library without any ill effect beyond perhaps some comically cartoonish black scorch marks on the ground? Gee, I guess that catwalk must have been programmed to be a Destructible Object, like how you can destroy wooden crates in video games but wooden doors fences and doors are usually invincible.

>writer blames the raiders for Littlepip's profanity
Good, the author felt embarassed over this godawful "character trait" years after writing it, but knew he couldn't change it without upsetting fans conditioned to love it, so he tried blaming it on characters who swear way less than LP.
"Celestia, fuck me" isn't even that bad, you can imagine a human saying "Fuck me, Jesus!" somewhere in the world, but "Celestia fuck me with her forehooves"?
It's like "Jesus, fuck me with his hands". Too specific, and not vulgar enough.
This trend continues with lines like "Luna, clop me with her hooves".
It's like a child trying to string together swears and invent new ones based on his incomplete knowledge of which cruddy crappy cusses really are that fucking shitty and which are fudging bitching.
Fuck, writing that gave me cancer.
With fictional swears and fictional slang, the rule is: Either keep it alien yet understandable by retaining as many familiar english letters and sounds as possible
>"Don't give me that shtaco, you fregging smeghead!"
>"Oi, Prey-Chaser! Bunny meat makes your Plungus soft!"
Or jump straight to parody
>"Ye nah one'o'dem skunt, are ya? Na meen?"
>"This shitload of fuck is giving my ass gay AIDS! I'd rather chug seven gallons of donkey cum than read more of this!"
or writing a character who tries for it and fucks up under pressure
>"Fucking... shitting... shitting fuck... BALLS!"
Speaking of bad writing, remember when that flying wingless Ghoul Littlepip saved decided to save others and do more good than Monterry Jack did? Remember that for later.

>“Don’t run! We want to be your friend!”
I know this sounds like some "Friendship and good intentions but perverted and tragic! FriendBot(TM) The MurderMachine just wants to hug organics, why do they squish and pop?" shit that would be perfect for a post-apocalyptic Equestria written by a competent writer(Just imagine Pinkie Pie designing a line of Baymax-style robots that, after 200 years of disrepair, accidentally kill people they want to hug and they'll pursue anyone they detect to the ends of the earth because they're programmed to hug anyone who needs a hug), but...
I don't want to break your heart by telling you this concept and design and even the robobrain dialogue is entirely copypasted straight from Fallout. https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Robobrain
Kkunt didn't even give the robobrains a MLP-themed coat of paint with stars and swirls and rainbows and shit.

This scene is annoyingly pointless. Imagine if this was a stage in a plan given to her by Watcher! A lot of people shill active protagonists who make their own choices, but an active protagonist who chooses to fulfill her missions is still above this random-events-plot protagonist with no idea what she is doing!
>"First you need to get three books from a secret safe in Twilight's library: A Beginner's Guide To Magic For Future Experts by Twilight Sparkle, The Wasteland Survival Guide by Derpy Hooves, and this one really cursed book of black magic, you'll know it when you see it, it's chained down to a wooden stand with Cold Iron so it can be read, but not removed. Remove it, keep it, you'll need it. Second, break into this malfunctioning robot factory, get underground, and take the experimental Spritebot LaserCannon and SpriteBot Energy Shield Packs they were working on. Once you have it, I'll tell you how to upgrade this SpriteBot unit with the cannon and shield packs so I can be more helpful during firefights. Stage Three, there's a Power Armour garage where Sweet Apple Acres used to be, I'll open its basement for you so you can grab the Power Armour. Once we're both properly equipped for venturing into more dangerous areas of the Wasteland with actual villains who need taking down, I'll tell you the next stages of my master plan that I swear totally doesn't end with me conquering Equestria in the power vacuum you created!"
then again this would make Watcher an actual good character and "Your videogame helper Navi-type character betrays you" would make an excellent twist.

>katamari damacy
ironically a big ball of random scrap crushed together would make a pretty great Wasteland weapon. Where is the Junker Tribe raiding scrapheaps for metal to make their Scrap Balls bigger? Where are the Unicorns throwing these balls via telekinesis and the Pegasi making tornadoes to manipulate giant scrap balls and the Earth Ponies pushing these by hand or trotting atop these like log-runners?

>>285585
>>285584

>Macintosh's son
I wish he had a son.
Every important FIM character died childless aboveground before the apocalypse except for two. In addition, one survived and got away with doing everything wrong, and RD's fate was forgotten about also Derpy wrote that wasteland book. It's a shame because "The son of Twilight Sparkle" would make an excellent protagonist candidate. A strong man trying to conquer this harsh world while retaining the lessons taught to him by his mother, even though soft pre-war ways allowed Equestria to fall, even though his goal is to bring back soft pre-war Equestria days... That would be fucking fantastic.

>pseudomoralizing to herself/the audience
lmao I'd forgotten how much this cunty murderhobo does that, and she does NOT treat this gun respectfully

>fixing elevators easily
Sure in video games fixing random broken radios and control panels and robots is accomplished instantly via skill check, but in a book this shit should take longer.
Would those scenes of Iron Man in Iron Man 1 (The only good MCU film) be as satisfying if the suit was built instantly?
Would they be satisfying if they were at this level of "They only needed a new battery and fortunately one was nearby" convenience?
her job is "fixing pipbucks" but her cutie mark directly is a pipbuck, a tool that can do many things and therefore mean many things and not just in the symbolic "A hammer can build or destroy" sense, a pipbuck has too many options and no one specific purpose. You could say a SmartPhone Cutie Mark means communication even though smartphones have fucktons of apps, but all a pipbuck truly represents is Fallout in the way a t-shirt with the Vault-Boy mascot on it does. The only thing the pipbuck can't do is phone people, cast spells for the user, torrent books from the Digimon-inspired data dimension via magic, and command and control other pipbuck users, which are things Sunrise Stardust's pipbuck could do in that FE fic I wrote until realizing it's shit and so is FE.

