/mlpol/ - My Little Politics

>>296515
It is, I had a friend who read it all tell me about it. I am still baffled how FoE and PH has such a rabid and dedicated fan base that claim it to be the peak of any pony or Fallout media ever. I want to imagine it's shit posting but some are super rabid about it. Sure I got fanfics and fan music I really like but I won't say it beats Blood Meridian or John Prine by orders of magnitude.

Also decided to sub to your YouTube channel if you don't mind!

>>296481
I still find it funny how one of the most vital pieces of Equestria and the Mane Six and FIM as a whole, Rainbow Dash, somepony who gained her mark when she metaphorically saved the lives of her friends and saved the world numerous times with the help of those friends and would eventually go on to literally save Rarity's life with another Rainboom...
Her role in this story begins and ends at being blamed for some random Fallout-knockoff bollocks including how some baddies she supposedly created started using a symbol of her aerial superiority and a reminder of one of her life's greatest moments in the edgiest branding-fetish manner the author could think of. In a story that normally revels in making canon ponies get eaten alive or slit their wrists on glass to bleed to death so they can avoid being raped by approaching Raiders, the author forgot to give Rainbow Dash an ending because this is where her role in the story begins and ends: To contribute a symbol that's taken out of context and used in a way utterly contrary to its real meaning and what its meaning should be to Pegasi.
What Pegasus out there who heard tales of Rainbow Dash's heroics wouldn't want her symbol on his body? There are absolute faggots out there who get tattoos of Pokeballs and MLP Cutie Marks and Rick Sanchez's face and the Reddit mascot, so you'd fucking think that in a world where magic exists and technology depends on the episode, somewhere out there you'd be able to find a tattoo parlour with a magical tattoo gun full of magic ink that gives you convincing knockoffs of real Cutie Marks.
Why is Calamity ashamed to have Rainbow Fucking Dash's mark on his asscheeks? Sure, it's a brand put there without his consent, but having that brand means the Enclave wanted to lump you in the same category as Rainbow Dash, Hero Of Equestria And Second-Best Pony.
>>296545
Thanks! Please don't talk about that channel here, that's bad for OpSec.
The pony fandom has a lot of people in it who aren't here because they like FIM, they're here because they want to BE SEEN liking FIM. They want to look like "The biggest brony", because they think this will get them the respect of other bronies. So they'll scream their devotion to FIM from the rooftops and tell everyone they're a brony and whine about "being persecuted" when normies say publicly admitting to liking a little girl's show is weird. They'll go on these absurd neo-religious rants where they swear the brony fandom is the nicest greatest world-changing community that ever existed. They'll talk as if a cartoon can create world peace by making everyone like it. Sure, the USSR persecuted those who listened to rock music because shared identity and real unity disrupts the divisive hate-driven identity politics commies specialize in, but while media can help bring people who like it together it won't single-handedly get the whole world singing Cum By Ya.
Some made a career out of digging absurdly deep into FIM episodes to try and find something that sounds mature, like a random math equation on a chalkboard or the position of some stars or a sex joke hidden in plain sight, and making analysis videos where they rant about the deep hidden super-smart symbolism within FIM "which is actually really the super-de-duper smartest show ever you guys". This stuff helps the fake brony feel like he's intellectually and morally superior for liking this cartoon.
I can respect healthy appreciations for good media and FIM is good. But these people unhealthily obsess over this show to the point where they give themselves shitty bootleg tulpas forced to imitate ponies they like and disallowed from developing their own consciousnesses and designing their own bodies, or start hypnotizing themselves to be more like the pony they want to fuck the most, even if that's a fandom creation with no canon basis.
There are little girls out there who will say "Justin Bieber saved my life" because his music was the first good thing they ever experienced and up until they heard his music for the first time they lived in a dull mindless trance where they didn't care about or love anything or feel any reason to live. They'll ravenously defend Bieber because he was their first crush and in another timeline where their parents did their jobs right, those girls would be this dedicated to Jesus and making God happy instead. These days it's Kpop bitches who do and say that "Jungkook and Udon Dango saved my life!" shit, but "FIM saved the lives" of these faggots by being a good source of comfort and fun, and by giving them the first community they've ever felt like a part of.
But the FIM fandom is big.
It's harder to rise to the top of a big fandom full of people saying what you're saying and doing what you're already doing.
So they niche themselves. Some try to be the biggest and most important and powerful-feeling brony on a gimmicky forum exclusively for waifu discussion and pony roleplay with only 30 active members tops. Some try to pretend some crappy fanfic they started reading was actually the greatest and best piece of literature in the world, because they want to say shit that will please its incestuous mini-fandom hoping to be beloved by it. And in a fandom that loves fanfiction spinoffs of this fanfic, but rejects anything too divergent from this fanfic, it's easy to yell "This is the best fic ever!" and write 10k-150k words of a shitty bootleg-of-a-bootleg story you'll stop writing once you realize the incestuous mini-fandom will never make you famous or pay you to publish this like they adore and pay and simp for Kkat.

Project Horizons became the most popular fanfic of Fallout Equestria by basically being Fallout Equestria except everything a shallow explosion-loving cuck who loves seeing his favourite bitch get fucked would call "Great" about FE is turned up to 11. More sex, rape, explosions, edge, and trashy hamfisted exposition.
Puppysmiles's story became a close second because it's nothing but kitsh shlock.

>>296578
I don't remember if we've talked about Puppysmiles and her story Fallout Equestria: Pink Eyes yet, but it sucks ass. I'll review it and spoil everything about it now so if you plan on reading all 134K words of it don't read this.

On the final day before the apocalypse one excessively "Cute" little filly was given a life support suit by her mom, then the nukes fell and rubble buried the filly.
Supposedly these suits were designed to help filles get to Stables that hadn't closed yet but what Fallout Vault by another name would open its massive door shortly after the apocalypse to let in one more filly? And others in these suits are never met. The Trauma Harnesses from FNV Dead Money were protective suits that walk the wounded back to base or return with skeletons but this up-to-11 Tauma Harness really should have changed the world but doesn't. Still, one of these abnormally effective super-suits has to exist for the story to happen and for the heroine to get her gimmick.
Pink Cloud, a hazardous material from Kkat's Fallout Equestria that artificially binds things together to create abominations 99% of the time and 1% of the time just superglues plot-armour protagonists to useful gear they'd normally never take off anyway (OH GOD HELP ME THE IRONY IS TOO MUCH AND KKAT MISSED ABSOLUTELY ALL OF IT) merged this filly with her life support suit and helps keep her alive.
200 years later this undead filly wakes up and goes around saying "Hi, I'm Puppysmiles. Have you seen my Mom?" as the author tries to make her seem adorable.
She's invincible and her soul's stuck in the suit.
She finds "Sentenza", which is a renamed Euclid's C-Finder gun from Fallout NV that summons down laser satellite blasts just like in Fallout NV. It eventually runs out of ammo (lolwut) so she trades the useless thing for a brushable Lyra plushie doll.
She also carries a EMP tank shell and a small rock named "The Rock Of Destiny", which is just a small rock. She uses it to kill enemies that normally take much more to kill. Har har har do you get the reference to FIM when Rarity found her rock of destiny? There is also a shard of Nightmare Moon inside Puppysmiles for no reason and she named it Creepy Voice.
After a lot of utterly meaningless filler where Puppysmiles meets renamed Fallout characters and does copypasted Fallout quests, Puppysmiles finds her mom's grave and is very sad. A friend Puppysmiles made said "You don't need to keep looking for your mom because you made a positive impact on the lives of so many living ponies". Creepy Voice (Nightmare Moon) takes over Puppysmiles but to stop Nightmare Moon, a friend Puppysmiles made shows PS her own mother's grave and a bunch of assorted mementos gained from a nearby safe and then that friend says "You need to move on". So Puppysmiles dies instantly and Nightmare Moon's evil plan to sort-of exist again is foiled.
Story's over, that was it.
A gimmicky filly exists, shows her gimmick off, helps some side characters, and after being sucked off by a side character for doing so many nice things in filler scenes she dies eventually in front of her mother's tombstone in the most tragic scene the author could imagine.
Was it really necessary to have NIGHTMARE FUCKING MOON invade this final moment out of nowhere despite this character's complete lack of any connection to darkness and Luna's jealousy of Celestia's bigger ass and greater popularity? Did this old relic of FIM really need to invade a long-dead filly's final moments alive? Sure it makes things seem more "Tense and dangerous" but is that tone right for a moment like this? What the fuck could a tiny magicless shard of Nightmare Moon even do in Puppysmiles's tiny filly body?

I rate this story a 3/5!
Just kidding it's a 2/10 just like Project Horizons. The original Fallout Equestria gets a 1/10 from me for having less originality than those two fanfics of fanfics and taking more "inspiration" from games than them.

Hey, Glim?

Now that Calamity has revealed himself to be a Dashite, what do you think of him personally and as a character?
Does this revelation that he has a mark, followed by an explanation of what the mark means and what backstory lore it's connected to and how he used to be Enclave until he wasn't any more, change things significantly about him and what he means to the story?

I think this would be a better reveal if we knew more about the Enclave, the Dashites, the betrayal of the Pegasi, and the branding before we learned he was mixed up in all of this once.

Arcade Ganon from FNV seemed like a snarky but nice Followers Of The Apocalypse doctor at first, until you learned of his connection to the Enclave. That fundamentally changed his character and role in the world. And all of those moments where he said "Seeing all these energy weapons makes me nostalgic" or revealed he knew too much about Vertibirds turned out to be clever foreshadowing.
A surprising number of Fallout fans shifted into NPC mode upon learning this and gunned him down while screeching "REEEE NAZIS!!! I don't care if he did nothing wrong, he's white and blonde and related to THEM!!!".
But he humanizes the Enclave, along with the rest of his Enclave Remnants. Sure, there were bad eggs who loved the bad stuff the Enclave was doing. There were good eggs who hated the bad things the Enclave was doing and wanted to bring America back better than ever before. There were neutral eggs who didn't give a shit about anything except flying.
He's just some guy trying to do the right thing, even though he doesn't get a happy ending. Closest he can get is one where he, as a doctor, constantly has shit to do.
He's like Veronica, when it comes to the tragedy of his character. The world's changing and old groups like the BOS and Enclave don't have much of a role to play in it any more. Best thing he can do is turn the Remnants into something good. Best Veronica can do is try to change the BOS, fail, and become a lonely wanderer.
Kkat can't rip this off right.

>>296463

Both Littlepoop and Velvet caught some shrapnel or something when Roboponer was blasting the two alicorns. In all honesty, both of them should be dead by now, but kkat has them simply wounded. Velvet has completely lost consciousness but is still alive, and LP, of course, is basically fine except for some "serious" injuries that will most probably not hamper her in any significant way. His justification seems to be that since Roboponer was concentrating his fire on the alicorns, they received the brunt of the attack and LP and Velvet were partially spared because they were only standing nearby. However, you'll also recall that Roboponer was rapid-firing grenades in a stream, so we are probably talking about literally hundreds of grenades exploding in a small area at roughly the same time. Ignoring things like magic shields and whatnot, realistically the alicorns and anything standing anywhere near them should have been blown to smithereens, and in the unlikely event that any of them survived, they would be completely deaf, and possibly have retina damage from all of those flashes going off at once. However, I've long since accepted that kkat's understanding of real-world physics is derived entirely from video game physics, so I have little choice but to ignore this problem.

Anyway, LP finds that Velvet is lying unconscious and bleeding on top of her isn't that just like a woman?. She opens her saddlebags to try and rummage around for those magical healing bandages that make literally every injury better, but she apparently can't find enough of them. Then, she notices that they apparently still have a bunch of those crack mints from before.

The scene that follows is basically like something out of an old Popeye cartoon, where he's getting his shit kicked in by Bluto until he finds a can of spinach and it magically transforms his muscles into Panzer tanks. LP downs the mints, and instantly gains coke-fueled superpowers that allow her to figure out probably the most hare-brained scheme she's cooked up to date. She takes Velvet's memory orb, the one with Fluttershy giving a speech, and floats it towards the alicorn. The alicorn apparently thinks it's a grenade or something, so she uses her magic to bat it back towards LP. However, as soon as the magic touches it, it activates the orb, which pulls the alicorn into whatever sort of trance state occurs when one of these orbs is being viewed. This causes the alicorn to drop her defenses, allowing LP to use her sniper rifle to finish her off.

I'm actually willing to give k "take enough party mints and you won't even be able to tell the difference between my Mega Bloks and her Legos" kat some points for creativity here; this is at the very least a more clever and imaginative way of defeating an alicorn than simply summoning Goku-strength out of nowhere and levitating a boxcar on top of her. The biggest problem here is that he never really clarified how the memory orbs work in the first place, so it's hard to tell if this is plausible or not. Unicorn magic is itself rather poorly explained in the MLP universe, but I get the impression that the aura a horn generates will assume different capabilities based on the intent of the user. For instance, if a unicorn is trying to pick something up, then horn magic becomes something like a physical force field around an object, that the user can then move around. Alternatively, we've seen instances where a unicorn will fire something like a laser blast out of its horn, in which case it becomes a destructive projectile. Since there don't seem to be different types of horn auras, we can assume that the horn produces some kind of all-purpose magic field, which then assumes different attributes based on whatever the unicorn summoning it is mentally commanding it to do, and presumably more complex tasks require higher mastery of magic.

What this scene implies is that the memory orbs will simply activate whenever any sort of magic touches them. This seems like a pretty serious design flaw, since unicorns will generally use levitation as their primary means of handling objects. If any sort of magic will activate the orb, this means that it would be impossible to even pick one up without getting sucked into whatever memory scene it contains. Since LP uses her magic to levitate the orb towards the alicorn, logically she should get sucked into the memory herself when she does this, so this whole trick shouldn't work.

However, since we've already seen multiple instances of both LP and Velvet handling this thing without setting it off, then it can't work this way without creating a continuity problem. The most logical way for the orbs to work would be to have them activate by intent, which means the unicorn needs to be physically touching the orb with its magic while explicitly intending to activate it. If this is the case, then what LP does here shouldn't work; the alicorn batting the orb away shouldn't activate it any more than LP's picking it up and levitating it would.

These two explanations are literally the only way I can think of for any of this to work, and either way it creates a problem. If the orb activates with intent, LP's trick here shouldn't work. If it activates at any touch of magic, LP shouldn't even be able to handle it in the first place. If the author has an explanation for all of this I'd be willing to listen; however, based on what he's given us, I have no choice but to declare shenanigans here.

Anyway, this where the scene ends.

>>296621

After a page break, LP is apparently still trying to down crack mints despite the alicorn already being defeated, because she doesn't want to deal with the comedown afterward. This is actually pretty accurate addict behavior; based on his writing and his hobbies I'm assuming that kkat took Ritalin as a child, so maybe he has some personal experience to draw from here.

>“But…!” I tried to come up with something that Velvet Remedy would buy. I was amazing now; I could talk anyone into anything. “At least let me hold onto them. I might need them.” And yet somehow, I couldn’t convince the most beautiful mare in the wasteland to let me keep a tin full of medicine.
Speaking of things that haven't been particularly well explained, what exactly these mints even do has not been made tremendously clear either. The mints, again, seem to basically be a powerful stimulant along the lines of cocaine or amphetamine, which stimulates brain activity but won't improve a person's intelligence or vocabulary. However, the author has made multiple references to this drug making it possible to "talk anyone into anything," which seems to imply that it somehow makes a person more perceptive, imaginative, or persuasive.

Considering this is a world based on an RPG game, where things like Perception, Imagination, and Persuasion are all skills or attributes or whatever that can be modified by ticking the integer value up or down, and considering that these "party-time mint-als" are probably yet another element ripped off directly from one of the Fallout games, my guess is that this is exactly what the author has in mind for them. This is actually completely legal; it's his world, and if he wants to invent a magical drug that does something like this he can. All he needs to do is to firmly establish that this is the actual effect the drug produces; unfortunately, though, he hasn't done this. He has only vaguely implied what this drug does, and seems to be relying on the reader's being familiar with whatever thing from Fallout he's ripping off in order to explain the rest. A person on coke might think they have become more persuasive and charming, when in reality they are just babbling like a retard. We don't know if LP's claims of being able to talk anyone into anything should be taken literally or not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASk_ndnBD0Y

>I’d administered the last of the medical potions to Velvet Remedy. The magical liquid seemed to work achingly slowly at closing her wounds. Now she was left with just the healing bandages to aid Calamity and myself. We didn’t have anywhere near enough. She was still very weak from the loss of blood, and was having trouble standing. Calamity needed a medical brace to fix his leg; Velvet Remedy didn’t want to risk a mending spell until it was properly set. More, he needed serious bed rest to recover from the lightning strike.
And, as long as we're still on the subject of things that are very poorly explained, the way medicine works in this universe is VERY poorly explained. As far as I can tell, no injury in this world is actually fatal; these general-purpose "healing potions" that exist are basically bottles of some kind of grand panacea that will cure literally anything. In addition to this, bandages apparently have some kind of healing property as well, in addition to performing their ordinary purpose of binding wounds and blocking infections. In addition to this, some unicorns are apparently also capable of knitting bones together, healing flesh wounds, and probably healing just about anything else.