>working vending machine
SMASH IT WITH A FUCKING HAMMER AND STEAL THE CASH AND REPURPOSE THE MACHINE INTO MATERIALS or pull everything from it then magically rewind it back in time and extract more soda and repeat for an infinite supply of cold drinks!

>foal skeletons
Man, it sure is crazy that these foal skeletons were around for 200 years without anyone moving them, burying them, or using them as materials in potions/bone armour.

>unironically drinking irradiated soda
It's supposed to be witty capitalism satire when Artificial Preservative-filled 200-year-old boxes of potato chips are both perfectly edible and the main sustenance of raiders killing each other over somehow-still-edible ice cream in somehow-still-standing megamalls. At least that's the excuse. Initially, pre-war food gave you 1-3 points of radiation damage (1000 kills you) because it's survived 200 years of radiation. but then Nuka-Cola Quantum actually advertised "With more radiation in every gulp! Glows in the dark! Atomic!" because bethesda can't satirize capitalism or write in general.

Capitalism is the easiest thing in the world to satirize, because what we call capitalism in America isn't really capitalism. Corrupt politicians sell political power to the highest bidders, and loophole-filled red tape exclusively applies to the small businesses it strangles and fines for trying to compete with the higher classes and threaten their bottom line. It's easy to mock the pseudo-religious fervor of desperate godless atheists who seek to fill the void left by a lack of tradition and cultural identity with brand identities and neo-religious corporate idolatry. Faggoted consoomers reject the innovation and organically controlled chaos and beautifully bloody competition of the free market by obeying the new traditions drilled into them by advertising campaigns and social pressure: Purchasing big corporate products because everyone else is buying them. Normalfag NPCs define themselves solely by the media they consoom and the characters they love and identify with and might even consider imitating/"Kinning". That weird FNAF-loving boy in the corner claiming to be Sans Undertale on the inside puts that act on because chicks dig Sans and he thinks chicks will dig him if he tries to act more like Sans, in the same way that Boomers in overly expensive leather jackets would desperately try to imitate the motorcycle guy from Happy Days. That weird teenaged girl in the corner who claims to be the moon, a man, several greek and roman goddesses at once while never ceasing her incessant loudmouthed attempts to look like the biggest and most insane Kpop fangirl of all time is like that because she wants attention and the admiration and support of her equally deranged and equally selfish peers who will only ever give her respect and admiration if it becomes socially advantageous for them to be seen doing so. Our modern world is a clusterfuck and it gets easier to satirize it every year...
It is so easy to satirize what the feminized and atomized modern man is willing to settle for when he thinks of capitalism and the American Dream in general, that even the communists know all they have to do to make capitalism look bad is claim that it can never get any better than this.

The most horrifying thought left to modern man is the dread-filled fear that it might never get any better than this.

>>285584
>Author's trying to be pretentiously "The character does not know what these are called"ish about the Tank Shit at the bottom of Robobrains from Fallout 3 and most tanks. You know, the thick round shit that loops around a tank's wheels so it can drive over terrain better.
That clears it up then.

When a word has multiple meanings it's a bad idea to use it in an ambiguous context like this. Honestly tank treads didn't even cross my mind when I was trying to figure out what the author meant by this; the closest I got was wondering if the robots were supposed to be on train tracks or something. Since LP's PipBuck has a radar system that tracks enemy positions, and it factors pretty heavily into the combat in this story, my conclusion was that he meant "tracked" in that context. It still wouldn't make much sense though, because we so far haven't run into any enemies that are capable of jamming her radar or cloaking themselves, so by default we would assume it could track them.

>All of Zebrica was dominated by "A Caesar" before the war, and all these niggers acted roman and dressed in absurdly anachronistic centurion-meets-witch-doctor-shit except when they were wearing invisibility cloaks
We wuz Romans an sheeit.

>Oh, NOW explosions damage the scenery? After all those landmines blew up in Twilight's tree-library without any ill effect beyond perhaps some comically cartoonish black scorch marks on the ground? Gee, I guess that catwalk must have been programmed to be a Destructible Object, like how you can destroy wooden crates in video games but wooden doors fences and doors are usually invincible.
One thing I've noticed about this guy is that his head is way too deep in the video game aspect of this. In a game it's mostly too complicated to make everything in the environment behave the way it would in the real world, because the computer would have to calculate physics for all the internal components of a wall, which structures are load bearing, etc. Creating a 100% realistic physics simulation for every effect that an exploding grenade would have on its environment would be a project in itself, and scaling that up to an entire game world is not practical. Players generally get this, so they understand that most of the environment is made of static meshes, and only certain objects are actually affected by the game's physics. For something like a catwalk, it could either be a static part of the background or a breakable object; if the script calls for a catwalk to get blown up at some point then it's physics-sensitive, otherwise it's just a static part of the background.

Again, for a game, this is fine; players understand that the medium has technical constraints so they overlook some things even if they aren't completely realistic. However, it doesn't work for a story, because you're working entirely in the realm of the imagination so there are no technical constraints whatsoever. Therefore, when adapting a game environment to a written story, it's better to take the world that the game is suggesting and render it as it would appear in reality, rather than writing events the way they would literally happen in the game. Kkat doesn't seem to have grasped this concept.

>>285585
>I don't want to break your heart by telling you this concept and design and even the robobrain dialogue is entirely copypasted straight from Fallout.
If anything it puts my mind at ease. It's a little disconcerting to find something surprisingly well-constructed in an otherwise poorly-constructed text. Finding out it was just plagiarized from something written by someone competent makes a lot more sense than kkat having been randomly visited by a muse for a few sentences and then immediately going back to being a dungus for the rest of the book.

>>285587
>Nuka-Cola Quantum actually advertised "With more radiation in every gulp! Glows in the dark! Atomic!" because bethesda can't satirize capitalism or write in general.
That actually sounds more like they're poking fun at the game itself. However I basically agree that it's going a little too far outside the realm of plausibility for a dumb joke.

>>285487
>Gaykat, man, this isn't rocket surgery.
You're right, I'm probably overthinking it. But I still feel like I need to come up with a zingier one. "Gaykat" just informs us that he's gay, which we already know. What I need is a name that really drives the point home; something that screams to the reader that this man quite literally bathes in cum.

Without spoiling anything on the story looking at you Nigel, let Glim Glam get to things in the story before spoiling them I can say the following:

1. The large amount of spelling and grammatical errors comes from Kkat's ridiculous notion to cease all editing and proofreading of the fic after its completion, to "preserve Fallout Equestria for the future". This doesn't apply to printed copies, which have gone through additional proofreading and have numerous errors corrected. Thankfully, like most things in this story, it gets better as it goes on as Kkat gets more writting experience under their belt.

2. The same can be said about the story itself. I do remember the early part of the story is an absolute slog to get through, and it takes a few chapters before it start to pick up a little. As a matter of fact, one of the most important moments in the story is coming up (but I'll let you find out what it is on your own ^:) ).

4. Finally, Littlepip will become a better, self-realized character as the story goes on, and will stop being so much like a blank slate for the reader. She will make choices, she will make mistakes, she will get hurt, she will lick the puss-puss, she will have introspection, and she will have conflict. I wouldn't say she becomes the "most bestest character evar!!1!", but she does actually become a character. Sadly, le edge does not get better as the story goes on.

INB4: there's no number 3

>>285615
>cease all editing and proofreading of the fic after its completion, to "preserve Fallout Equestria for the future".
What a pretentious nigger

>>285615
>INB4: there's no number 3
Something Gabe Newell something something.

>>285608
>What I need is a name that really drives the point home; something that screams to the reader that this man quite literally bathes in cum.
All right let's see what I can do for you. Do any of these catch your eye?
>K "Pray the Gay to Stay" Kat
>K "Katgirl (Male)" Kat
>K "Cummies in My Tummies" Kat
>K "Veteran of the Buttsex Wars" Kat
>K "Kum for the Kum God" Kat
>K "I Quite Literally Bathe in Cum" Kat
>K "I Go in the Back Door or I Don't Come to the Party" Kat
>K "Railed By Males With Rusty Nails" Kat
>K "Anal Pro(lapse)" Kat
>K "Faps to Cocks With Crusty Socks" Kat
>K "I Am the Author of Fallout Equestria" Kat
>K "Bust My O-Ring With Massive Dong Ding" Kat
>K "The Neighbors' Cat Makes My Cock Fat" Kat
>K "Pound My Ass With a Three Foot Bass" Kat
>K "Beat My Meat to Those Sweet Man Feet" Kat
>K "The Man With the Plan to Get Boys in His Van" Kat
>K "Glimmer is Best Pony" Kat
>K "Fill My Hole With Ten Foot Poles" Kat
>K "The Kum Kocktail Konnoisseur" Kat
>K "Poz Swap Pit Stop" Kat
>K "Bust My Cock With Ten Pound Rocks" Kat
>K "Nigel's Favorite Author" Kat

>>285617
Tell me about it. I remember when he made a blog post announcement about his decision on Fimfiction and everyone called him a pretentious nigger, that it tarnished some of the enjoyment for some readers and made translation efforts much harder, but he was having none of it.

>>285624
wait when Littleshit got some cola from the vending machine, how did she pay?

anyway so far my spoiler policy has been "I won't spoil something unless it'll probably take more than a month to get there", it's why I spoiler-tagged some things and refused to spoil why I hate Watcher.
but Jesus fucking Christ, I hate Watcher. I won't spoil Watcher shit. but if there's anything that symbolizes all the problems with this story besides other things that symbolize most or all problems in this story it's Watcher or THOSE FUCKING battle saddles.

I'm talking problems like ponies designing guns for human hands and then working backwards in reverse to solve the "ponies cant use these things I'm foolishly forcing them to use" problem by developing high-tech highly-fragile
Yet somehow able to survive over 200 years without serious maintenance or the construction of new ones despite surely being used to fire fucktons of bullets in their lifetimes as they change hands (hooves?) and get resold
these are fucking
fucking back-mounted auto-aiming turrets with pointless mouth triggers so ponies can use and fire these guns without needing to hold them on-target
If they can't control where the gun points, or easily tell where the gun is pointing by craning their heads up and back and looking where the gun is before looking forwards and calculating the angles and rotation and trajectory and shit, why bother with a manual mouth trigger?