Taking all of this together, it's a wonder that anyone in this story has died at all, or that death is even something to be concerned about. If you can have half of your skin flayed off by shrapnel, lose most of your blood, and then cure yourself with band-aids and a potion, you are for all practical purposes immortal. Do the raiders and slavers and all the various enemies in this world not have the same level of access to this stuff that LP and her friends do? LP's group doesn't seem to have any kind of special hook-up; they just find it lying around. Are they just the only group of ponies in this entire world who ever had the bright idea of looking inside of all the old cabinets and safes that are lying around? Or are their enemies just too busy torturing children and decorating their bedrooms with intestines to bother looking around for potions?

All of this is illogical on the same level as the water problem I brought up earlier. There are basically two possible scenarios here: either all of this stuff was made before the war, and there is a limited amount of it in the world, or else these supplies are something commonplace that are either currently made, or are abundant enough that there is little chance of their ever running out. In the first case, this stuff should be much more valuable than it is, to the point where the entire world economy should revolve around it. Why would ponies be worrying about working for bottle caps or digging gems out of the ground? The real path to economic domination would be gathering up and hoarding all the world's panacea potions and magic bandages. Unicorns like Velvet, who have healing abilities, would also be highly sought after; this means that the slavers would have likely imprisoned her as a high-value piece of merchandise instead of simply letting her live and work among them.

In the second case, this stuff would be common enough that literally no one in this world should fear death. If you can just walk around the Wasteland opening random closets and picking up magical cure-all potions, suddenly the thought of having a limb blown off by a raider with a grenade launcher isn't quite as terrifying.

The author tries to make it sound like this stuff is scarce so the party has to scavenge for it, but at the same time there seems to be little competition for it. This makes no sense.

>>296623

Anyway, the author has placed them in what he seems to think is a dire situation: pretty much everypony in their party was technically mortally wounded, but even though they have a cure for that now, there's only so much magic elixir and special all-purpose-boo-boo-healer bandages to go around. So, they are probably going to have to take it easy for the next few days. But will the Wasteland allow them to? Let's find out.

In the meantime, LP decides to go down to the sugar shack or whatever it's called and see if Roboponer is okay.

>I had to wave Velvet Remedy back before I approached the unmoving armored figure crumpled against the shack below. Harnessing my levitation, I could pass over the minefield safely. Velvet Remedy could not.
"No, Velvet, I know you want to come with me, but you must rest yourself! Only I can magically lift myself up by my own asshole and float myself to safety over nearly any obstacle. Only I can harness the refreshing power of crack cocaine and think up preposterous ways to kill an enemy, that logically shouldn't work but do for some reason. It's a heavy, heavy burden being the strongest and best at everything but also being tiny and weak somehow because the author says so. So rest yourself, my little lesbo crush, while I levitate myself over this field of landmines so I can rub grand panacea ointment all over the mortal bum wounds of this all-powerful killbot." Have I mentioned recently that I hate this character?

>Between the alicorn’s thought-words and the label my PipBuck had spontaneously given the shack, it didn’t take Party-Time Mint-al-enhanced smarts to realize that this had probably been SteelHooves.
So...she's saying that SteelHooves is Roboponer's name? I don't really see how that's a given. "SteelHooves Shack" is the name that the PipBuck gave this location, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a shack belonging to someone named SteelHooves. If that were the case, the PipBuck would have called it "SteelHooves' Shack", with a trailing apostrophe denoting ownership, and I know that a consummate professional like kkat wouldn't make such an obvious grammatical error. So, logic would dictate that SteelHooves would be the name of the shack itself, not the name of the Roboponer it contains. I mean, if you were exploring the ruins of post apocalyptic Orlando and found a place your PipBuck told you is called Disney World, would you automatically assume that the eight foot tall robotic Mickey Mouse guarding the place was named Disney? I wouldn't.

Here's why this matters. Earlier, when we first encountered Roboponer, here is how it was described:

>It was a mighty relic from the war, a “Steel Ranger”. A bright lamp on its forehead spotlighted its target, and the huge gun on the right side of its monstrous battle saddle began to fire again.
The quotation marks and the capital letters suggest that the proper term for this kind of thing is Steel Ranger. At the time I actually remember this line striking me as odd; this seems like another one of those weird instances where LP knows some random historical fact that it doesn't seem like she ought to know.

Anyway, next we have this:

>The great alicorn hunter… meaning there were more of these. Possibly a lot more. The thought was frightening.
This indicates that this robot is a type of thing, not a unique individual thing. Thus, its name would refer to its type and not itself; if the unit itself has a proper name we don't know it yet. So, is thing called a Steel Ranger or a SteelHooves? "Steel Ranger" is a term that Littlepoop seems to just know for some reason, and SteelHooves is something that her PipBuck gave her, which she simply assumed was the name of this type of thing even though she already gave us a name for it. Hence my confusion.

Is it possible that SteelHooves is the name of this particular Steel Ranger, and Littlepoop knows this because the PipBuck told her that this is his shack? Who knows; I'm probably spending far more time on this puzzle than it really deserves.

>The metal stallion (or, at least, I was assuming stallion based on the form of the armor) had not moved since the battle. I crouched down next to the fallen Ranger (several of my bandages shifting and coming undone as I did so, my wounds oozing blood).
Now she's back to calling it a Ranger.

Anyway, we get a closer look at the SteelHooves and/or Steel Ranger:

>Up close, the armor was even more impressive. It had its own air filtration system, complete life support, even mechanized drug injection. The damage from the rockets was far less than it had any right to be. Still, the armor had cave in at the point of impact, gruesomely crushing the pony inside.
So apparently it's not a robot or a cyborg, it's just an extremely sophisticated suit of armor. Good to know.

>I tried to find a way to remove the helmet. If there was one, it was well concealed. But I found a jackpoint that would allow my PipBuck to interface with the helmet’s own arcane technology matrix.
"I have never seen this particular piece of 200 year old technology before, but I automatically know two different names for it, and also this thing I wear on my wrist can just connect to it automatically and communicate with it because reasons." Have I mentioned recently that I hate this character?

>I pulled out a tool from my utility barding, already suspecting that the helmet included its own E.F.S. and S.A.T.S. equivalents, if not more.
Of course it does, and of course you would suspect that. If anything, you're being too modest here; you don't just suspect, you know. You are Mary Sue, the author's Chosen One, destined to know all and see all, and have all the answers and all the powers. There is nary a problem in this world you could possibly encounter whose solution isn't buried somewhere in the vast pocket dimension contained within your asshole, just waiting for you to reach in and pull it out.

>>296605
Actually got a physical copy of Pink Eyes. Bought it for shits and giggles at a convention after losing an auction for another fanfic book. Got about halfway through it but my interest slowly waned due to it following the filly main character and no much happening. Fallout Equestria and PH have the benefit of having a sociopathic horn dog so could be baffled at all the crazy stuff they do so can get some entertainment from it like this review we are all enjoying (except maybe Glim Glam for having to read it but he's a trooper).

Feel like the pegasus stuff should have been established earlier. Even just hints about the clouds or mysterious pegasus ponies attacking places with a lightning strike (not actual lightning but hey considering the fact they can control weather could maybe do that to) decimating certain communities with survivors terrified of them.

Figured what was said earlier to where it'd make more sense to cut their wings off so they can't fly but you'd think they wouldn't want Dashites to share their secrets or use their training to help surface ponies so would probably be keeping tabs on the surface and send kill squads to hunt down Dashites that are trying to play the upstart hero.

Would give Calamity a reason why he was loitering at Appleossa and wasn't trying to interfere with the salve trade. Could be opposed to it and respect Rainbow Dash's element of loyalty but too scared to help and have the Enclave come and kill him. Could give him some extra depth having the training and the drive to be a hero but too scared of reprisal to actually act on it and sees LP as his chance to atone for being passive for so long and want to make a difference.

LittlePip learning about all that could have made her initial shock at the open sky be a constant anxiety. While the Stable ceiling was a bland canvas it was a shelter at the least but now she is in this vast open expanse with no cover or protection knowing that there are enemies who could be watching them and listening to DJ Pon-3 and have her and Calamity worried that Enclave soldiers may be listening in.

Velvet even could have a good reaction to it thinking that being outside means she is free but now realized the irony that even outside she is still in a cage created and watched by ponies who are closer to birds and have the ability to fly freely. Would give her a new motivation to free the ponies on the surface from this ever present cage of the clouds.

Also as an earth pony fan glad to see they are shafted even further and relegated to useless idiot melee meat shield while unicorns are super wizards and pegasus ponies can grow sky crops while earth ponies have no distinguishing traits in this universe and one of their main gimmicks which is to help nurture animals and plants is not present. Swear most the community just sees them as pack mules.

>>296471
>Come to think of it, do real needle guns make needles neatly sink into meat with superhuman accuracy that could disable specific pressure points and make needle-tossing ninjas jealous, or do needle guns just shred the shit out of meat and armour and everything else?
I will preface this by saying that I am not an expert in weapons nor was I ever a particularly bright physics student, so if anyone who knows more about these subjects wants to correct me here feel free, but based on my limited knowledge here is my view.

An ordinary modern firearm round contains a small amount of compressed gas and a charge. When you pull the trigger, a hammer strikes and ignites the charge, which causes the gas to explode. This creates a force inside the barrel, and since the barrel is strong enough to contain the force of the explosion, the projectile in the barrel has nowhere to go but forward. Obviously, a needle is just a needle; you can't really rig it with its own gas canister and an explosive charge, so you'd have to create some kind of force inside the barrel itself that would move the needle forward. If you were going to do this with an explosion, you'd have to put the explosive charge inside the barrel and then manually ignite it somehow, so you'd end up with something like a musket, where you'd have to put a fresh powder charge into the barrel every time you fire it. This would kind of defeat the point of a needle gun, which as I understand it is supposed to shoot multiple needles fairly rapidly.

The best way to manage this then would be to use compressed air like a BB gun. You would probably have a canister of compressed air that would go into the handle or something, and then every time the trigger is pulled it releases a burst of air that fires a needle. A BB gun is obviously not as deadly as a real gun, and my assumption is that this is because the release of air that launches the BB is nowhere near as powerful a force as the compressed gas explosion that launches a bullet. Presumably a needle gun would be similar, so the weapon's effect would come from the sharpness of the needle rather than blunt force. The effectiveness of a needle gun would probably vary based on how much pressure is in the air cartridge (or whatever it has), and the density of whatever you're firing at. If it hit you in the eyeball for example your eye would be pretty much fucked. Anything soft and spongy like flesh or fatty tissue it would probably drill through. Muscle and bone would probably stop a needle; except for a few vulnerable spots, it's unlikely a needler would be able to hit your body with enough force to hit anything vital on the inside. Most armor would probably deflect it (not chain mail obviously).

It seems like the kind of weapon that could be extremely nasty to get shot with, and would be more than enough to make someone think twice about attacking you, but unless you dip the needles in poison or can somehow produce a yuge amount of force to launch the needle, it's unlikely to be deadly.

>Ever get the feeling this fic would be better if it was an intentional parody of the idea of shoving something like Fallout into FIM?
This has been my view for some time now.

>>296605

>Now that Calamity has revealed himself to be a Dashite, what do you think of him personally and as a character?
I can't really say what I think of Calamity being a Dashite because the word "Dashite" doesn't really mean anything yet. We have no idea why the pegasi decided to break off from Equestria during the war, or why being separate from it is still important to them 200 years after the fact. We also don't know anything about why Calamity decided to leave them, or if it was even his decision to do so. For all we know they kicked him out for diddling colts or something. This information won't mean anything until we know more about what actually happened.

>I think this would be a better reveal if we knew more about the Enclave, the Dashites, the betrayal of the Pegasi, and the branding before we learned he was mixed up in all of this once.
Knowing this would make it a more significant reveal, but that doesn't mean the author is necessarily wrong to do it this way. We know something about Calamity that we didn't know before, it just doesn't mean anything yet. This shows us that there is more to his character than we've thus far seen, but we still don't know the details, which makes him mysterious and therefore interesting.

You could potentially develop a character like this rather artfully by giving the reader a blunt fact about him up front, and then filling in the details behind it as you go. For instance, if you started out a story by introducing a soldier who had sold out his platoon to the enemy, you could potentially make it interesting by giving the reader nothing except this information up front, and then gradually introducing bits and pieces of his past that explain why he did it. Why did the soldier defect? Was he a coward? Was it greed? Did he have some crisis of conscience over what his side was doing? If you tell the reader that your character did something controversial without explaining the controversy, it provokes curiosity and keeps the reader interested, whereas if you just told them up front that the soldier changed sides because he thought the enemy had cuter uniforms, the reader would just be like "oh," and then wonder why the fuck they should even bother reading all the rest of the words you wrote.

Absalom Absalom by William Faulkner is a good example of this kind of thing. The first chapter basically gives you the entire plot of the book, but it only covers the actual events, and they are colored by a particular character's opinions. As the story unfolds, you learn more about the characters involved and their actual desires and motivations. I'm certainly not saying that kkat is doing anything along the same lines as Faulkner, just that this is an acceptable way to build backstory.

>>296621
>The memory orb trick
I guess you could fudge it and say "The memory orb only works if your magic squeezes down on the ball hard enough or pushes into the ball" but in that case it sure is convenient the Alicorn held the memory orb wrong while assuming it was a grenade and got cutscene triggered by it. You know, instead of trying to bounce the "grenade" back by smacking it with a magically conjured shield wall that could also bounce away the grenade blast if it detonated early.
Come to think of it, how do Earth Ponies and Pegasi and Donkeys/Zebras/Dragons/other S1 creatures use these things?

Anyway this moment gets dumber in retrospect. If you're cool with me spoiling something the author already blatantly spoiled ahead of time because he forgot it was a twist in fallout 1, a hive mind unifies all Alicorns. What one sees, the hive mind learns from. It's how they recognized Littlepip on sight even though the Alicorn she dropped a boxcar on died. All Alicorns are cunts and their minds are linked to the gigacunt in charge.

For this Memory Orb "That strange spherical ball's probably a grenade so I had better toss it back- OH FUCK NOW I'M IN A FLASHBACK" trick to work, not a single one of any of the many Wasteland-wandering completely-fertile-yet-daughter-creating-only 200+ year old Alicorns can have ever encountered a Memory Orb, ever. They can't've even seen one. Or heard any sort of rumors or myths about these things.

Hell, the hive mind's ruled by Trixie, who is a pony who existed during the same pre-war times as Fluttershy and the rest.
While Fluttershy and some other Mane Six members were filling a shitload of memory orbs with random scenes from their lives, and Trixie was working with Twilight on a secret project, Trixie supposedly never heard of or encountered or played with a Memory Orb even once?! This is like if some voice actress from the modern day survived 200 years yet couldn't tell her hive mind's future-people about old phones 200 years later because she had somehow never heard of or seen or tried using a Smart Phone and absolutely none of her hive-mind-buddies or their girl-only families or captured males killed by snu-snu ever ran into any Smart Phones or anyone who knew about them either.

>The healing problem
Yep. The only Health Point you have that matters is your last one.
Once you have a lot of healing items in Fallout 3/NV you can map them to a button and run around spamming that button to keep your health full no matter what dangers you run into.
Beartraps and landmines and other traps and enemy attacks can be ignored by those with enough healing items. And those games are so generous with their healing item supply, mods to make them rarer were swiftly coded.
NV's Hardcore Mode (in addition to new Food/Water/Sleep requirements) fixed a little of this by making Stimpaks heal over time instead of healing instantly. Also forces you to use the rarer-than-stimpaks Doctor's Bag items or the addictive drug Hydra to fix limb damage, so crippled legs can slow you down in fights and broken arms can reduce your gun accuracy.
Now dangerous situations can kill you faster than stimpaks can heal you, even if you've got 500+ stimpaks pocketed!
I still use a mod so Stimpaks dehydrate you and make you tired and hungrier. It makes sense, since fully healing from 5 bulletholes in 6 seconds should take a lot out of you. Also gives you a reason to carry more food/water, meaning less of your limited carry weight's spent on guns and bullets and empty space for any loot you find.
Would it be correct to say authors should do something similar to reduce the "game-breaking" (story-breaking) power and convenience of Stimpaks/Healing Potions/other analogue for the Floor Chicken that instantly restores your health points?