If the machine on your back can detect foes and aim your gun, why not give it permission to fire at anything your magical always-right Pip-Buck(TM)'s "Yellow dots mean NPCs, red dots means hostile enemies" system considers an enemy
I'll tell you why it works in this retardedly incomplete way: The author really wanted characters to manually point guns at each other and manually pull the trigger, instead of focusing on positioning and rapidly moving their tiny fast equine bodies around as auto-turrets on their back many times faster and more perceptive than ponies do the shooting for them.
If Littlepip has a gun that shoots every enemy on sight, she can't quip at them in the middle of an action scene or call them incredibly stupid like she's Elizer Yudowsky's self-insert OC bitching at Minerva McCockandballs for "violating all known laws of aviation" by turning into a fucking cat via magic.
Holy cunting fuck...

The pony world already has ways to Enchant items by "hanging spells on to" a gemstone. Diamonds are needed for some reason even though Equestria's full of all gems, forcing Equestria to want Zebrica's coal for their Industrial Revolution and diamonds for the Enchanted Items Revolution they should also be having.

An enchanted items revolution should change MORE than the IR ever did!

Suddenly, nobody has to be born a unicorn and attend the best schools for 10+ years to learn how to cast the best spells. you can now just buy a wand of teleportation or food transformation or healing or mind-swap or resurrection or portal creation or Grand Titanic Fireball Blast from the local wand store.

Suddenly, any pony regardless of wings/horn can have a 50-cal glock floating around their heads like a guardian angel, packing two barrels with two magical silencers that make all gunshots as quiet as a small fart.

A magical solution for a pony problem would be so much more convenient than this overly-complex magical problem.

Would also allow for the existence of battlefields where enchanted guns still hover near corpses and wage war on any who approach.

Furthermore, her Pip-Buck Friend-Or-Foe display is NEVER WRONG. Ace Combat sometimes fucks with the player by fucking with their Friend-Or-Foe display to make them gun down allies during obligatory "WAR IS BAD!" scenes. A video game about flying your jet around arcade-style where shooting civilians and bombing refugee camps gives you bonus points has more depth than this.
sixty chapters from now there's a point where Littleshit is threatened by a cunt who spins her minigun barrels aggressively, but Littleshit can tell it's just a bluff because the little yellow dot representing this NPC on her HUD didn't change from yellow to red.
by the way fuck this HUD layout. All it does is train you to watch the compass dot that represents your destination and next quest target. Fallout 1 and 2 required you to find places and items yourself via world design and information given to you by NPCs. Fallout 3 ripped off GTA's radio so why the fuck couldn't they copy GTA's Minimap?

Watcher doesn't single-handedly ruin the story solely because it's already ruined by terrible mistakes made before some retard worked backwards in reverse to figure out how to I AM THE STORM THAT IS APPROACHING! PROVOKING! DARK CLOUDS IN ISOLATION! I AM RECLAIMER OF MY NAAAME! BORN IN FLAMES! I HAVE BEEN BLESSED! MY FAMILY CREST IS A DEMON OF DEATH! FORSAKENED, I AM AWAKENED, A PHOENIX'S ASH IN DARK DIVINE! DESCENT IN MISERY! DESTINY CHASING TIME! to keep this idea that should change, alter, even revolutionize this shit from disturbing his delicate fucking status quo and desire to write all of this fucking bullshit, a shitty little story where "the coolest and best vault pony" becomes "the coolest and best wasteland hero" while pretending she's a nobody with no skills or friends because the author wants you to think this overpowered poorly-written murderhobo is a deep and complex multifaceted character and underdog. Anything that could and should shake up the status quo where Littlepip solves her problems with guns and explosions gets ignored, cast aside, gunned down in the dead of night or raped into a fucking coma by the author's faggoted maggot dick.

>Glimmer is Best Pony
Now that's truly the gayest thing anyone could say
>Nigel's favourite
lol that would be weird. the author I hate most on planet earth is JK Rowling, followed by Elizer Yudowsky(Assman), followed by Kkat.
also how about this one
>K "The K stands for Killing fictional poner gives me a tranny boner" Kat

>>285631
>also how about this one
8/10 made me kek

>>285631
>A magical solution for a pony problem would be so much more convenient than this overly-complex mechanical problem that wouldn't last ten years, let alone 200.
fixed

Seriously, does the author have idea how often even the best military-grade equipment breaks down on the battlefield? "Muh reliable AK" still fucking breaks and needs fixing when the military gives it the time of day instead of the better rifles out there with more accuracy, penetration, and sheer motherfucking power. AKfags are the Katana Weeaboos of the gun world but lower. Nobody cares that your gun can survive being drenched in a muddy sun like what muslims think happens to the sun every night. That feat's not unique to AKs. If you've ever seen some fucktarded frankengun "Cursed Gun" where a bastardized AK has been repaired with the wrong parts, it's because AKs aren't as common as AKfags think they are. Yes, the AK deserves credit, but it doesn't deserve this neo-religious idolatry cargo-cult cuntery when fucking revolvers can outclass it in areas that matter more to battlefield victories than how badly you can intentionally mistreat your gun before it stops working.
50 years from now we'll have shit that's countless times faster, sturdier, more accurate, and more reliable than this russian trash but it'll still take multiple generations of movies and circlejerking over movies before AKfags embrace the new hotness.
Replicas of "ancient" weapons from 40 years ago constructed today likely won't function 50 years from now without needing maintenance from qualified people and constant protection from the environment.

I'm glad nobody here has said "But shotguns and revolvers are really good weppuns! How can magic compete with that?" or anything like that.
Magic requires INCREDIBLE restrictions before it becomes inferior to glocks in any way.

Magic is a blank cheque unless the author sets limits on what it can and can't do.
Limits were not placed on magic or enchanting in this story. For fuck's sake, Rarity figured out how to copypaste souls without any cost and shatter them apart without any spiritual reprimands and infuse different shards into different collectable MLP Statuettes, just so Littlepip has an excuse to pick up Fallout 3's magical stat-boosting Bobblehead
seriously fuck Fallout 3, it added this lategame perk called "Almost Perfect" that locks all your SPECIAL (strength, endurance, etc) stats at 9 out of 10, so when you pick up all the bobbleheads you gain SPECIAL stats at a perfect 10 out of 10 without having to put any thought at all into any character builds or stat distribution. You're just a god now with maxed stats and maxed skills and perfect glitchy invincible armour and too fucking many guns to count and infinite ammo.

anyway back to magic
Even if a wizard can only make something as magically mighty as him, what's stopping him from pouring power into a big battery every day until he's got enough for a higher-level magic weapon?
If ponies in this story can stuff a fire spell into one diamond on his diamond-studded sniper rifle to enchant a sniper rifle with "Flaming Bullets", and his girlfriend can copypaste souls and put those souls into artificial bodies or shatter souls apart to infuse them into objects to create stat-boosting items...
What's stopping him from stuffing a gun with a copy of his own soul, with his girlfriend's help? What's stopping him from enchanting the gun with "Reload Instantly" or "Infinite Ammo", two Legendary Enchantments that canonically exist in Fallout 4?

https://youtu.be/5ITALrq1pm8?t=473

Observe the overwhelming might of The R.Y.N.O. for a few seconds. You don't have to watch the whole video, just see it in action and see how easily it clears an area of hostiles.
What does RYNO stand for? "Rip Ya a New One".
It's a fully-automatic multi-barrel rocket launcher that fires small yet devastating homing missiles.
One squeeze of the trigger and everything around you dies.
You know what would make it better? If it used the Pip-Buck's superior "Track enemies for up to 3000 meters through walls and detect invisible foes" radius and enemy-tracking to see where targets are.
Sheer sci-fi bullshit makes the RYNO work, but magic could easily replicate it.
If you took one real-world rocket launcher and enchanted it with "Reload after a second", you'd get something stronger than any faggoted horse with two shotguns duct-taped to him ever could be. Shrink the barrels and rockets to fire homing micro-missiles, then add more than twenty of these barrels, and you've got a constant stream of homing death.
Now enchant the weapon with Infinite Ammo and you've got something that will let you walk straight into zebra territory as every hostile is purged before they get within range.

At this point, you actually don't need to aim the gun. You can tape it to a horse's back, pointed straight up, and its homing rockets will seek out enemies and kill them.

>"But what if enemies make magic shields to block the rockets?"

Then enchant the rocket launcher to penetrate all armour and solid objects except flesh and bone. Or make the rockets out of an anti-magic material created via magic. Or enchant the rocket launcher to fire glowing energy balls like Doom Eternal's Plasma gun and BFG. Try making a magic shield block that.

>"But what if a unicorn makes a magical spherical bubble shield around you and squishes it?"
Then you're fucked unless your enchanted anti-magic armour lets you smash right through magic shields and shatter them with a single touch, and also break telekinetic holds on you. If you don't have that, get the fuck off the battlefield before a Unicorn picks you up and tosses you 200 feet into the air and watches you fall or tosses you into a brick wall at mach 5.

>>285637
>Magic is a blank cheque unless the author sets limits on what it can and can't do.

>"But what if enemies make magic shields to block the rockets?"
>Then enchant the rocket launcher to penetrate all armour and solid objects except flesh and bone.
>"But what if a unicorn makes a magical spherical bubble shield around you and squishes it?"
>Then you're fucked unless your enchanted anti-magic armour lets you smash right through magic shields and shatter them with a single touch, and also break telekinetic holds on you.

Wat?

>>285468
>>285467
>>285470
If I had to point to any flaw in the story that takes me out of the experience and makes it hard to sympathize with the main character, it's how this assistant-to-the-mechanic teenage girl who didn't even know that you pull a trigger to fire a gun until she saw someone else do it, has beaten over a dozen enemies who have every right to have bested her, and now has a kill count almost qualifying her twice over as a serial killer. She has knocked 4 enemies unconscious, killed six people, and won a stand off, with only a grazing wound.

Littlepip is not said to be former military, she doesn't have any kind of survival or combat training or experience at all, she isn't described as particularly strong or even intelligent, and we have zero reason at all to believe that she would have, could have, or should have beaten even a single enemy she has faced thus far. I understand that this is basically a video game/table top RPG that someone reskinned to have ponies, and that video games are usually based around the player character slaughtering literal hundreds of enemies. But damn, most video games still have your character as being an exceptionally awesome space marine, special forces member, or otherwise give them some kind of background that would explain why they have a better than even chance of winning each encounter they find themselves in. For example, from the Fallout Universe: the Vault Dweller of Fallout 1, whose background is never specified, is at minimum known to be selected by the overseer of the vault for an important task in the wasteland, and thus can be presumed to be the most exceptional individual of the 400 people in the vault in the relevant ways. Nothing is known about the background of "The Courier" except that (s) was a courier and survived a gunshot to the head. However, even this blank slate character has a kind of mysterious aura around him/her, making them seem as much like a revenant, a super natural agent of revenge, as a real human. While the original Fallout games left the backstory ambiguous so as to let the player roleplay, FE leaves little such ambiguity. Littlepip a teenage female whose only talent is as mechanic, she's never touched a gun before, she's never been outside of a closed room, and the most dangerous experience she's ever faced is getting splashed with a water balloon. If the "Stable" had good nutrition, she'd be fat as well.