This is unusual for me but real book comparison time.
in Shadow Of The Conqueror by Shad M. Brooks, there are special magic people who can heal themselves and some special people who can heal others using magic.
Medical technology's shit as a result in this semi-medieval world because everyone relies on Healers for their healing, so you can survive near-death experiences with a healer nearby but without one, even simple wounds can fuck you up from injury/infection.

In a world where a third of the pony population are Unicorns who CAN learn healing spells, but any type of pony can be destined to get a healing Cutie Mark to represent how they should be doctors/magical healers/something specific, would it really make sense for them to be medical experts who know about things like bones and how they might wrong?
Would a society used to solving its problems with magic and friendship think it's worth trying to understand the body, or think it's worth performing autopsies on dead ponies?
Why would a society able to make Healing Potions not make Energy/Magic-Restoring Potions for the horned healers?
If cartoon ponies understood how germs worked, would ponies put antibacterial gel in First Aid Kits or shrinking potions so ponies can shrink themselves down to physically beat germs up like in every "shrink and go inside someone's body" stock episode ever?
Zebras invented potions and can make healing potions, so why do ponies at war with Zebrica (and Zebras in general, not that they realize this until it's too late) have so many healing potions? If ponies can make potions too, why does Kkat never do anything with that idea? Where's the racist pony potioneer who says "We make potions better than you stripey idiots! You're stripey like my mom's underwear, you zigger faggots!"?
It's supposed to be a part of this story that War-Era Equestria was full of retards who didn't know how to treat PTSD and had no idea what it was. So why would they have our modern understanding of bones/medicine/healing without magic AND magical insta-heal cheat spells AND so many different kinds of magical mass-produced insta-heal cheat items that they're still somewhat plentiful after the war?

>>296626
LP's Pipbuck gave her the name of SteelHooves on sight and his home's name, and she recognized him as "a Steel Ranger" which is also dumb.

These moments of "Littlepip sometimes knows her own kind's history and sometimes she doesn't but we have to discover it alongside her even if she already knows something and reminds herself what she already knows for our benefit sometimes" are stupid. How does she know what a Steel Ranger is, when up until this point we have no idea what one is?
If they're a pre-war thing every Stable Pony knows of, it should be foreshadowed sooner.
Perhaps during chapter 1 while Littlepip stares at a wall while on the clock at her pipbuck repair place and thinks "Needs a mural", two faggy co-workers of hers could argue with each other over whether Applejack's Steel Rangers or Rainbow Dash's Shadowbolts were cooler.
Could foreshadow or comically exaggerate the capabilities of the Steel Ranger we're encountering now, and the capabilities of the Pegasus Enclave baddies we'll eventually meet, by saying shit like... uh...
>"The Steel Ranger's armour is two feet thick and weighs 300 pounds, and they can lift 700 pounds! They carry miniguns with armour-piercing 50cal bullets on their right side, a 150mm tank gun on their back, and on their left they've got a rapid-fire auto-targeting grenade launcher on their back that can spit out six 40mm grenades a second and takes 120-round grenade drums! And that's on top of anything their mouths carry into battle, like the Heavy Flamer or Super-Heavy Flamer! Their suits literally heal them faster than a standard flamethrower can hurt them! Their suits are enchanted to absorb fire and burn it as fuel! For their journeys, no challenge is too great! They also have huge magic hardlight Tower Shields that can block enemy bullets but not their own and retractable massive 40 pound chainsaw swords connected to their asses by a retractable steel cable and commanded by their SATS attack system! Plus with their piston-enhanced kicks that can shatter concrete, a Steel Ranger could beat the shit out of any Shadowbolt!"
>"Maybe if they can catch them, which they can't. Brute strength doesn't matter when you can fly faster than a fighter jet! If a Shadowbolt gets into melee range, his vibroblade deathsteel wingblades will slice a Steel Ranger's head clean off! Or he can manipulate the wind itself with his Ceremonial Wind Saber to whip up a tornado or slice your head off from up to 1000 meters away! All they need is a clean line of sight and a second to swing that sword hard enough, and you're fucking dead, kiddo. Or their Tractor Beam can magically lift anything up to 1200 pounds! Or they can fly way higher than any unarmoured pony could ever dream of, flying so high you can't see them and everypony else's Power Armour would ice up and everypony without Power Armour would be completely unable to breathe, since a proper Shadowbolt suit stores enough oxygen for 30 minutes of sustained almost-orbital flight! And he carries enough long-range miniguns and lock-on missiles to destroy a whole army of enemy aircraft, and he has enough easily-dropped bombs to flatten a small town! First they drop a bunch of small grenade-sized bombs from bomber-doors on a secret compartment in their stomach, then the shrinking spell on that compartment wears off and the grenade-sized bombs grow to the size of houses! He can carry all sorts of supplies and extra ammo in that special shrinking compartment. He even carry megaspells and fire them at will, goddamn it! Can your stupid fucking Steel Ranger faggots survive explosion spells big enough to take out whole cities?"
"Yes! Yes, they can! Remember how the Ziggers dropped a Hellfire nuke on Fillydelphia and it killed or mutated everypony EXCEPT the Steel Rangers dancing in a military parade with their armour on? Tanks melted, skyscrapers crumbled, and the Steel Rangers still fucking stood. Fire and thunder! Blood and brotherhood! The Steel Rangers are the greatest heroes in the ENTIRE MULTI GALAXY-UNIVERSE TIMES A BILLION!"
"Ok, so Steel Rangers can survive explosive Megaspells. They can't just shrug off other magical effects put into Megaspells, like mind-control ones that make you kill your friends or shrinking ones that make you tiny or transformation ones that turn you into cows forever! Remember when we dropped the Cow Bomb on the Zigger capital, whatever the fuck its stupid muh-bongo-donger name was, for suicide-bombing our schools? The Shadowbolts could turn your Steel Rangers into fucking cows, retard! Blood and brotherhood? More like milk and chewing cud!"
"Fuck you, asshole! Even if a Steel Ranger was turned into a cow, he'd still be cooler than a Shadowbolt! Steel Rangers are honourable Earth Ponies who will proudly face a thousand enemies alone to give their unarmoured friends the time to retreat! Shadowbolts are pussy faggots who only care about themselves and betrayed Equestria as soon as Rainbow Dash pussied out of life!"
"You fucking take that back, you fucking bitch! Rainbow Dash is still alive out there somewhere, and she'll save us all some day!"
"Yeah, like the rest of her friends were supposed to? It's been 200 years since Equestria got bombed. Twilight and her friends failed Equestria, and it's their fault the world died!"
Then those two guys fistfight over this but the story mostly ignores them like they're background noise.
Meanwhile Littlepip is thinking to herself "This wall definitely needs a mural. Also these losers need girlfriends. I want a girlfriend too".
I might have gone overboard with the weaponry there, but making their in-story appearances far weaker than they are in legend could always be blamed on propaganda and the Steel Rangers/Shadowbolts (Who will become the Enclave for no reason) having already used up their best gear during the war, leaving them with the same third-rate mass-produced military gear that would eventually become the standard 200-year-old shit used by Wastelanders today.

>>296626
>The great alicorn hunter… meaning there were more of these.
LP shouldn't know these guys hunt Alicorns.
Even if they did run around doing shit for Equestria and getting famous before the nukes fell, there were only two Alicorns: Celestia and Luna, who were both on Equestria's side even though they sucked.
The "Artificial Alicorns" running around 200 years later aka now were first seen by Wastelanders ten years before Littlepip left her Vault.
Yes, it's retarded that they spent 190 years doing nothing besides sitting around practicing their evil laughs and edgy fashion sense.
But unless someone told Littlepip about the alicorn-hunting Steel Rangers offscreen, she shouldn't know these guys like hunting Alicorns.

I forget, was Big Mac a Steel Ranger? If not, have the Steel Rangers had any foreshadowing at this point in the story at all? It feels like the Steel Rangers and everything about them came out of nowhere just so she could be saved by the timely arrival of someone besides Watcher.

>>296627
Bro, you're a fucking genius.
At any moment, any Pegasus including an Enclave Pegasus could pop their upper bodies down out of the clouds like a Whack-A-Mole character and snipe down at targets marked by their Pip-Bucks. That should be horrifying to these ponies. The clouded sky becomes an ever-present hazard and constant reason to seek roofed shelters... Genius!
As for Earth Ponies I've seen authors who like them emphasize their super-strength/super-toughness and try to spin Cutie Marks so while Unicorns and Pegasi typically get something specific, Earth Ponies usually get vague ones with many meanings. RD's good with the weather (her speed comes from training) and Fluttershy's good with animals. Applejack the farmer's great at all parts of running a farm, Pinkie Pie can do all sorts of cartoon-physics party tricks and Sherlock-Scan people to know what parties they like, Nurse Redheart's godlike at everything remotely medical in nature, and so on. Plus the average Unicorn's only magically strong and the average Pegasus is only fast after a lifetime of study/athleticism but Earth Ponies are always in peak physical condition, to the point where getting fat for bulking purposes takes significant effort and cartoonish mountains of food.

>>296649
That makes sense, thanks for the needle gun info. The weapon sounds like something impractical as a main battle rifle. Probably best used for precisely-aimed stealth kills but only if they're quieter than guns. If they run on compressed air, how common are compressed air tanks and perfectly-crafted needles in the apocalypse?

>Dashite means nothing for now
Oh yeah, good point. Come to think of it I've seen other pieces of media build backstory this way before. There was a lengthy Naruto example here (first we learn Kakashi's dad once abandoned a mission and was considered a pussy and killed himself, making Kakashi anal about rule-following, then we learn he abandoned his mission to protect his comrades so Kakashi becomes nicer) but I shortened it.

>>296460
A lot of the confusion regarding the dart gun Pip's been trying to build for the past 4 chapters is due to yet another Fallout 3 reference Kkat expects you to intuitvely know about. Fo3 has a handful of weapons only available through crafting, one of which is a dart gun. It's a gas-operated miniature crossbow that shoots paralyzing poison-tipped darts. Not weapons-grade darts - pic related darts. In the game these darts greatly reduce their targets' movement speed, but do minimal damage. FoE's version put their targets to sleep instead. This makes some sense as a weapon for Velvet to use considering her alleged pacifism, or at least as a means to end fights with something other than a gorefest, but absolutely NONE OF THIS IS IN THE STORY until it becomes immediately relevant.

It's also distinct from the needler weapon, which isn't a thing in Fallout and, as I recall, vanishes into the ether at some point around here and is never mentioned again. Maybe Kkat was playing Halo for a change when he wrote that thing in.

>>296462
>Seems to me that a better way for pegasi to brand one of their own as a traitor would be to chop the offender's wings off, since that's literally the physical attribute that makes them a pegasus. It would also be perfectly in line with all of the other edgelord crap this story is so fond of.
The bizarre thing about dashites is that as the story goes on, Kkat can't seem to decide if they're a society of principled pegasus revolutionaries or just exiles with a silly name. Also, we later learn that the pegasi have a vested interest in staying hidden from the surface world and have absolutely no reservations about brutally killing one another at the slightest suggestion of insubordination. The only reason dashites exist in the first place is so that they can tell Pip that the hidden pegasus nation exists in the first place.

Later, we'll see that the other pegasi were kind enough to let Calamity leave with his own suit of power armor and cutting edge custom guns.

>>296463
>As we can see from the above passage, at least one of the alicorns appears to have mysteriously exploded, thus bypassing the need for the party to actually fight it, and I have little hope that the other two will not encounter a similar fate.
Once again, alicorns appear and are played up as a terrifying threat, only to accomplish nothing and be jobbed immediately. We're not even to the actual main plot yet and Pip's merry band is already killing wizard supersoldiers three at a time.

>>296623
>Considering this is a world based on an RPG game, where things like Perception, Imagination, and Persuasion are all skills or attributes or whatever that can be modified by ticking the integer value up or down, and considering that these "party-time mint-als" are probably yet another element ripped off directly from one of the Fallout games, my guess is that this is exactly what the author has in mind for them.
Correct. In Fallout New Vegas, Party Time Mentats increase a character's intelligence, perception and charisma stats by a hefty amount for a short time. Because your chaarcter's skills are directly influenced by their stats, this translates to a significant boost to the related skills including hacking, lockpicking, shooting and persuasion. This comes at the cost of withdrawal reducing your intelligence and perception if you get addicted.

In other words, Littlepip is powergaming. She's using a consumable to boost her stats/skills a little higher to pass the threshold of stat/skill checks she'd otherwise fail. Kkat probably imagines that this is a meaningful way of having his character surmount difficult problems.

>>296626
>The quotation marks and the capital letters suggest that the proper term for this kind of thing is Steel Ranger. At the time I actually remember this line striking me as odd; this seems like another one of those weird instances where LP knows some random historical fact that it doesn't seem like she ought to know.
Yet another Fallout series reference. The powered armor used by the games' Brotherhood of Steel is iconic to the series - it shows up on the cover of most of the games. If the Steel Rangers were founded during the war it makes sense that Pip and the others would have heard of them, though in the games they're a faction that formed from remnants of the US army *after* the war and therefore have a lot of high end military tech. If that were the case here Pip would recognise the armor but not the affiliation with the Rangers. There is absolutely no reason that Pip should know Steelhooves hunts alicorns.

Glim, a while back it dawned on me that Littlepip's party can't meaningfully fight against anything responsible for Equestria's downfall, whether it's an abstract idea like "greed" or "short-sightedness" or "fear of giving up the moral high ground to protect what you love" or a physical threat like an enemy nation or an evil army or a giant enemy crab. She might be able to shoot at some baddies that set up shop within the 200 years after the megaspells fell but she can't meaningfully fight the flaws that let Equestria die or get revenge on the ones who killed it.

But is what Project Horizons did to address that - making a big physical threat in the form of a giant multi phase videogame final boss for its protag to shoot and saying it represents the abstract idea of evil that caused everything bad that ever happened to happen - a smart way to solve that problem?

>>296827
>Once again, alicorns appear and are played up as a terrifying threat, only to accomplish nothing and be jobbed immediately.
One of the things that annoys me about this is that even lacking any kind of depth or substance, this idea could still be an entertaining hack and slash adventure, but the author can't even manage to do that right. He sets up encounters to look like they are going to be major fights, but then either skips the action entirely or else solves it by having LP pull some asinine solution out of her ass. It's like he deliberately sets his characters against enemies they shouldn't logically be able to beat because he wants to make them look bad ass, then realizes they can't actually win, and then finds a way to end the fight before it can get started so his characters don't lose face. Doing this kind of thing once is bad enough, but doing it over and over again like this is just infuriating, particularly in the absence of any other redeeming qualities in the book.

>In Fallout New Vegas, Party Time Mentats increase a character's intelligence, perception and charisma stats by a hefty amount for a short time.
I had assumed the "party time" part of "Party Time Mint-als" was something the author had thought up, but if that's what they are actually called in Fallout I almost want to forgive him for including them. If you're transposing another universe's elements into Equestria and something in that universe is called "Party Time ____", I'm pretty sure you're legally obligated to include them and associate them with Pinkie Pie somehow.

>In other words, Littlepip is powergaming. She's using a consumable to boost her stats/skills a little higher to pass the threshold of stat/skill checks she'd otherwise fail. Kkat probably imagines that this is a meaningful way of having his character surmount difficult problems.
This is where I object to how the author handles this. It's another example of his clumsily transposing video game elements into literature. In a game everything is controlled by numbers because there's no other way to do it, and giving the player little boosts and whatnot that screw with the numbers can make gameplay more entertaining. In a book though it makes little sense to approach it this way. Giving Littlepoop a drug addiction isn't a bad addition to the story, but a story isn't a game; a story tries to paint a picture that is at least somewhat akin to reality, and in reality your ability to smooth-talk someone isn't determined by an arbitrary number that can be modified. What's doubly irritating here is that the author is clearly using some kind of game mechanic here, which is unrealistic to begin with, and to make matters worse he doesn't bother explaining any of his mechanics to the reader, so we're left guessing at whatever was in his head. You basically have to be as much of a video game autist as the author is to make any sort of sense out of how anything works in this story.

>There is absolutely no reason that Pip should know Steelhooves hunts alicorns.
In the author's defense, I believe she learns this by overhearing something one of the alicorns murmurs to itself.