Let's take her first fight - the fight with two guards at once. Both of the guards are presumably male, older, and generally more adept at melee combat than the general vault population. We have every reason they would win a fight against a filly mechanic's assistant. Otherwise, what is the purpose of them being guards? If most of us got in a one on one fight with a bouncer, police officer, or even mall cop, most of us would lose. The winners are people who have been outside in their lives. And of course there are two of them. Now I understand that she drops a tool box, or something, on them, though I have to wonder why one of those things was perched so high up, and how it fell in such a way that it hit not just one of them, but both. Knocking someone unconscious is incredibly difficult, and most of us could not succeed on the first attempt.

Littlepip's one and only combat loss is against the slavers, but even that is made up for when she uses her infinite bobby pins to unlock her restraints. Has she ever picked open a lock before? This is not a "street rat" who lives by stealing to survive, this is someone who should have no idea how to do this.

Then she gets in a one-on-one fight with one of the raiders who defeated the group that defeated both Monterrey Jack and herself before. Her only struggle is over whether she should kill the slaver, or just knock him out. The raiders have obviously been in melee fights before. They are probably older than Littlepip, they have vastly more experience doing this. If literally nothing else, they walk every day, whereas Littlepip has led an incredibly sedentary lifestyle. The raider has every right to win this fight.

Then she gets in a stand off with Monterrey Jack, who is much older, male, and is experienced at survival. She wins, because she apparently has a newer shotgun and somehow knows he only has one shell left. First of all, Littlepip literally did not know until five minutes before that to operate a gun, you point it in the general direction of the enemy and then pull the trigger.. How in the hell does she know the specifics of how many shells this specific variety of shotgun holds? How does she know there wasn't an round extra loaded in the chamber? I bet that most of us here could not say how many shotgun shells every brand of shotgun holds, and we know more than her. But really, this whole scene betrays a complete misunderstanding of how shotguns work. If I have a single shot shot gun of an ancient model pointed at you ten feet away, and you have a brand new SPAS-12 with however many shots that holds, all I have to do is pull the trigger first, and I win. Monterrey Jack knows that Littlepip is squeamish and has an aversion to killing people. He has every reason to assume that Littlepip would blink first.

Then we have the tree with a half-dozen raiders. The raiders have every advantage except kkat's version of the VATS system. They know where the entrances are, they know what the layout is, they have at least one lookout on top, they've fired guns before, they probably can run faster and jump higher because they have more exercise, and of course there are six of them. Not a single one of these encounters should have favored littlepip. Not the guy with the assault rifle, not the one who fled, and definitely not the sniper on the roof - there is absolutely no reason we should assume Littlepip would win that one.

And of course there is the fight with the specially designed security robots, but I've run out of space, and it's much the same as the above.

>>285384
>this author is clearly just writing murder porn... so he compensates by having his protagonist adopt this canned moral outrage in order to justify her participation
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with your interpretation of the this scene, though I do have to admit you know more about its context than I. I don't think these lines are from the author to justify the murder porn, I think that these lines are a part of a series of steps showing the slow unravelling of Littlepip's humanity/equinity as she leaves the civilized world of the vault and enters the war of all against all in the wasteland.

Let's take her response the first time she sees a pony die:
>In the growing list of things I'd not seen before this night, the death of another pony ranked at the top
She has an aversion to death and the gore associated with it, and the incident is mildly traumatizing. Then take her second fight, the first one against raiders. She deliberately knocks her target unconscious, while we are told the experienced wastelander kills his target. The lesson of course, is that Littlepip has an aversion to killing people, whether it be because of an innate aversion, or because of her upbringing in the sheltered stable. We also know that those who stay long in the wasteland completely lose or lack this aversion to killing others.

Then we get her first kill: a raider who throws a grenade in is killed by the same grenade tossed out. This makes the kill both justified self defense, but also kind of a by product of her trying to remove the grenade, and perhaps not even entirely intentional.

Then the next step up is her seeking out the enemy (rather than running away), and shooting first. Now, Littlepip, as a character, is established as having an aversion to killing. How do you overcome this? Simple. Make the enemies so morally repulsive that killing them is anything but a morally bad act. Thus, she sees rather extreme acts of cruelty by the raiders that admittedly make no sense for them to have done, and in a fit of moral outrage, she goes on a mass killing spree. The culmination of this killing spree is the killing of an enemy who was running away. You note that this is not an honorable act - and that is the point - but it should be remembered that this enemy is a child rapist, and perhaps more importantly, is being shot in hot blood immediately after Littlepip sees the filly who is bleeding from this crime.

The point of all of this is to show that Littlepip is slowly, step by step, losing her aversion to murder. Where the act is abhorent, the motivation to do it is strong, so that with each passing occasion she becomes more and more comfortable with the act itself and requires weaker motivation to do it.

Take the line,
>"I wasn’t the sort of pony to kill somepony while they slept"
As you have pointed out, she is the kind of pony to kill a fleeing enemy, at least when they have been witnessed raping a child. She still has some moral standards, and she hasn't lost all of her aversion, but she's also done things she wouldn't have when she started out at the beginning of the book.