>>296834
>But is what Project Horizons did to address that - making a big physical threat in the form of a giant multi phase videogame final boss for its protag to shoot and saying it represents the abstract idea of evil that caused everything bad that ever happened to happen - a smart way to solve that problem?
I haven't read Project Horizons and don't really know anything about it, so I can't really comment on that. Overall, though, one of this author's problems I think is that his idea here was just too big. He obviously has a very complex world that he's thought out, or at least tried to think out, and he tries to cram so much of it into one book that he ends up with a haphazard mishmash of all sorts of ideas that have nothing to do with each other.

For all its complexity, the backstory of this world has almost nothing to do with anything going on in the main story, such as it is. In between her adventures, Littlepoop wanders around picking up fragments of the past and getting little bits and pieces of information from the pre-war or wartime era, and this is how the author handles backstory revelation. However, there's no clear reason why she does this or why she is interested; she has no connection to any of these characters or events, and other than being a nosy klepto there's no reason for her to care about finding journal fragments and terminal entries from hundreds of years ago. The reader may be interested, but that's not enough; these events from the past need to be connected to LP's own motivations and storyline in order for her investigations into them to make sense. Thus, in an effort to answer your question, I would say that trying to have her avenge the death of old Equestria, or fight whatever evil supposedly caused the apocalypse, is the wrong direction to go no matter how the author tries to approach it.

The author's problem is that he's basically trying to tell a story about the war that destroyed Equestria, but he's telling it 200 years after the fact and attempting to use events in the present as a framing device. His other problem is that he does it badly. His heroine has no apparent connection to any of these events, however, so trying to unravel them and/or avenge them don't make any sense for her as a motivation. Again, the problem is just the size of the idea.

Imagine if JRR Tolkien took all of the lore about Middle Earth contained in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion and tried to cram all of it into the text of The Hobbit. It would just be a complete mess. Bilbo Baggins has no reason to give a shit about what the Valar were doing thousands of years before he was born, even if that information is a crucial part of the world he lives in. Thus, even though they're important, those events don't factor into his story and thus didn't end up in his book. The Hobbit works because it's a simple adventure story about a quest to find some gold. It takes place within a very large, rich, and detailed setting, but the actual events of the story don't even scrape the surface of this lore. The reason Tolkien was able to make his world feel so real is that he didn't try to tell you everything about it all at once, he just gave you a quick glimpse of it with a simple story, and then filled in more details later on as he began to weave larger and more complex stories in that world that dealt with more significant events.

Kkat would have been much better served by writing multiple short works set in his FoE world than by trying to write one massive epic that contained everything up to and including the kitchen sink. If he wanted to write this story about his Littlepoop character, he should have focused it primarily on her. Who is Littlepoop? What are her goals? What is she trying to achieve in life? So far, he hasn't been able to answer any of that, because he seems more focused on trying to explain all of this complex shit from 200 years ago. If he wanted to do all of that, he should have just written a war epic set during the period of the actual war, but that idea would likely be dismissed outright because he wants to mimic a Fallout game, which is set in the post-apocalyptic period.

Ideally, what we should have here is a story about Littlepoop and her life and goals. The story started out promisingly enough, with the storyline about her leaving the Stable to chase her crush across the Wasteland, and if he'd pursued that he could have spun it into an interesting, self-contained story. As the story progressed, we would have seen this ruined version of Equestria that is obviously quite different from the version we're familiar with, and we would have been curious as to how it wound up this way. He could slip in hints or references to past events where relevant, but there's no reason the entire history of the war should be contained in this story about Littlepoop. If he successfully told this story, his reader base would likely be curious enough about past events that it would have justified writing other stories, probably prequels set during the war itself, which would have been much more suitable vessels for all of this backstory. Ironically, many of the journal fragments LP picks up have hinted at stories far more interesting than the one we are reading. For instance, Diamond Tiara's last days in the Shattered Hoof facility could have been its own self-contained work, or a small event in a larger work dealing with that period, instead of just a bunch of sound files that some dull-as-ditchwater protagonist found while randomly looting a dungeon.

>>296652
>For this Memory Orb "That strange spherical ball's probably a grenade so I had better toss it back- OH FUCK NOW I'M IN A FLASHBACK" trick to work, not a single one of any of the many Wasteland-wandering completely-fertile-yet-daughter-creating-only 200+ year old Alicorns can have ever encountered a Memory Orb, ever. They can't've even seen one. Or heard any sort of rumors or myths about these things.
This is actually a good point. If anything, the alicorn should know more about the memory orbs than LP does, especially since the one she chucks at her is actually the first one she ever saw.

>I still use a mod so Stimpaks dehydrate you and make you tired and hungrier. It makes sense, since fully healing from 5 bulletholes in 6 seconds should take a lot out of you. Also gives you a reason to carry more food/water, meaning less of your limited carry weight's spent on guns and bullets and empty space for any loot you find.
>Would it be correct to say authors should do something similar to reduce the "game-breaking" (story-breaking) power and convenience of Stimpaks/Healing Potions/other analogue for the Floor Chicken that instantly restores your health points?
What I think authors should do is to completely forget about stimpacks and healing potions and shit like that, because they are items that only make sense in video games. Instead, they should treat character injuries as real injuries with real consequences. If Littlepoop gets her leg blown off, then she shouldn't have a leg for the rest of the story. If losing a leg is a major part of her character arc, then this would become a significant event that affects the entire outcome of the story. If that's not what the author wants, and he needs her to have a leg for most of the story in order for it to work, then it shouldn't get blown off in the first place. Having a character suffer some life-altering injury and then heal it through some entirely bullshit means is just a waste of words; a life-altering injury should either be life-altering, or else the author should just have the character suffer light wounds that she could heal from normally.

In Johnny Tremain, when the titular character dumps molten silver on his hand, it fucks up his hand and he can't be a silversmith anymore. It's a major turning point in the story, and that's why it's in there. If kkat had been writing it, Johnny would just chug a healing potion, fix his hand, go back to making the most awesome silver goblet ever, and then graft a laser cannon onto his dick so he could defeat the entire British army by himself.

>>297322
I thought I already said Party Time Mentats are from FNV and went on an overly long autistic rant about how the ingame recipe [A tin of mentats, a whiskey bottle, a honey mesquite pod crafted at a Campfire in the dusty wasteland air or on a Hot Plate somewhere] would probably make something really unappetizing if taken literally. I take too long to get to the point and it pisses me off.
Anyway boiling a tin of 200 year old intelligence enhancing addictive crack mints in whiskey and honey over a campfire... why would that magically make the resulting honey and booze boiled intelligence-boosting crack mints also increase your Charisma stat? Booze doesn't make you charming, it just makes you think you're charming. Where does the honey mesquite pod factor in? For flavour? Junkies snort and inject some wild shit in wild places but this is ridiculous. And magic is never confirmed to be how these are made. You can say blending some greenish plant and water gets you a red health potion if "because magic" excuse but this is just silly.
and LP's first ever PTMentat/Mint-al was because Calamity told her it was a hangover cure even though it wore off practically instantly.

I asked about the "blame everything on an evil god for the hero to shoot" thing because it was an immensely unsatisfying copout when Persona 5 ended that way. After all that talk about reforming society and challenging authority and rebellion it turns out everything bad only happened because an evil God made it happen, the same evil god that gave the heroes superpowers for no reason besides "so the plot can happen".
However (this is why I brought it up) would such a magical bullshit final boss dark-god enemy be more suited to a magical world of ponies where a god of chaos can invite you to tea? Yalbadabbadoo was jarring in the supposedly realistic but cartoonishly simplistic Persona 5 setting but if Discord had an evil edgy dad named Oblivion who wanted to destroy everything and taught Discord how to be an asshole it would probably fit the setting. It probably could be done.
One of the most popular pony fics is about ponies and evil gods and "Dark World" counterpart BS but I forgot its name.
But would it make for an entertaining and emotional and satisfying end to the story for Littlepip to get a custom super strong Power Armour suit made by all her friends (especially ones inspired by her heroism or saved by her good deeds) chipping in and working together, and then we watch as Littlepip battles Oblivion The AlicorNequus while dodging his Mega Darkness Destruction Balls Of Darkness And Destruction and shooting Oblivion with different guns she found during her journey and finishing the baddie off with Twilight Sparkle's revolver?

Thank you for mentioning how often the author cheats to make Littlepip and pals look like they're able to beat enemies they could never logically defeat. FE fanboys love talking about her like she's the ultimate badass because these scenes completely fooled them. Reading through her Respect Thread might give you Turbo AIDS.
A "Respect Thread" is when a fan gathers evidence of a character's best feats of durability/strength/intelligence/stealth and the feats of important gear or transformations or teammates and other relevant fight info. This is to make arguing over who would win in a fight between two fictional character easier. So LP's Respect Thread constantly sucks LP's dick.
Sometimes for a joke our out of rage fans make "Disrespect threads" chronicling all the times a character sucked and failed and met their limits while failing to surpass them. For example listing all the times Superman lost fistfights to weaklings and failed to be faster than a speeding bullet even though he travelled halfway across the universe in a second in last week's issue. But that's irrelevant.

You've expertly analyzed the problem with the divide between pre war and post war Equestria in this story. Fallout focused on the "present day" and the backstory added context to what the player encounters.
Do you think this problem could have been fixed by making Littlepip a Dashite who gets cast down from Skyfag society for caring too much about the world below and being a history obsessed faggot who eventually realizes the propaganda version of history she was taught in Skyfag School was absolute bullshit, giving her a reason to wander around at random learning the backstory of different locations while doing sidequests for fun and slaughtering baddies and making friends? If she started out befriending Monterry Jack and forming a "innocent girl and experienced guy" couple only for the Raiders or some Slavers to kill him right in front of her, it would give her a reason to viscerally hate all Raiders and/or slavers besides their foul smell and bad taste and offscreen crimes. It would also give Calamity a reason to stick around with her besides "i like her and want her medic friend and feel guilty about shooting her for wearing raider spikes once". A scene where Velvet gets butthurt at LP for being former enclave could be neat too. And it would explain where her random pro commando fucking gun skills came from.

Your "split the story up" idea is fucking genius. That would.massively improve ALL stories that could be told in this setting! When hearing Diamond Tiara's Final Words Holotape 1 of 4 right after seeing her corpse everyone knows she's dead so there isn't much tension in the story of how she died. It's a mystery but the end result is already solved. But a story set from her perspective could expertly get us feeling what she feels and hoping she makes it even though she doesn't.

>>297362
>our out of rage
*or out of rage. Sorry typo.

>>297362
>I thought I already said Party Time Mentats are from FNV and went on an overly long autistic rant about how the ingame recipe [A tin of mentats, a whiskey bottle, a honey mesquite pod crafted at a Campfire in the dusty wasteland air or on a Hot Plate somewhere] would probably make something really unappetizing if taken literally
I think you did, actually. This story discussion is already well into its second thread and we're barely a quarter of the way through the text, so it's hard to keep track of everything we've talked about.

>Do you think this problem could have been fixed by making Littlepip a Dashite who gets cast down from Skyfag society for caring too much about the world below and being a history obsessed faggot who eventually realizes the propaganda version of history she was taught in Skyfag School was absolute bullshit, giving her a reason to wander around at random learning the backstory of different locations while doing sidequests for fun and slaughtering baddies and making friends?
Again, it's a bit difficult to say because I haven't read far enough to know about the Dashites and what they did or why they did it. However, if it was firmly established that she had some familiarity with history and had a reason to be interested in the world below, it probably would give her more of a motivation to delve into what really happened during the war. Having her friend killed early by raiders would make a good motivation for her to want to kill raiders, so you're definitely thinking along the right lines.

>>297376
I added the number of words in all chapters up to chapter 14 and got 104631 words.
Once chapter 14 is finished, we will have read 104k out of the 620k words in the story. We're making really good time!
At first the online calculator I used gave me 342k and it seemed weird for a story's halfway marker to be chapter 14 out of 45 plus two afterwords but it turned out the commas in the numbers fucked the calculations up. Removing the commas gave me 104,631.

Anyway, if this fic was put onto Wikipedia's list of longest stories ever it would rank below the estimated 645,000 of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand but above the estimated 610,000 of Jean-Cristophe by Romain Roland, and above the 600,000 reached by both Alan Moore's Jerusalem and "...And ladies of the club" by Helen Hoovy Santmyer

Those stories probably set up a protagonist who makes sense (and whose backstory and pre-adventure life is worth mentioning in the story because it influences who the protagonist is and how he/she thinks) along with stakes and a proper story structure before getting a hundred thousand words into the story, right? I don't know because I've never read them. But they surely set up their goals and setting and stakes before this point.

Does this story have stakes? Saw a writing advice vid today on the importance of stakes.
Littlepip just sort of exists in this apocalypse-themed playground and her plot armour protects her from all the world's worst fates. So her goal is to wander in the direction of the only two places she has been told about (Another Slaver town and a Radio Tower) while fighting baddies and possibly sidequesting along the way.
If Littlepip and her friends die on this quest, what happens to the world? It just sort of goes on being as sucky as it was for the last 199 years. And if the hero succeeds, random NPCs in cages get saved probably but what kind of life can they live in this hellhole? There should probably be a "Important Person" the hero wants to save from the Slavers/Raiders to justify her obsession with those baddies and provide a clear end point for the story. The Punisher's neverending murderous rampage through countless no-name thugs means a new set of no-name thugs need to be established at the next story's start, because like most comic book characters his stories are designed to go on forever and any satisfying finales are flushed down the toilet so the status quo that drives weekly sales can reign supreme. He lost everything, driving him over the edge and motivating his crusade against crime in general, not just the baddies who pissed him off.
But a story with an ending like Taken starring Liam Neeson, Liam's not just going after kidnappers for fun or because they killed his dog. He's trying to save his daughter and her friend, there's a time limit of 96 hours after which they'll be lost forever, and the film ends when he saves them. Sequels could be made with new baddies but Liam's character's goal is simple and concise.
Littlepip's goal? To "Make Equestria great again".
And the only solution the author can think of is for Littlepip to kill ponies in her own pony country she deems "evil" according to her 200 year old morality until the author decides it's time to wrap things up.
So far the thought of creating the foundations for a self-sufficient town/city that could protect her home and stuff, andd grow into a stable civilization able to create useful resources/weapons for her and get gold medals for all the post-apocalypse's unique challenges, and grow over time until it brings civilization back to the Wastes hasn't even crossed Littlepoop's mind. She's just a murderhobo here to kill baddies, and I suspect if any new civilization does get made it will be primarily constructed by side characters and NPCs even though she or a friend will be put in charge of it. I don't think "If the hero dies everything's fucked and the main baddies win forever and their evil Bond Villain plan destroys all hope for a better future" consequences get established until the final arc.

Littlepip's current plan (Go towards locations I've been told about and possibly do stuff along the way) seems like a videogame thing, too.
In Ratchet And Clank you go to different "Planets" (levels) after being rewarded with their "Co-ordinates" typically in the form of an ad. But they make sense for your journey.
Ratchet doesn't take a detour from his "Stop Drek from destroying the galaxy" quest to race hoverboards or fight in arena battles for fun, he does so because the winner of the race/tournament gets a Gadget he needs to progress further into the adventure. He needs the Refractor to solve laser puzzles or the Trespasser to hack doors or the Swingshot to get over bottomless pits.
LP taking detours for looty-shooty "fun" has no similar excuse.
And in Fallout 1, you leave your Vault at the game's start. You have 150 days to find a Water Chip to fix your Vault's water purifier, before everyone dies. You're told "Go east to this vault, they might have one" but it's destroyed and chipless. Also you run into the town Shady Sands along the way. You need rope from this town to enter and search that vault.
Returning empty-handed to Shady Sands, the recruitable companion Ian tells you about Junktown and The Hub, your next places to search. The Hub's Water Merchants point you to Necropolis where you learn of the Super Mutants. Eventually you can steal a Water Chip from Necropolis and then you must stop the Super Mutants at Mariposa, your time limit becomes "Time until the Super Mutants kill everyone". Once you defeat the Super Mutants and their leader the game ends, you win.

Sure in a videogame or when pressed for time and desperate for leads "Let's wander in that direction and slaughter 999 enemies and complete a death-course no matter how dangerous" makes sense. But it still seems inelegant. Have any of LP's murderhobo adventures connected to each other significantly? How can they when she has no "Main Quest" for them to tie into?

>>297534
What if Velvet Remedy was captured by Slavers almost immediately after leaving the Vault/Stable, so once Littlepip realizes this her "Hunt down all Slavers" bonus-objective becomes her main quest?
It would give her a reason to take on Old Appleoosa with nothing but her guns and Calamity.
And after saving the slaves and not finding Velvet, she could check that computer terminal in town and get a load of useless (to her. to us, it's backstory) info before finally finding slave-selling records and learning Velvet was bought by a thug working for Deadeyes and taken to the Gem Prison to sing for the gem-mining slaves or something.
The "Velvet Remedy" in Littlepip's team, her role could be filled by a doctor mare forced against her will to cure slaves AND slavers, even though she's a moralfag who'd rather just heal slaves. Or she'd rather sell her medical skills to the highest bidder and slavers only pay you in food and protection. Her character arc becomes "being more moral over time" in that case. Either way Littlepip could still stare at her ass and try to impress her and get jealous whenever Calamity flirts with her.
After this, when Littlepip goes to the Gem Prison and defeats the unexpected dragon and helps the Griffon take over everything, the Griffon says "Velvet was sent to the main Slaver HQ at Fillydelphia because Red-Eye wants her to sing for a pro-slavery radio station of evil he wants to make, so go there. It's near Tenpony Tower, the only radio tower out here that still works. You can't miss it. Also Red-Eye wants to conquer this radio tower and get it playing his propaganda and his music, the same shit played by his Spritebots."
And so Littlepip does.
And instead of obnoxiously flirting with Velvet, she can think "I'm coming for you, Velvet! I'm going to save you!" every night.
Perhaps even fantasize about the day she saves Velvet and how grateful and kind and adoring she thinks Velvet will act, to make it hit harder if LP saves Velvet who turns out to be a spoilt ungrateful wimpy pathetic wishy-washy faggot who loves trying to sound and act morally superior to others but frequently fails to back it up with good deeds.

Anyway all LP has of Velvet is a signed nude autograph she bought at a concert and some old Velvet Remedy MP3s on her Pipbuck INCLUDING a half-finished song Velvet gave to Littlepip (And only Littlepip) as a reward for taking her Pip-Buck off(even though her office was closed at the time, which got her in more trouble. she was the only one in the office at the time after closing hours because she painted a mural on its wall without her boss's consent and had to wash it off), and LP thinks "I should send a message to Velvet and the world, to subtly tell her I'm coming to save her!"
so she decides to make a short detour at Tenpony Tower and get Velvet's old songs on the radio, so if Velvet hears them she can think "Wait, only Littlepip had that song... How'd she get it on the radio station Red-Eye was going to take over, only for his invasion of the radio tower to fail when a bunch of heavily armed ponies slaughtered all of Red-Eye's troops? This must mean Littlepip's coming to save me!"

That way Velvet becomes "The McGuffin" that drives the plot and motivates Littlepip. Combine that with "LP befriended Jack and Raiders killed him" to give her a reason to take detours and slaughter Raider camps, and that could fix the story's big "Littlepip murderhobos aimlessly" issue and give her a reason to think "I must stop these baddies in particular" for all of the story. Or most of it, before the final villains are introduced and become the main threat.

What do you think, Glim?

>>297535
Oh also it would be necessary to establish the Raiders as a significant threat. I forgot about them at first since the story treats them the way Pokemon treats its Rattatas and Pidgeys.
It's not enough to just give them messy houses full of corpses and pissed-on beds and expect readers to "fill in the blanks". Showing just how evil the Raiders are, making them kill beloved characters the audience cares about, introducing a town for the sole purpose of showing it feeding the Raiders out of cowardice even though feeding Raiders is an evil act since it sustains them and lets them raid more locations, so Littlepip can fight some of these raiders and lose only to inspire the cowardly town to rise up and save her...
Perhaps Littlepip could join a party of adventurers near the start to give the impression that everything is going to be fine. Monterry Jack, some others, an old veteran badass with a sharp mind and scarred 47 yr old body, a hotheaded idiot, an edgy loner stealthfag who can't do teamwork, and at least one cute chick who gets raped right in front of Littlepip by the Raiders. The party represents standard fantasy cliches and typical videogamey ways of adventuring. But they lack plot armour and make frequent mistakes so they are slaughtered horribly right in front of Littlepip. Her memories of their mistakes teach her what to avoid when adventuring with her own party.
Sword Art Online did an arc where Kirito made some friends and they died. But that just made him sad for a while. Didn't contribute much to the story or his character. Didn't teach him anything or make him inherit anyone's hopes and dreams.
Goblin Slayer's opener was a goddamn masterpiece. First we see the generic safe "standard fantasy setting", a power fantasy we've come to expect. An oblivious angry idiot hero and his harem. Then they all die horribly to weak-ass goblins for fucking up so much. Then Goblin Slayer comes in to say if you want to win against Goblins, this is how hardcore you need to be. If Littlepip learned from a character like Goblin Slayer and then watched Raiders kill him, it would be emotional. It would say "not even badasses like this have plot armour". It would say "LP needs to surpass this if she wants to avenge him". It would tell the shonenfags in the audience "LP will eventually grow beyond this Power Ceiling". And it will tell those in the audience here for an emotional rollercoaster "This won't be easy".

Of course for that to work the whole story would need another draft. LP should be creative with her crafting and improvisation to win fights when outgunned and outmatched instead of relying on deus ex machinas and getting saved by strangers and Spontaneous Enemy Retardity Syndrome.
Speaking of retarded the thought of ponies acting like Fallout 1 Raiders is already pushing. They were just bandits that dressed like Mad Max baddies but taking things further brings to mind edgy Sonic The Hedgehog art that tries to look badass and fails. Giving Tails a glock and scar and leather jacket won't change the fact that he's a cute and fluffy 3 foot cartoon fox in Mickey Mouse gloves and no pants. But Fallout 3's Meme Raiders? Cutesy cartoon ponies can't act like this and expect to be taken seriously, they're trying too hard to look tough and scary. That could be turned into a joke and all Raiders could actually turn out to be scared desperate starving softies trying to intimidate poners into giving them free lunches because they suck at fighting. But that wouldn't make them a big threat to the world. If Raiders must act evil even when it harms their own survival chances, then blame it on a virus. Toxoplasma Gondii, the weird shit that makes worms crawl to high places and swell up to resemble caterpillars so birds will eat them and spread the virus, makes mice into fearless cat-biters with a fetish for cat piss, turns men into gay "bugchasers", and makes birds aggressive. Ponyland's magic Toxoplasma Gondii turns ponies into edgy assholes and transforms their Cutie Mark into a big red edgy bloodstain. Ponies invented it and then decided it was too cruel to use on Zebras but when the nukes fell it was released into the world though only Raiders caught it. Because... uh... it's a magic virus that attacks the soul so those with a pure soul can't be corrupted by this. This basically makes Raiders into Zombies and makes killing them an objectively good deed that fights the disease's spread.

>>297565
>If Raiders must act evil even when it harms their own survival chances, then blame it on a virus. Toxoplasma Gondii, the weird shit that makes worms crawl to high places and swell up to resemble caterpillars so birds will eat them and spread the virus, makes mice into fearless cat-biters with a fetish for cat piss, turns men into gay "bugchasers", and makes birds aggressive. Ponyland's magic Toxoplasma Gondii turns ponies into edgy assholes and transforms their Cutie Mark into a big red edgy bloodstain. Ponies invented it and then decided it was too cruel to use on Zebras but when the nukes fell it was released into the world though only Raiders caught it. Because... uh... it's a magic virus that attacks the soul so those with a pure soul can't be corrupted by this. This basically makes Raiders into Zombies and makes killing them an objectively good deed that fights the disease's spread.
Not to stray too far off topic, but this is pretty much exactly what Project Horizons did - the raiders in that story result from a virus that behaves essentially like pony rabies. It's a passable justification for raiders to behave like disposable videogame enemies with no regard for their own survival if they MUST act that way, I suppose. Still, giving them actual motives beyond random acts of violence, even if they're just "get food", would be preferable if they're supposed to carry any kind of moral weight.

As I recall, FoE does eventually give a vague hand-wavey explanation for the raiders, but it essentially boils down to some nonsense about 'lacking virtue'. Because dedicating their lives to the teachings of Socrates is the only thing stopping tiny horses from killing each other and smearing what's left on the walls, apparently?

>>297578
Individual bandits can have tragic reasons for robbing people, making killing them ethically questionable. Like a stallion who says "I need to rob people for medical supplies because my child is dying".
Or a scavenger who insists showing up to a battleground after you almost completed it and scored the final blow gives him an equal share of the loot because he's out of food and might die soon.
Perhaps a community that used to be self sufficient but had a bad harvest and has to turn to raiding or die out can have "and then the heroes taught them how to farm properly" as a happy ending instead of "then they fought and the heroes won".
But a society dedicated to destroying and stealing while doing nothing for their long-term survival and growth is evil by definition no matter what their interior decorator's tastes are. Multiple raiders might have tragic reasons for becoming raiders but they're united in their evil. Even if they were just born into a Raider society and stealing is all they learned grosing up, at best they can be an enslaved penal labour force until they're ready to stop being niggers and start helping the good guys rebuild society so nobody will be born into a hopeless situation where your choices are kill and steal or die again.

FoE's comments on virtue annoy me. Especially the "figure out what your good virtue is" shit. What a deterministic mindset born out of thinking AJ was destined to be more honest than RD and Flutters was destined to be kinder than Pinkie. Kkat might have "learned about" the world through videogames but his incomplete understanding of FIM taught him all he knows about morality and wisdom. Good people don't figure out what one virtue out of six they were born with. Good people strive to be good people even when it comes at an acceptable personal cost.

>>296626

>Whoever had designed the armor must have worked tail-twined-with-tail alongside Stable-Tec.
At the very least this provides an explanation for why LP's wristmo-jackameter is able to communicate with SteelNigger's robohelmet. It's still a little too convenient imo, but the author may actually be going somewhere with the connection so I'll let it slide.

Anyway, just as Littlepoop is about to take the guy's helmet off, he tells her to please not do that. She assures him that she is a certified Stable-Tec PipBuck technician not making this up, and that he can therefore place absolute faith in her ability to fuck around with his life support system. Unsurprisingly, this does little to sway him. He assures her that his armor is beyond fucked, and not even the most certified technician in the world could save him now.

>Fueled by Party-Time confidence, approached, trying to reassure him.
This is not a sentence, btw.

>“Without magical power, I cannot even move. I will die here. I am, truly, already dead.” The low voice in the armor sounded resigned to the idea, and at peace with it. “But I took them with me. And, if I am not mistaken, I saved the Stable Dweller. As a final act, it was a good one.”
C:\dialogue\speeches-generic\heroic_death.wav

>I was taken aback. My overblown reputation. A deep discomfort stirred inside me. It wasn’t right for other ponies to risk their lives for me, thinking of me as something special.
Jesus H. Christ, ego much? However, she's not exaggerating; if you look at SteelDong's death speech, you'll see that he explicitly mentions "saving the Stable Dweller" as his motivation here. So yes, you read that correctly; in addition to and/or as a result of having her exploits chronicled on the radio for some reason, LP now has her own personal cult of worshippers in super-powered robo-armor who are willing to sacrifice themselves kamikaze style to protect her, because something something you are the last hope of this dying universe, O Stable Dweller. This character has reached levels of Mary Sue-ness that shouldn't even be possible.

>I looked back towards Velvet Remedy, wishing I had actually taken some time to learn more about medicine from her rather than just relying on her skills.
Yeah, really. No, I mean that unironically; look at this pony's established list of skills and how she obtained them. She learned lockpicking from a magazine she found, hacking she just knows for some reason, levitation is just something she's obscenely good at for some reason, she is able to build and repair weapons for some reason despite having no experience with them until a couple of weeks ago... Really, it's not that implausible that should could have learned everything there is to know about the healing arts just from hanging out with Velvet for an afternoon. After all, she's Littlepoop, Maryest of Sues, Mother of Dragons, defender of the known universe; why should there be a thing she isn't able to do?

>Turning back to the fallen armored pony, “Okay… SteelHooves, right?”
I still am wondering how she knows this name. And, as it turns out, so is SteelHooves:

>“How did you… oh. Of course.”
Oh, wait. It seems he already knows. He's not going to tell us how he knows just yet, but at this point we can hazard a guess. It's probably safe to assume that Littlepoop is the fulfillment of some kind of ancient prophecy, which foretold that an annoying rug-muncher with all the powers would one day vanquish all Baddies and save the world, and as the Chosen One she can be presumed to already know everything important.

>Without another word, I turned and focused my magic on Velvet Remedy. She floated into the air with a shocked eep. She started to float through the air towards us.
First of all, I fucking hate this protagonist. I hate her with a fiery passion that burns with the heat of a thousand suns. If someone doesn't rape and murder her by the end of this story, I may just have to write a Nigel-esque 35,000 word opus in which some retarded OC I make rapes and murders her while lecturing her about all the reasons she sucks, just so I can obtain closure. Second, it's redundant to tell us twice that Velvet floated through the air. Third, "eep" should be in quotation marks, since it's a noise she makes that is not technically a word on its own.

Anyway, she floats Velvet Remedy across the fucking minefield with her fucking infallible levitation powers god I hate this fucking character and sets her down so she can examine SteelFaggot's mighty robotic hypnodong.

>As I informed her of what he had told me, my mind flashed to the poster I had seen on the wall of Candi’s clinic: “You don’t have to be a Steel Ranger to be a Hero. Join the Ministry of Peace today.” I looked at Velvet Remedy, knowing she must be familiar with the same poster from somewhere, and wondered if she was remembering it as well.
Yes, because that's what's important right now. This is what we were all thinking about. Some poster you saw on the wall way the hell back in chapter 4 or some shit. Great job.

There is a page break, even though the next scene begins at pretty much the exact point where the previous one ended. Velvet examines SteelCock and begins trying to figure out how to get him out of his armor so she can suck his robodick treat his wounds. SteelNuts, however, tells her that if she does this he will die. Since this effectively means he will likely die no matter what she does, this seems like a moot point, but whatever; let's see where it goes.

The long and short of it seems to be that the suit is somehow what is keeping him alive at the moment. It comes equipped with some kind of healing mechanism that automatically administers any kind of medical treatment he might need, but since the suit is offline it's not working. My, what a puzzle.

pic is completely unrelated, but is something I wish I'd found back when we were reviewing a story that had an actual Irish pony character

>>297836

>“No, I know how to fix him! I can restore power to the armor and reboot the spell matrix.” I beamed. “The suit designer obviously incorporated Stable-Tec arcane technology. It’s really not that different from fixing a PipBuck.”
I may not have mentioned it, but I really, really hate this protagonist.

So anyway, as it turns out, she really didn't have to levitate Velvet across the minefield at all; her A1 PipBuck certification apparently covers repairing ancient technology from the past incorporating complex life-support mechanisms she's never seen or worked with before. Velvet stands back, ready to start applauding her as soon as the job is done, but then this happens:

>I trotted forward, and came crashing back to reality. Recognition of my mistake mixed with the crushing depression that flooded me in the wake of Party-Time Mint-als wearing off. In a moment, I was stupid, ignorant and dumb.
Yes, because this is how drugs work. A drug wears off suddenly in the space of a single second, and when this happens, you not only lose any abilities you've gained from it, but can no longer do things you were apparently supposed to be able to do already without them. Looks like we can add pharmacology to the long list of subjects kkat seems to only understand through their representation in video games.

>“I don’t have the tools.” I felt like crying. The Steel Ranger was going to die, imprisoned in his armor, because I wasn’t a certified Stable-Tec PipBuck Technician. My utility barding didn’t include a spell matrix master key. Reluctantly, I admitted as much.
Wait, what? Of all the autism in this text, this is by far the autismiest ]this is an actual word I swear. Apparently, it turns out that Littlepoop is not actually a certified PipBuck technician after all. Even though her background is in PipBuck repair, and even though the text has not said anything about certifications that I can remember, at least, so it would be fully logical for the reader to just take LP at her word when she claims to be a certified technician, the truth is that even though she is a technician who repairs PipBucks, she never technically obtained her certification, which apparently means she does not have some tool she needs to repair this piece of arcane 200 year old technology. Wew lad. Just...fucking wew.

>“A spell matrix master key?” The voice of SteelHooves sounded hopeful rather than resigned. “You might be able to find one in Stable Twenty-Nine.”
What? Who? What the fuck is going on in this story? Where is Stable Twenty-Nine? Why does this guy know where it is? Why this Stable specifically? Are they going there now? Is that what's happening? They are now off to some Stable located God-knows-where to hunt around randomly for some key that may or may not even be in there, to help this cyborg pony who is probably minutes away from death? Is that actually what's going on right now?

Well, after a page break, it turns out that yes, that is exactly what's going on right now.