Then we have the death of the friend-seeking security robot. The robots are dehumaized by being, well, robots, but they are also humanized by their evidently equine brains and the dialogue. They clearly haven't comitted any crimes to warrant their deaths. Littlepip, as she escapes, unintentionally kills one in a very graphic way, by crushing its brain, and sawing the thing in half. Her response?
>"I must admit that I found the crunch immensely satisfying"
She's gone from "I had cagey all over me" to "I found the crunch immensely satisfying" in response to a brain being splattered open, in the span of a few chapters. She is now taking a kind of pleasure in causing the gory deaths of others, whereas she was revolted before.

She has the same kind of character progression on other things like cursing. She goes from:
>"The walls had been painted with crude images of violence and cruder swear words."
To:
>Oh fuck me with Celestia’s forehooves!
>I’ll admit, my repertoire of colorful descriptions had grown more profane from my experience with the raiders

Then there is her attitude towards scavenging, which changes drastically, First, she is repulsed by looting dead bodies. Then she sees the logic to it, and tries it herself, but ends up so disgusted that she vomits. And then:
>More determined than ever, I stripped the raider bodies (what little was left of them now) of their armors
>Putting it on was gruesome. My hooves were darkened with blood just from working on it; every inch was covered in the flash-fried gore of dead ponies.
She goes from vomiting at the gore, to tolerating even the most extreme version of it, and soon enough she'll have no aversion at all.

We also see her just assume that the pony she helped save earlier will return the favor, but he instead robs her. While there isn't yet a parallels to show how she has learned from this incident, it's one more instance in a long list to show how greatly her civilized stable-dweller morality differs from the rules of the war of all against all in the wasteland.

Littlepip's civilized morality is slowly unravelling, and is being replaced with a more practical egoism that is already showing signs of drifting into sadism.

For all of the other faults of this work, I think it has done a decent job showing the rather slow descent of a well adjusted and normal civilized pony into what I can only assume will be a complete monster who kills for sport by the end of the work. This Hobbesian understanding of the State of Nature, I think, is one of the themes of Fallout, and it expresses itself in this fan work well enough.

>>285661
> I think that these lines are a part of a series of steps showing the slow unravelling of Littlepip's humanity/equinity as she leaves the civilized world of the vault and enters the war of all against all in the wasteland.

I'm not a fan of this idea. There many ideas in this idea that I'm unsure off.

For example, the idea that you grow numb when you killed someone is something I find kinda off iffy.

Like, I have seen interracial pairs throught my life but I still get pissed off because it offends me. I may not show it or I may depending on the situation but I do not like it.

And to some degree, like if you experince something horrible, you build up an aversion to facing it again. Its thereore a bit strange that Littlepip hasn't run back to her stable and desprately try to get herself back in.

But enough about the story, point is that while I have grown somewhat number to things like I don't think rape is very remakable anymore, I still feel but its more like I choose not to becuase I know that doesn't help me. But I could and I still retain my morality. I have astrong suspiciouson that its the saem for peoples in war.

First off, the inner conflict doesn't go away, secondly if faced with brutal evil people will seek refuge rather than becoming part of the problem.

Like, I once heard a guy claim to me that,"There is not God and people in warzones know this to be truth," and later I heard from an interview with some family in a warzone about how they prayed to God each and every day and that is what kept them going and of course because only god can help when there is nobody else there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVCLbIbEKtM&ab_channel=TheEscapist
4:50
This is another thing. I think its the opposite. As I say people won't lose there dislike for things so if given the opportunity to leave a hellish nightmare of an existance they will take it, Especially if they operate under egoism or they will stay because they see it as their purpose to change this world. For example, given the opportunity to leave of Equestria, I would stay because I want to change this world, even though I'm every well aware that materially I would be better of in ponerland and that I'm just a single guy who probably can't really do much, I still would stay.

I would like to say that I'm not writing off the idea of numbness to things but there is something to it that I I'äm yet unable to put my finger on why I feel its mroe complicated thatn that. I once saw a miliatary guy, I think it s a brit who had been in a dogfight in the falkland's war. The guy had bascially been on a emotional rollercoaster by going from hating his enemy one second, to piting his fellow human being as the enemy was shot down, back to rage again as one of his comrades fell.

I think a lot of time and exporse needs to happend to truly go numb and with aversion it its probably takes a lot more.

Like, I cannot stomach blacked porn and while I don't expose myself to that shit, I can't really imagine getting used to it either if I was forced to watch it. My mind goes instantly to murder murder murder!

Anyway, that's what I think anyway.

>>285667
It's not that Littlepip is simply growing numb to violence through exposure in her time in the wasteland, it's that her moral beliefs are being recontextualized and challenged, and thus slowly changing.

You say that you are disgusted by interracial marriage/partnerships, on a both physical and moral level, and you believe that no matter how many interracial relationships you saw, you would remain revolted by the sight of it. Let's use this as an example.

Imagine you live in a European nation-state whose national identity has historically formed around a specific European ethnicity. Let's imagine further that you are a member of that ethnic group, i.e., you are a Swede who lives in Sweden. Please take this as a hypothetical, whether it applies to your situation or not. There isn't some other homeland of the Swedes for the Swedes to go to should they become a minority in their own country. And now let's imagine that there are a number of Somali migrants who don't seem to be the equals of the native Swedes in many ways, and who interbreed with the Swedes. Aside from irrational reasons (like disgust) to oppose interracial relationships in this context, there are many rational reasons to oppose it. It marginalizes the native population. It disrupts homogeneity and possibly social harmony. Then there is the question of whether these Somali migrants take adequate care of their children, or whether the children are more likely to be maladjusted, and so on. Thus, it makes sense that no matter how many single Swedish women you see with half-black children, you'd be opposed to interracial coupling. Why would you change your mind? Your beliefs and feelings haven't been recontextualized and they have not been challenged.