>“I’ve changed my mind,” the Steel Ranger protested. “I cannot allow you to go into a Stable for me.”
Wait a minute, never mind.

>His sense of hope had swiftly been squelched by a stubborn nobility that I both understood and rejected. I wasn’t the only one.
What? This sentence is complete gibberish. Do you even read this crap before you publish it?

>Calamity whinnied. “Ponyhole cover marked Stable Twenty-Nine? Near the Fetlock passenger wagon stop?”
Oh, wait a minute again. Turns out that Calamity conveniently found the entrance to this specific stable while he was rooting around under the fucking wagon last night, so it doesn't matter if SteelWang tells them where the entrance is or not; they can go there anyway. Sounds like another pointless treasure hunt that knowing this author will probably suck up an entire chapter at a minimum.

>It took us much longer to reach it than I remembered. We were moving gingerly, avoiding marks of red on my E.F.S. compass. Right now, I felt a few radroaches could finish us off.
I feel like I'm almost insulting the intelligence of everyone reading this by pointing it out, but this whole errand is completely illogical. First of all, SteelWank is in a near-death condition as far as I can tell, and will probably die in a very short time if he doesn't receive medical attention. I doubt the party can hike back to this stable, do a complete dungeon crawl, retrieve the whatever-thingy that Littlepoop needs to work her magic on the suit, and return before he expires. Second, from what I gather all three of them are in rather bad shape as well. Are they even in any condition for a dungeon crawl right now? Can they even handle a walk to the stable and back, let alone dealing with whatever is down there? Is it worth it to spend realistically two or three hours in an abandoned Stable, just to hunt around for this whatever-key-thingy that might not even be in there, only to come back and find that the soldier bled out five minutes after they left? Does any part of this idea make any sense at all?

It's actually a little hard to tell exactly what's going on with the Steel Ranger; it hasn't been made 100% clear how dire his condition is or why exactly he can't take his suit of armor off. As far as I can tell there are two possibilities:

A) the pony is a cyborg who is physically fused with the suit, a la Darth Vader, and he literally can't be separated from it without dying, or
B) he is injured so badly that the suit's life support system is the only reason he's still alive.

My guess is A, because as I understand it the suit is completely powered down, so the life support wouldn't be working anyway. However, the author hasn't clarified this particularly well. Because of what >>296827 wrote, I'm assuming this is yet another case of the author referencing something well-known from Fallout, and just assuming whoever is reading will be already familiar with what he's referencing.

>>297837

The other issue here concerns the party's health. Even with whatever bullshit panacea-potions they took, the text clearly stated that they didn't have enough supplies to heal themselves adequately. Can they even move right now, let alone go on a treasure hunt? The problem, again, is that the author is trapped in a video game mentality. He's basically thinking about this as if the party is down to their last few HP, and their primary concern is simply avoiding fights so a random encounter with a "radroach" or something doesn't kill them before they can find more potions. In a game, if you're "injured" to the point that the screen is flashing red every few seconds, this is basically all you have to worry about. A low-level enemy might be able to kill you with a single hit, but you can still run and jump and climb and do whatever else you need to do to get around.

In reality, there is a lot more to it than this. Velvet for instance lost quite a bit of blood; usually that means doing a lot of physically strenuous activity is a bad idea. She could probably pass out just from walking around too much. I think someone injured their leg, though I don't remember who. How badly beat up are these ponies? Again, I feel like I'm almost insulting people's intelligence by pointing this out, but in real life (or whatever this story is supposed to be exactly), your health isn't determined by a number. This group suffered some pretty serious injuries and, even though it's not clear how well the all-purpose bandages and healing potions were able to magically cure them, I don't get the impression they are in any shape to be traipsing through an abandoned Stable just to hunt for some tiny key that, again, might not even exist, in order to rescue someone who realistically has maybe an hour left to live.

In fact, this doesn't even make sense in video-game logic. Any half-wit noob could tell you that you don't enter an unexplored dungeon without resting or healing first.

>Calamity was flying, keeping all weight off his leg. He looked at the passenger wagon and announced too-cheerfully, “Well, I hope your levitation is back to its full impressiveness, Littlepip. Unless we’ve found a flux regulator and nopony’s told me, moving that thing will be up to you.”
God fucking damn it. If Littlepoop doesn't get gruesomely dissected with a blowtorch by the end of this story, I'm going to write my own Silver "I was dissected with a blowtorch once, except it wasn't so much a blowtorch as it was a giant cock, and it wasn't so much dissection as it was rape, and it wasn't so much rape as it was me pretending it was rape so the guy wouldn't stop" Star story where she does.

>I laid down.
I lay down.

>I needed to focus fully on the passenger wagon (Sky Bandit Stages, I noted pointlessly), and that meant not diverting my energies to remaining upright. My horn lit up as I concentrated on the huge wagon. Magical power enveloped it. I pushed, converging all my will onto moving the vehicle. My horn flared. A layer of overglow burst around it. The wagon began to rock, groaning. Sweat broke across my forehead. I began to have trouble breathing. Somewhere distant, Velvet Remedy was being concerned, but I blocked it out. A second layer of overglow erupted around my horn, and the whole wagon lifted several feet into the air and was shoved back onto the sidewalk.
>I let it down gently, then collapsed, exhausted. I could see the ponyhole cover. Yay. Sleep now.
If I even have to explain what's wrong with all of this then there is literally no hope left for humanity.

Anyway, page break. On top of the time it took them to backtrack to this location (since the author has been completely vague about time and distance we can't possibly know how long this was, but I'm assuming a walk of around 30 minutes to an hour, probably longer since they're injured and need to move slowly), as well as however long it will take them to poke around in the Stable, as well as the amount of time it will take them to get back, the dying roboponer is going to also need to wait for Littlepoop to take a fucking nap. Hope he's got Tetris or something in his magical helmet; he's going to be sitting there awhile. Oh yeah, I also hope that none of the giant radioactive hedgehogs or roaches or any of the other ridiculous things that are crawling around everywhere bother to attack his completely immobile and defenseless form during this period of several hours.

>“Well, this was a bust,” he proclaimed. It looked like Stable Twenty-Nine had never opened. And without an override password, it was unlikely that we would be getting in.
Bummer. Time to turn around and march back I guess. If SteelButthole hasn't had his head chewed off by giant radioactive cockroaches yet, I'm sure he'll thank them for at least giving it the ol' college try.

Anyway, in a surprise twist that should surprise no one, the broken control panel or whatever the fuck is stopping them I'm not even bothering to pay attention to details like this anymore isn't actually a problem, because Littlepoop is able to hack into it or something, and she finds out that the door is voice-activated. It requires three distinct voice imprints.

>I thought a moment, and cursed how slow my brain was. “I… um…” Then I remembered Stable Two’s override code. CMC3BFF. “I think I know.”
This is beyond dumb. I think all three of the CMC have been mentioned by name at this point, but AB and Scoot were only mentioned briefly in passing (AB was mentioned in some terminal entry almost at the beginning I think, and Scoot had a single audio recording that LP listened to in New Appleoosa, and neither she nor her message were ever brought up again), and LP has no way of knowing that the three of them were friends, let alone what the name of their club was when they were children together. The meaning of the password would be obvious enough to an MLP fan, but to Littlepoop it should just be unintelligible nonsense.

>>297842

>The first voice was the one that took the longest, simply because I didn’t have a recording of it. Instead, we sat there listening to DJ Pon3 on the radio, waiting for his selection of songs to cycle through. For the first and only time, I was actually grateful that his radio broadcast had such a limited selection of music.
Literally what the fuck? For the sake of my own sanity I'm going to just forget about how LP just magically knew that these three random ponies from 200 years ago would be the three voice imprints this door would want. I'm also not going to worry about whether or not she actually has recordings of SB and Scoot. Scoot I know for a fact she does; SB I don't remember though. However, these autismo bits about sound recordings and journal entries and stupid, tiny, irrelevant details from ages ago that suddenly become important at random times are about the only thing in this story the author actually bothers to keep meticulous track of, so I'm actually willing to take his word that Littlepoop has SB's voice somewhere on that stupid wristy-thingy of hers.

However, what I can't forgive is this bit about the fucking radio. Literally what the goddamn fuck? First of all, they are on a time limit here. LP might have completely forgotten about it while she was napping for God only knows how long, but the whole reason they are doing this is because they are trying to get medicine for a pony whose internal organs have been crushed, and is probably bleeding to death inside his armor as we speak. Call it a hunch, but I would think time would be a factor here. Even assuming they had no trouble with the doors and there are no monsters inside the stable, simply going in to get the stupid key and rushing out would probably take more time than they have. Now, on top of that, they are taking additional time for sleep, as well as sitting around listening to the goddamn radio for God only knows how long just on the off-chance that they might play an old Applebloom song? For that matter, was Applebloom even a singer?

Actually, is it even Applebloom whose voice they need? Did I get that wrong? The author doesn't even bother to clarify which one they need; he just assumes the reader is as autistic as he is and has been keeping scrupulous inventory of every single ridiculous thing this wacky dyke has picked up during the 96,630 words of this garbage we've read so far, and would therefore know exactly which voices she does and does not have recordings of. All he says here is "the first voice," without any previous listing of the three voices in any specific order. I just automatically assumed voice #1 would be Applebloom, because I'm thinking about it in chronological order according to when the three of them were first mentioned in the text, and as far as I can remember it went AB (mentioned when LP first left her stable), Scoot (first mentioned in a recording LP found in the abandoned stable) and SB (actually I don't remember when she was first mentioned, but she wasn't significant until recently).

In fact, now that I look at it, he never even says which three characters the voices belong to. Once again, he just assumes that the reader knows what he's referencing and that it doesn't require any explanation. If a reader had never seen MLP before, they would have no fucking idea what "CMC3BFF" would mean, any more than Littlepoop or any of them logically should at this point. Jesus fucking H. Christ; between the massive length, and the preposterous amount of stupid details, and the haphazard autistic way the story is being told, just trying to keep track of what the hell is going on in this massive autistic clusterfuck is trying enough, let alone giving it a thorough analysis. This author may actually be the death of me. This thread is going to turn out like the end of Amadeus, if instead of commissioning him to write a funeral dirge he could rip off, Salieri had just given Mozart this 500,000 word pile of shit to read, assuming that the sheer autism of it would literally kill him.

Anyway, rant over. Let's continue.

>“Good evening, everypony! This is your humble host, DJ Pon3, master of the airwaves. And it’s just about time for me to turn in. But first, the news! Looks like our wasteland crusader from Stable Two is an equal-opportunity savior. From the reports I’m getting, she and her companions helped out a bunch of raiders up at Shattered Hoof from being enslaved and decimated by an attacking slaver army. And then, because you can’t have a cupcake without icing, she killed a dragon!”
As if the situation weren't implausible enough to begin with, we once again have this random DJ off in the middle of God knows where reporting on the specifics of events that LP was at the center of. This battle at Shattered Hoof would be a large enough event to make the news I suppose, but would LP's role really be common knowledge? Seems like all that would be known from an outsider point of view is that Deadeyes was killed in a skirmish between rival slaver and/or raider groups, and that Gawd is now in charge of the fortress. LP's name might come up if the dragon incident was widely known, but that's about it.

>Luna dammit, why wasn’t it ever “Calamity and his companions?” Or Velvet Remedy and her entourage?
Luna dammit, why is any of this even on the radio? How does this guy even know this stuff? Instead of this stupid false modesty, LP ought to at least show some curiosity as to how this weirdo knows so much about her, or why he's even interested. Since the author clearly intends for her to seek the DJ out at some point, it would give her a natural motive to look for him, instead of just "let's get Velvet's music played on the radio because reasons."

>“Don’t know if I agree with you on this one, kid. Saving raiders? Some monsters deserve to be enslaved.”
Saving who? At this point I don't even remember who or what the Shattered Hoof guys were supposed to be.

>>297837
This is dumb. LP has more Mentats. I mean Mintals. I mean Mint-Als because Kkat didn't think his target audience could understand the mint pun without a hyphen. Just take more drugs you fucking lesbian degenerate. ...lol what an odd sentence.
anyway even if his life support system is fucked Velvet can still cast Heal on him or feed him a health potion.
Hell I'm surprised LP doesn't just repair his power armour by consuming a set of heavy Raider armour which is something you can do in the games. It's how she has repaired guns and armour up until now.
>clearly marked manhole cover
The stables were supposed to be hidden. That's why some were in sewers and some were in mountains.

Also in Fallout 1 and 2 Power Armour suits were pneumatically assisted plate armour with no healing. F3 nerfed them to be shittier than a leather jacket and weak enough to be killed by cheap chinese assault rifle bullets. Fnv upgraded their defense stats but The Big MT's Stealth Suit was superior for making you invisible and auto injecting painkillers and health potions. F4 wasn't out yet when this was written. Fuck this cunting power armour niggerstorm of bullshit. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FVzc20Bm8Xo This healing spell matrix autism comes straight from Kkat and he can't be arsed to explain how it works or why they don't just ram a Stimpak into his taint. Or why they don't wait around for Velvet to recover her stamina and then cast Heal a few times. I forget if she knows healing magic or if she's just the only one allowed to apply magic bandages and inject stimpaks/feed you healing potions.

Oh yeah... remember how Steelcunt fired rockets/grenade showers at the Alicorns while they were a few feet from LP and friends? If Steelcunt was motivated by a desire to save Littlepip, it's a good thing she just barely had enough healing supplies to rapidly heal from most of the damage he did to her during his overly destructive attack or else he would have killed her along with the Alicorns. If he hadn't wounded Team LP they could have used their healing items on him.

Fuck, Steelcunt could have killed LP while trying to use psychically grabbable projectiles like missiles and grenades against alicorn foes he knows will have telekinesis and shields. He should have brought Laser guns if he wanted to kill alicorns. As Silver The Hedgehog once famously said, telekinesis can't grab lasers. Plus ain't nothing stopping him from saying "the resonance frequency scrambler I put on my laser rifle lets its shots pierce through magic shields easily. They were expensive as hell before the war but these days you'll find them on the corpses of most solo doomsday preppers who died of old age underground years ago".

The Vaults and Stables were designed so SHITLOADS of people could live underground. In the games there are 20 people and about 3 floors on average per vault for the same reason a farm only has two cows and a town only has 7 people: videogames like compressing space and scale to make exploring huge places faster for the player and easier on the hardware. But a story has no space limitations. The average Science Fiction author can't count or understand scale. Fallout Game Vaults might be the size of Skyrim Dungeons but realistically they should be fucking massive and the story should reflect that instead of letting Littlepoop and pals clear these dungeons in a few hours at most each time. LP knows she can explore this ATTEMPTED UNDERGROUND CIVILIZATION CONTINUATION that may have BULLSHIT GIMMICKS AND WACKY MONSTERS and worst of all A SHITLOAD OF COMPUTER TERMINALS AND DIARIES AND AUDIO LOGS TO READ before Steelcunt dies.

>radroach
A Radroach is a dog sized irRADiated ROACH from fallout. Ponyland has a magical corruptive energy called Balefire or Taint or something like that. Kkat copypasted Radroaches and forgot to change their names to Taintroach or Baleroach or Magiroach or Hellroach or something like that.

LP's mine shit would be less annoying if she psychically picked up and disabled mines slowly instead of rapidly and effortlessly flying over them. Would make trading safety for time a question she has to think about before floating stuff. Then again she knows she can trot over landmines wothout detonating them and must float her friends over which is retarded. Why take the Light Step perk that makes you magically undetectable by landmines so fucking literally?

Why does the author have a boner for LP lifting heavy shit she could just push? And why was this wagon harder to push than the fucking boxcar she dropped on an Alicorn? Again, the average boxcar weighs more than a WW2 nazi tank.

>leaving Steelcunt behind
there are so many jokes that could be made here if this was a comedy. Plenty of shows have made jokes at the expense of characters who can't move or get left behind or both so he should have plenty of material to rip off.
Remember that time Bender was just a head and a dog pissed on him? Comedy gold.
*squidward laugh*
gold. Comedy gold. Gold piss. Heh, I'm funny.

>God
No, he shows up later.

>hurr hurr radio broadcast only has 4 songs on shuffle
this is a videogame limitation except not really. BugthEAsderp was just real lazy when ripping off Saints Row/GTA's ingame radio. Makes no sense that a 200 year old prewar bunker and radio tower would have less than 10 songs. Either they were all built to last or they all degraded into worthlessness.
Also you're right fuck this scene. Waiting for a CMC member, presumably Sweetie Belle since the fic called her a singer once even though she also runs the vaults and died in the vault Velvet and LP are from, is fucking retarded when on a time limit. Didn't the first chapter's pipbuck monologue say the Pipbuck can record radio broadcasts? lol kkat forgot. She should have a Sweetie Belle song prepared just in case.