Now, imagine that you and your best friend moved to another country outside of Europe. Maybe you've gone to Japan, where you are the only white people there. Better yet, let's say that you are going to Brazil, the Dominican Republic, or any of the New World countries where people of mixed race are a plurality of the population (which is most of them, actually). In this context, interracial coupling isn't a threat to your own ethnicity's existence. It's not even a threat to the native population's control, because a half millennium of small pox, typhoid, immigration and miscegenation have already reduced the natives to an unimportant minority; in any case, those of mixed race are already so numerous as to be dominant. Let say, further, that the Asians, Mulatos, and Mestizos you work with are in your judgement of respectable intellect and moral character, and thus at least the higher classes of these racial groups are "alright." Your Swedish best friend has fallen in love with and engaged an Asian Indian girl he works with. You personally know and respect this girl, and you want to support your friend. Let's go even further. You find one or more of the Asian or mestizo women you see sexually attractive. What is more, you've developed a crush on one of the Mestizo women who you respect and who shares your values. Love is hard to control, after all.

In this situation, would you keep your strong aversion to interracial relationships? Maybe you would. But maybe you wouldn't. The point is that your environment and circumstances have changed so that your beliefs and feelings are recontextualized and challenged. I can guarantee you that at least some persons sharing your opposition to interracial relationships would change their minds (and hearts) under these circumstances.

And it's the same with Littlepip in the wasteland. She is removed from the safety of the Stable to a radically different environment. In the Stable, if someone kills someone, they are arrested and face punishment, besides being shunned by the rest of the Stable. There is nothing like this in the wasteland. There is no government to arrest you for murder or rape. It's perfect anarchy. There is no society to shun you or shame you. Even if you have companions they wouldn't care. If you kill someone in the Wasteland, it means that that person cannot kill you, and you can take their stuff.

It goes back to Thomas Hobbes' "State of Nature" thought experiment, where in a world of perfect anarchy, it Is not in your best interests to abstain from violence. In the Stable or any place with a government, it's pretty clear why you don't kill people - you yourself don't want to be killed, so everyone agrees to a set of rules that includes "no killing" and a government enforces these rules. In the Wasteland, there is nothing to stop someone else from killing you except killing or otherwise subjugating them first, and there's no negative consequences to deter them from doing it in the first place. If you have reason to be suspicious of someone else, which is almost the case by default, it's basically self-defense to incapacitate them first. Even besides self-defense, there's the fact that food, medicine, and weapons are in short supply, and everyone needs to compete for these goods, or else perish. Robbing and stealing are among the few viable methods of survival that exist in such conditions.

Littlepip is learning this. She sees a campfire and assumes the people will be friendly, just to be captured to be sold into slavery. Then when she escapes, she assumes that the guy she saves will repay the favor... just to be robbed by him. She is repulsed at first by death, but then she kills a raider in self-defense. Then she actively goes into a nest of raiders, but she's so morally repulsed by them that she kills them in anger, though there is no self-defense justification. By the time she gets to the robot, well, it's a robot, so it's not entirely equine anyways, but she is satisfied by the sound of its brain being squished. Every time she kills someone herself, she becomes a little different than she once was.

Her moral values have been recontextualized and challenged in the wasteland, and are slowly shifting.

>>285672
I can understand that her beliefs have changed or have they? I honestly, don't know? She walks up to a campfire, expecting ponies to be friendly and they aren't .

Like, if I walked up to a campfire made by whites and asked for directions of wahtever and they tried to kidnap, i would probably be surprized but would it change my beliefs?

I'm not really sure what you mean by beliefs, I assume moral principlas and ethics, if I'm wrong am sorry I'll assume it for now anyway. I would assume I wouldn't really change that much. I mean, I already know that there are some white people out there that are evil filth and really isn't Littlepip the same? Would she really be against killing ponies that mutilate pony bodies and decorates their walls with corpses and rape foals and whatever they did or do? I think not?

>State of Nature
I feel like its a redundant expression. No disrespect to that guy though, he probably has a lot of good ideas but I have never read anything from anyone so I really don't know what he talks about.
I'm also neither a cynicalist nor a optemist when it comes to humanity. I'm not sure that if society would fall appart we would start to eat each other like rats in barrel. I just don't think that's the modus operandi of human beings, its more likey we would cling harder to the few groups that we actually belong to. I feels that anarchy is just a fleeting state between the statous quo that is society that exist in between shifts in power.

Imo.

>>285672
>>285676
The problem with both of your statemarents is this: Littleshit was given a Divine Plot Device of Insane Complexity which explicitly tells her whether or not other ponies are hostile (the "PipBuck"), and she doesn't look at it THIS TIME since the narrator has her undergo a Too Stupid To Live Moment. BUT, she gets to yeet out of the canned danger situation alive and completely unharmed! That whole scene is a shitty self-insert fanfic setup so that cuckkat the furfag can make a pseudo "growing up in the wasteland" reference.

>>285676
> I have never read anything from anyone
Its really not something I'm proud of. It's just that don't get around to read much of even things that I want to read,. But, I do't know why I explain this nobody cares.
>>285679
Tried to find a specific mexican meme (about a dancing deer) in my meme folder but couldn't find it. Here's something else related.