>radio says Littlepip saved raiders
this should raise some fucking questions
LP thought Gawd was a mercenary.
LP should ask herself "oh fuck were they slavers/raiders too?"

It just dawned on me how artificial this whole setup is.
Out of nowhere Littlepip gets attacked by not one, not two, but three alicorns. And then a super mecha badass in a fighting robot power armour Iron Man suit pops up out of nowhere and helps kill them. Except he's a faggot with terrible aim and preparation skills who's so "eager" to kill alicorns and save Muh Stable Dweller he forgot to make sure he doesn't hurt the Stable Dweller or her friends or himself.
He's kind of a total fucking retard. And it's not intentional. This isn't a character trait the author knows about. This robofag won't grow over time and learn the value of restraint and abandon some made-up "hurr durr crusade heretic" meme indoctrination and overcome his complete tactical ineptitude and inconsistent inability to use explosive weapons safely.
This guy's such a faggot he made Littlepip and pals take a detour out of their adventure to save his life. Do you think he keeps a padded helmet under that Power Armour?
For such a grim and dark and edgy setting, something like this... it's unintentionally hilarious.
Speaking of hilarious, Spongebob Squarepants. Merriwether Williams worked on it and FIM. In a parallel universe, mainstream bronies probably obsessed over that show instead. Sandy Cheeks porn became more common than Pokemon porn and instead of making up names for background ponies like Derpy and Bastion Yorsets they made up names for the background fish like the Health Inspector from Nasty Patties and the "What did you do to my drink?" Fish and the My Leg guy. Self insert harem power fantasies are written by lonely teens who fantasize about dying and reincarnating into Bikini Bottom as an all-powerful OC who gets to annoy Squidward and fuck all the bitches just like the similar Pokemon and Blue People Avatar fics. 35000 word Accusation Fics are written where authors beat the shit out of Patrick Star and call him a cunt for being a cunt to Gary in Petsitter Pat. Fallout Bikini Bottom became the most popular fanfic in the spongebob fanfiction community on FishFiction.net, and in the same vein as what Fallout Equestria does with Poison Joke, the Snail Plasma from that season 1 episode was injected into a thermonuclear bomb shaped bubble that was dropped on Rock Bottom to turn the eldritch monsters into helpless snails during an underwater war, and Spongebob's insane cartoon physics moments are explained with "he invented crack mints made from bubble mixture and snail food".
Edgy Spongebob... what a crazy idea. Like those pics of Sonic posing with knives or an edgy gun-toting gangster-tattooed Bugs Bunny in nigger clothes. Weird how western cartoon chars get edgy fanart but Naruto, who comes from a dark and edgy show already, gets photoshopped into absurdly expensive tacky nigger fashion.

Come to think of it, why did Steelcunt start out all "It is an honour to die for the glorious Marey Sue of Stable 69" but then as soon as Littlepip suggested risking her own life and the lives of her friends to try and get something that could possibly save this guy's life (if fixing a auto-inject healing potion system is enough to fix a caved-in fucked-up chunk of suit armour) he suddenly wants to be saved? If he was willing to die to save her then, why does he love the idea of her risking her life to potentially save him now when there's no guarantee she would make it? What if she was permanently scarred or crippled from this adventure? Obviously she'll pass this test with flying colours but he's just a book character. He shouldn't know what we and the author know.
And another thing, why is it that when Littlepip listens to the radio we don't hear every single song and every annoying comment from DJ Pon3? The ponies here are tired and wounded and on a fucking time limit so they should say some hilarious bollocks right now and yell at each other. Littlepip needs Sweetie Belle on this radio and she shouldn't get it until she's bored to tears and hilariously mad.
When the radio plays Johnny Ponyguitar or Heartache By The Poners yet again or plays What's New Ponycat 13 times then one It's Trot Unusual then one more What's New Ponycat it should piss these characters off as tensions get higher. Somepony should call Littlepip's plan retarded prompting LP to say "Do you have any better ideas or are you relying on me to do all the thinking yet again, you pretentious fucking karaeoke-loving whore?"
Also this would be a terrible time for lore in Littlepip's eyes but if the radio host started a lengthy talk-radio podcast infodumping session it would let LP taste a fraction of the rage I feel when this story starts randomly infodumping without making any of it good or interesting or meaningful or smart or relevant to the story.
Her agonized "slam own face against wall" reaction would be the perfect comedic contrast to an infodump that foreshadows a big future story event almost as cleverly as Ratchet and Clank 2's "Behind The Hero" ads about Qwark.
LP could even openly yell something like "I GET IT, I GET IT! SOME PRE-WAR PONY DIED HORRIBLY. WHAT A SHOCKER. WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHING?"
And then for meta commentary, the DJ could announce the moral of this story and the reason why he wants everyone to know this particular tragic tale. And the moral taken from the edgy story is completely and utterly wrong for maximum comedy, prompting Velvet to rant. Bonus points if she rants hypocritically as her friends stare, making her say "what?".
Alternatively while Littlepip waits for a not-sweetie-belle song to finish she could talk to Calamity and ask him for more info on the Dashites. Even if he doesn't want to talk about his time as a Pegafaggot Team LP might run into one and info about the Dashites/Skyfaggots could be useful and necessary. And good foreshadowing and a clever way to set up info so an infodump won't be needed if more skyfags/dashites show up later in the story but she shouldn't say that part out loud.

When youre done with this are you gonna do Project Horizons?

>>297925
If Glim does, at least he'll have some ACTUAL FUCKING DIALOGUE and STORY to read at least until some parts of it go full silly mode. Then again he might also die of accumulated aneurysms from both this pile of shit and dealing with that quarter-jew Nigel's literal 'tism prisms.

>>297925
Let's see if he makes it all the way through the original first and not mention the fact that PH is three times as long.

>>295632
>>295821
>>297970
https://www.wikihow.com/Find-a-Hobby
>>297925
>>297999
Speaking of Project Horizons, I hear one of the main characters from that specifically uses a grenade launcher because "you have to think before you fire it". Perhaps that was a subtle dig at this story's reckless videogamey use of explosives.
Also it's absurd that Littlepip and pals don't mind getting caught in the collateral damage from Steelcunt's reckless explosive attack. They don't comment on it or complain that they had to use up their limited supply of healing items, possibly even the last of their healing items. Sure, Steelcunt could defend his actions with "Those three alicorns definitely would have killed you, healing items couldn't have saved you from what they would have done to you if I hadn't showed up!" but it's absurd that Littlepoop would treat her and her team's wounds and reduced number of healing items like a gamer desperate to move on with the plot would. Up until now, Littlepoop's fangirled over Velvet almost every day. But suddenly, she won't even comment on the source of her wounds or think a single negative thought about him?
And it's not just that this is a rescue Team LP shouldn't've liked. This "rescue" forced Team LP to take a diversion from their main path to rescue this dumbass who thought throwing big easily-grabbed grenades/missiles at a psychic foe aware of his location would end well for him. Slaves at the slave camp might die during the time this mission takes up. Littlepip and pals might die during this trek through a potentially-hazard-filled Stable. If there's been something heavy over its manhole cover all this time, there's a good chance that if the ponies maintaining the Stable died, the Stable itself is barren and devoid of life. Yet it could still have automated turret/robot defenses and the author could forget about food/water requirements while filling a destroyed and inhospitable stable with massive monsters "To make it extra-deadly" even though realistically those massive monsters would starve or eat each other in such a food-free environment.
This mission will only take a handful of minutes to a few hours if the author interprets the short and nonsensically enemy-filled "Skyrim Dungeon" design of F3's Vaults literally when designing this Stable like it's a fucking Total Wipeout meets Annihilation Nation deathcourse. They're going to search a fucking massive place for something tiny that might not even be there so it should take a fucking long time for well-trained and organized teams of expert scavengers to find. It will only be easy to find if it is conveniently placed in clear sight yet inconveniently placed at the end of a linear death-trap-filled dungeon crawl.

>>297844

>Also in the news: got another report of hellhounds attacking travelers in the wasteland between Manehattan and Fillydelphia. Honestly, ponies, if you have to travel that way, make sure you have a heavily armed escort.
Hurr durr that's where we're going, I wonder if that's going to be relevant?

Anyway, eventually the DJ plays a Sweetie Belle song, and I guess that was the last voice they needed. The author still doesn't bother to tell us who the other two voices are, nor does he explain the logic LP used to figure out which voices were needed. He does, however, provide the text of the recordings, so I guess anyone who was astute enough could go back, find those specific lines of text earlier in the book, and look to see who they were attributed to.

>“The override code for opening the door to Stable Two is... CMC3BFF.”
This was apparently spoken by Applebloom.

>“Hello! My name is Scootaloo. You probably know me (since I am pretty famous) for my awesome performances at events like last year’s GALLoPS, or maybe just as the founder of Red Racer…”
This one at the very least contains a name.

>I turned to find Velvet Remedy walking past me to face the door. The gorgeous mare had donned her beautiful dress and groomed her mane. I shot a look to Calamity, who merely shrugged. “um… Velvet?” The dress hid most of her bandages.
What? So...apparently Velvet had time to put on her fancy dress at some point and clean herself up a bit. I'll ignore the question of how or when, because the most pertinent question is why?

>“We’re meeting the ponies of another Stable for the first time. We want to put our best hoof forward,” she said aristocratically. “Especially if they’ve never had outside visitors before. We want to look like diplomats,” her eye moved to look at me without turning her head. “If you two went in first, we’d look like invaders.”
*sigh*
*rubs temples*
*chugs half a bottle of tequila*
*sighs and rubs temples again*
The group is entering an unknown stable. The last stable they entered was filled with radioactive cats. Granted, Velvet wasn't along for that trip, but we can assume she's probably heard the story at some point during their travels. Why would she assume that there would be anyone in here they could reason with? In fact, why even assume it would be inhabited? Again, the last stable they visited had been empty and abandoned for what seemed like decades. In fact, here is what we read about this stable just a few short paragraphs ago:

>“Well, this was a bust,” he proclaimed. It looked like Stable Twenty-Nine had never opened. And without an override password, it was unlikely that we would be getting in.
>It looked like Stable Twenty-Nine had never opened.
>never opened.
This strongly implies that the stable they are entering was built, but never occupied. Thus, my assumption has been that they are probably about to enter an empty stable that has either been hermetically sealed for 200 years, or else has been broken into and occupied by monsters or raiders as was the case with the last one. Either way, they would be entering a potentially dangerous situation. Frankly, the idea that this stable would be occupied in the same way that the one LP came from was occupied had never even crossed my mind, though in retrospect I suppose it's logical. Actually, if the party was assuming that the stable is a friendly place, it might explain this rather bat-shit-crazy idea of diving headfirst into a dungeon when they all have like 2 HP each god damn it now he's got me thinking like a vidya game sperg.

Anyway, Velvet at some point got all dolled up to introduce herself to what is probably an abandoned cavern filled with rapacious raiders, and nonchalantly strolls inside as soon as the door opens.

> Calamity limped up to me as I watched her disappear inside. “She’s really somethin’, ain’t she.”
>“Yes…” I said, feeling a little dumbstruck. I glanced at Calamity, who was staring through the door at Velvet. “…she…” I did a double-take. Calamity wasn’t looking at Velvet Remedy, he was looking at her. Something broke in my brain. “…no!”
And in other news, the last horse has finally crossed the finish line. I've always wanted to use that expression literally :^)

Anyway, there is a page break here. When the next scene starts, Littlepoop is silently fuming to herself over only just now realizing that Calamity wants to stick his hoo hoo dilly into Velvet's cha cha. Meanwhile, they just forced open the door to this hermetically sealed stable which could contain raiders, friendlies, monsters, or anything in between, but this seems to be the furthest thing from her mind.

This author has a really weird approach to developing his various subplots. This story mostly follows a pattern, where Littlepoop will chug along from adventure to adventure, mostly fixating on whatever external goal she has at that moment or whatever crap she's looting, and then she will just randomly blurt out something about Mint-als (which I guess she is supposed to be addicted to, even though she rarely if ever thinks about them), or Velvet (with whom she claims to be in love, even though she never seems to behave that way towards her in any of their interactions). It feels even weirder when he drops these bombs at inappropriate times, case in point. Obviously, the love triangle between these characters was going to reach this point eventually, but is now really the right moment? Literally at the precise second when the door to an unknown and potentially hostile location swings open, Littlepoop is getting paranoid about Velvet and Calamity getting together? I mean, the love triangle isn't a bad idea, and there's plenty the author can do with it, but there's a time to focus on side-plots and a time to focus on what's happening in the here and now. Even putting this in there a few seconds before the door opened would have been fine.

>>298014

>I took the mental image of Calamity successfully wooing Velvet Remedy when I could not and shoved it into a deep dark hole.
At this point, I think the author should consider doing something similar with this entire text. Also, it's worth noting that she hasn't actually attempted to woo Velvet Remedy yet; she's basically giving up without even putting in a marginal effort.

Anyway, LP sets her feelings aside and turns her attention to their immediate situation. The stable actually appears to be something like what I was originally envisioning, which is well-preserved but empty and abandoned. Unsurprisingly, there is a skeleton hanging in front of the door.

>This was an ominous start.
Again, I really don't see why they would have been expecting anything different. Every other place they've explored has been full of skeletons, ffs, even the place that actually had ponies living in it had a damn cabinet full of them.

>My Eyes-Forward Sparkle was clear of any red. For that matter, it was completely clear of anything other than my two companions. There was no life in this Stable. At least, not within the range of my PipBuck’s spell. The Stable was utterly silent, save for the ever-present high-pitched hum of the lights and the gentle rumble of the generators.
And again, it seems like they should have been more or less expecting this. The entrance to the stable was located underneath an abandoned train car in a bombed-out city, the door had never been opened, and there have been no indications of life or civilization anywhere in the area. Add to that the fact that nearly every other place they visit is either abandoned or full of enemies. What exactly did they expect to find down here?

Anyway, they've got two different options for which way they can go: maintenance, or atrium. Maintenance would take them to the PipBuck stall, where they would be most likely to find the key thingy they are looking for, but they also are in dire need of medical supplies, which they could find by going the other way. So, they head for the atrium first.

>Stepping in, my eyes immediately fell on the skeletons of at least three dozen other ponies.
At this point, they should be surprised when they enter a location and don't find three dozen skeletons.

>I had to use telekinesis to create a path through the bones of the ponies “lucky enough” to have made it into a Stable before the megaspell destroyed Manehattan. I felt anger biting at the back of my head. I reminded myself it wasn’t my Stable.
What exactly is she angry about here? What is the implication? She doesn't know how any of these ponies died, or why. There seems to be an implication that some sort of tremendous injustice occurred in this place, and that it somehow feeds into whatever LP's hang up about stables in general is, which actually hasn't been very well-explained either. Velvet also seems to disapprove of them, though that seems to be tied to her whole "I don't want to be le caged" thing.

Overall, the story seems to be leading us towards some idea that the stables were somehow insidious places that exploited or killed the ponies they purported to help. However, we haven't seen any direct evidence of this yet. LP's stable seemed like a nice enough place to live, at least as far as this setting goes, and the only other stable they've been to was the abandoned one filled with monster cats. However, the cats were the result of a freak accident that can't really be blamed on anyone, and apart from all that weird stuff about gender roles it seemed like it had been a relatively normal place as well.

>“Do you think they…?” Velvet’s voice trailed off. She was looking behind us, just above the door we had come through. Two automated security turrets were mounted on the wall. They had power, but didn’t seem to be tracking us. My E.F.S. claimed they were not a threat. The room suggested that had not always been the case.
Whatever Velvet is implying here is not clear, and it's never explained. Maybe the turrets shot them? Idk.

>Behind me, I heard Calamity whispering to Velvet, “She’s had bad reactions to a Stable before.” What, was I that obvious? “We better keep an eye on her.”
Again, I'm having a hard time figuring out what exactly LP's deal here is supposed to be. The last time around, the issue was that she was exploring an abandoned stable filled with dead ponies and monsters, and it bothered her to see a place that so closely resembled her home in such a state. Okay, I can understand that. So is the same thing happening again here? You'd think she'd be pretty used to skeletons and carnage and shit by now, and the simple coincidence of the building resembling the place she used to live shouldn't really bother her this much. What exactly is up her ass?

Part of it seems to be what she noticed about Velvet and Calamity earlier. Also, I'm assuming she is still dealing with the comedown from the crack mints. At this point, she suggests they split up:

>Velvet, why don’t you raid the clinic.” It was safe. I could see into the clinic through the Atrium window. Calamity and I will head down to maintenance.”
The author is missing a quotation mark at "Calamity and I." Also, if she's jealous, she ought to suggest that she and Velvet team up and Calamity fuck off. Sending the pony she supposedly loves off by herself to deal with a potentially dangerous situation while she hangs out with her romantic rival doesn't make a ton of sense.

Anyway, Velvet objects to this, saying that she needs to examine Calamity's bone as soon as possible :^). Littlepoop gets pissy, but realizes that she can't really vocalize why she's pissy without giving her feelings for Velvet away, so she says "fine" and goes off to the PipBuck repair station to find the whatever-key they came down here for. There is a pretty cringe-worthy dialogue exchange, in which Calamity and Velvet pretend they don't actually like each other, and then the scene ends with a page break.

>>298014

>I spent the rest of the trip down through Stable Maintenance reminding myself that it actually was a good thing that my friends got along, that it was stupid to be jealous when I’d had no real chance to begin with, and that if I wanted to keep those friends, I’d best bury these feelings in that same dark hole.
This is actually a pretty reasonable reaction, and is in line with how LP ought to be feeling right about now. However, I'd actually like to back up a little and examine the cringe-worthy dialog exchange between Calamity and Velvet that I mentioned above.

From the way she's behaving, Calamity and Velvet can clearly see that Littlepoop has some sand in her vagina, and they ask her what the fuck. She responds thusly:

>I waved a hoof. “Oh yes. I’m just… feeling a little drained. Blood loss, you know.” I put on a good smile. She looked like she was trying to be convinced. “Okay, I’m a bit surprised. But I’m happy. It’s a good thing that my two friends like each other.”
It doesn't feel like an appropriate time for her to be this blunt about what she sees between them. Velvet and Calamity clearly have feelings for each other, but neither of them seem to have openly declared it or even directly acknowledged it to themselves. For her part, Littlepoop has not made her feelings about Velvet known at all; in fact, I don't think either of them would even realize that she likes girls from her behavior thus far. Blurting it out like this not only gives her own feelings away, it calls direct attention to what's obviously developing between Velvet and Calamity, which is only going to hasten things along by making the two of them realize it and face it. Not even Littlepoop could possibly be that dumb.

If the author wanted to, he could take this little burst of jealousy from Littlepoop and mine a lot of comedy from it being misinterpreted. Since, again, Littlepoop hasn't declared any affection for Velvet and hasn't really made it apparent that she's into munching pony box, the natural assumption here would be that she is jealous because she likes Calamity, not Velvet. This misunderstanding could develop into a pretty hilarious side plot. Velvet, who obviously likes Calamity but doesn't appear to realize it yet, would think that LP likes him and might try to play matchmaker between them or something, which is obviously not what LP wants. Calamity seems to openly desire Velvet at this point, but hasn't really noticed Littlepoop. If he suddenly had reason to think LP was into him, it might change this; he'd start to notice LP more, and would probably be flattered at the thought of having his two female companions fighting over him. The whole thing could turn into an absolute mess, which would be perfect; the more convoluted you make this sort of thing, the more entertaining it tends to get.

Anyway, the next bit is where it starts to go off the rails somewhat:

> Calamity coughed. “Wait, what?” He nickered, “She’s a self-righteous, self-idolizin’ elitist who’d rather fix up our enemies than shoot ‘em.”
This isn't really an accurate characterization of Velvet, and Calamity has never said or indicated that he feels this way about her before. In the rare instances where she actually takes a moral stand on something she can be a little self-righteous, but this is actually far from being her worst quality.
>self-idolizing
She's never shown signs of having an unreasonably high opinion of herself or her talents.
>elitist
She certainly has never indicated she considers some ponies to be socially beneath her.

Now, here is what she has to say about Calamity:

>Velvet Remedy shot him a scowl. “And he’s an impulsive ruffian who thinks he can fix the wasteland by drowning it in blood.”
This is completely inaccurate, at least from what we've seen. To be fair, the author has given Calamity almost no distinct personality at all, and we don't know much about his past beyond that he's a "Dashite" (whatever the hell that is). So, nearly any characterization of him would feel inaccurate.
>impulsive
If you asked me to say the first word that popped into my head when I think of this character, "impulsive" wouldn't be it. He actually seems fairly level-headed for the most part.
>fix the wasteland by drowning it in blood
Hoo boy, if irony were strawberries, kkat would be chugging a lot of strawberry-flavored cum right now. This statement doesn't apply to Calamity at all, but it's a highly accurate characterization of Littlepoop. Calamity really hasn't explained why he does any of what he does. He doesn't seem to have any sort of overarching goals or objectives in life, he hasn't expressed any strong beliefs or principles one way or the other; he's mostly just been a presence in this story without really making any serious contributions to it. As I've often commented, it's a little perplexing why he even chose to tag along with LP in the first place. She's the one with the holy-roller mission to purge the Wasteland of all its icky badness, and who doesn't care who or whom :^) she has to slaughter in order to accomplish this. Calamity's use of violence seems to be mostly practical; he kills when he needs to, but he isn't a sadist about it. He strikes me as a pretty typical resident of the Wasteland, really; he lives day to day, mostly focuses on his own survival, and doesn't really concern himself with big-picture goals or missions.

Anyway, you'll recall from the tangent I went off on earlier about RomComs that this kind of odd-couple chemistry is a staple in romance stories. Two characters who clearly like each other will often behave as if they don't, and will often fight or be adversaries in the early part of the story. This is clearly what the author is trying to do here, but unfortunately it doesn't work, as these characters have not had anything resembling that sort of chemistry up until this point. To my memory they've never had an argument or butted heads on anything, actually.

>>298005

I dont think it would be entirely reasonable to suggest that Somber picked one the characters weapons that he only obtains like after the length of kkats foe and a significant amount of charachter development.

P-21 out the gate is so fucking assmad about stable99's... err society he's like a school shooter, and it scares him so its a big step for him to use the grenade rifle

>>297970
>quarter-jew nigel literal tism prisms.
What the actual fuck are you talking about.

>>296515
>I never finished PH but I heard it ends in a literal multi-phase videogame boss battle where Blackjack the canonical child rapist fights a big evil blob monster that's responsible for everything that ever went wrong

Isnt Blackjack canonically like 16 or something? Also that isnt where it ends and ames isnt responsibile for everything that ever went wrong, and if i remember correctly his boss killed him.

>>298070
That guy's a tsundere with a crush on me, but he just can't spit it out or realize I'm not interested in him. I'm joking, I don't actually know what his problem with me is. But if you ignore him he'll go away for a while until he feels like yelling something like this again. He doesn't call me a faggot because there's something about me he thinks I should change. He calls me a jew because he thinks if he says it enough times, others will assume it's true and join in. I was born in the UK and I'm so white I get sunburns during cloudy winter days, but if we were on a lefty site right now he'd call me a nazi instead.

>>298014
> Calamity limped up to me as I watched her disappear inside. “She’s really somethin’, ain’t she.”
>“Yes…” I said, feeling a little dumbstruck. I glanced at Calamity, who was staring through the door at Velvet. “…she…” I did a double-take. Calamity wasn’t looking at Velvet Remedy, he was looking at her. Something broke in my brain. “…no!”
Something definitely broke in Kkat's brain.
>Calamity wasn’t looking at Velvet Remedy, he was looking at her
...Her what? Her ass? Her hooves? He is Calamity and She is Velvet Remedy. How can Calamity not look at Velvet while he instead looks at her?
This has to be a typo.
Perhaps he meant to write "He was looking at her..." and then trail off?
Still fucking faggoted. This fic went through 22 proof-readers or something, right? People can buy this online and order print runs. It wouldn't surprise me if someone out there bought this at a charity store after it was given away.

>#notmystable
Littlepip and Kkat are such faggots.
He insufficiently explained her dislike of fucked vaults- I mean "Stables" and made it an insufficiently big thing.
Littlepip grew up in an underground vault made by the same company that made numerous other vaults. When she goes through an abandoned and destroyed Vault, it should be pure suffering for her. The memories should leap out and bite at her psyche like sharks made of lava lurking beneath the surface of lava. She turns down a familiar hallway, sees some familiar doors, and has to stop and tell herself she isn't back home and the third door on her left does not lead to the bedroom of the only filly who ever invited her to a slumber party and only once. It's like a funhouse-mirror version of the home she grew up in, the underground complex that was all she ever knew until she started this stupid quest. It's like a hellish mockery of the familiar ever-clean and boringly sterile environment of her home.
It's so painfully similar to her home that if she closes her eyes and ignores the smell it almost feels like nothing's changed at all. Dust and dirt and scars and blood and skeletons should bother her more than they do. She doesn't know how her home is doing and the sight of just one vault that easily fell into disrepair and became a monster-infested deathtrap should leave her terrified that her vault might suffer the same fate. Every second, she should desperately try to tell herself "This isn't my home, my home's fine". Any differences from her "hometown" of a vault just like this one should leap out at her and stretch her suspension of disbelief. And LP's memories of this place aren't entirely happy like ex-celebrity Velvet's were.
LP acts like an amateur roleplayer whose character grew up in a normal vault. So when she encounters a fucked vault, she comments on it once or twice since Kkat thinks that's something this character should do. But realistically this should be a fucking massive deal for her every time she comes to one of these shitholes.
It's like if you came from a town and left it long ago, only to return a while later to see it's been taken over by monsters and coated in filth and decay. Except you know there are countless other towns out there that started eerily similar to yours and they've probably all gone to shit.
The sight of her first destroyed Stable full of monsters should shake her greatly and make her count her blessings that her Stable didn't suffer from a random chimp event or random mutant cat infestation or have some random goofily-written men-in-charge gimmick. She didn't react enough to this when she was a newfag, so all the time spent focusing on it now makes her look weird.
The sight of her second destroyed Stable should hurt her hope and make her fear that all Stables out there are fucked in some way. Her name, "The Stable Dweller", should also stick out to her and make her think "Oh fuck, being from a Stable is considered noteworthy enough to be your epithet in this world. Were all Stables fucked, or are they just peacefully existing underground? I may never know but I wish I knew!"
Instead of callously clearing a path through skeletons coating the floors like dirty laundry coats the bedroom of a messy faggot, the sight of areas where ponies gathered for no reason before dying together for no reason should make her cry. At least fucking once. And then grow tougher skin over time so wasteland shit EVENTUALLY stops bothering her as much as it should bother a realistically-written civilian newfag to the post-apocalyptic lifestyle. Kkat's inconsistent writing makes all of his "UwU this is the saddest scariest edgiest thing ever and it bothers me so much" moments jarring compared to all the shit that doesn't bother her but should.

Littlepip's nosy obsession with unearthing the secrets behind why and how pre-war places went to shit is so fucking retarded, too.
Kkat had the perfect excuse dropped in his own lap, by himself. He wrote that Scootaloo turned most vaults into experiments. So if Littlepip thought about this and said "I must learn the secrets behind the fall of these Stables so future generations can learn from their mistakes!" it would be good writing for once.

>>298017
>“She's had bad reactions to a Stable before. We better keep an eye on her.”
She disliked walking through an enemy-filled hellhole full of poisonous abominations. But she still speedran one to get you the antidote once your dumb ass got poisoned, Calamity, and she still blew it up and saved your ass. How the fuck is that a "bad reaction"? She didn't blow it up because she wanted to, she blew it up because she didn't want the monsters to spread! Are you talking about her "bad reaction" to a Stable where men are in charge? The author clumsily had her insist she doesn't have a problem with men in charge but hates the propaganda posters where mares cower in fear from a clogged sink only a heroic stallion could save them from. Calamity's talking like they're walking through a knife shop and Littlepip is known for slicing her wrists open for attention!

>misunderstanding where they think LP likes Calamity
You're a motherfucking genius! No homo but I love you. This would elevate this story and make slogging through all the edge and goomershit worth it to get to the love triangle moments!

>Calamity and Velvet's characterizations of each other
I wonder what these characters would say about Littlepip.
They'd probably take turns sucking her dick and calling her impressive while giving her all the credit for what the team did together.
But if Calamity's supposed to be a simple guy, Kkat should lean into that and make this an actual character trait. Write him talking to Littlepip about her higher ideals with curiousity while he says he's never thought much about higher ideals. He could mention he once knew ponies who had grand ideals, but got killed by them. Or say he used to believe in high ideals before the world decided to beat it out of him. Could write him arguing with Velvet, so he's mad at her for being inefficient and she's mad at him for not having her civilian morality.
Deep-ass discussions on dreams and goals and the future are great ways to characterize your characters. But only if it's written like an actual conversation where they comment on each other's dreams according to their personalities. If they just take turns spelling out their names and backstories and characterizations and goals for the audience artificially it's gay.
If you're going to do it artificially, just make the narrator spell shit out the characters would never mention on their own, like in Jojo's Bizarre Adventure pt5. It'd probably be improved if the Passione gang told each other their backstories during a "getting closer to each other" scene but it was a fast-paced story arc with little time for stuff like that.
Naruto had a great scene near the start where Kakashi asked his new team of 3 rookie ninjas for their names, likes, dislikes, and dreams. Solidifying who they are and what their dynamic will be for the audience's benefit. It makes sense since they were all strangers to him and he was genuinely trying to get to know them.
Naruto says he wants to be the next Ninja-President, Sakura says she wants Sasuke and hates Naruto and her dream is Sasuke(She was shallow back then), and Sasuke edgily says he likes nothing, hates a lot of things, and his dream is to kill his evil big brother.
Then Kakashi "Introduces himself" by telling them absolutely nothing about himself and he unexpectedly says he hates them all. Funny scene.

>>298069
Makes sense. I've heard things about the story but never read it. Couldn't get past the first chapter, fictional fully-female-dominated societies piss me off more than they probably should.
>>298077
I was told that character groomed/fucked someone way below her age but I've got no idea if it's correct or not.

>>298100
Theyre probably referring to the scene where scotch tape fucked bastard in the space ship like, less then 10 feet from her. Scotch tape is like 12, I think it makes sense given both of their backgrounds since theyre from stable 99 where they had... less then kino views about sex.

Other then that I cant think of anything. Blackjack will fuck just about anything that will move and would be jailbait in real life.

>>298099
Nigel, for the love of god. We know you're never gonna learn. You have made evident that you're like the guy from Memento, where a few day(a week at best) you'll 'learn your lesson' until the heat dies down, and then you'll go back to derailing and sperging about what the fuck ever.
But please, PLEASE stop gaslighting posters, proffering your "Nigel is a gud boi, he dindu nuffin" delusions. You know exactly why he has an issue with you. He and others - self included - have spelled it out to you in painstaking detail over a thousand times by now.
But you wont, you'll feign innocence, cool your jets for a few days, maybe a week, and then test the boundaries once again until you're back up to full speed.
Because you've been doing it for almost 4 years now. Its exhausting. Have some fucking decency.
But it's always someone else who has a problem, it's never anything you do. You're a gud boi, you dindu nuffin

>>298112
Sometimes I accidentally make off-topic posts but I work hard to make sure I don't do that any more. If my haters hated me for a valid reason, they would only rage at me when I did something wrong and they would clearly point out what is wrong in the moment. They wouldn't need to use vague terms and buzzwords to make their arguments for them. Dindu check, gaslighting check, movie reference for emotional reaction check, sperging check, delusion check, is this a record for the most buzzwords used in a guilt-slinging low-quality accusation of guilt? I'm surprised you didn't accuse me of being a jew in this post. I've been more on-topic in this thread than my haters. When I actually make mistakes, good people point them out clearly and explain how I can avoid doing them again in the future because that's constructive. Yelling at me when I do nothing wrong is not constructive. Trying to demonize and dehumanize me and paint me as someone who's calculating everything to troll everyone is not constructive. If I was a troll I wouldn't be a very good one. A troll takes pleasure from annoying others, and I don't give a fuck how my haters feel. It's best to ignore them and their attempts to trick others into joining in the dogpile. Nobody smart would fall for such obvious emotional manipulation anyway.
>>298104
That makes sense. That story sounds like a clusterfuck, do you think we'd be allowed to review it here if we skipped over the sex scenes?
>>298017
Come to think of it, does Littlepip's overpowered PipBuck and its enemy-detecting and map-making ability ruin the thrill and terror and uncertainty of exploring new dungeons?
That Pipbuck can detect enemies long before LP's eyes and ears can. She can't get jumpscared by enemies because she will always have that warning on her radar. She will always have a compass mark magically telling her where her Quwst Objective is too, making exploring an area to find something specific way too easy. I guess the author could build on that for terror by making her hide from hyper dangerous enemies in a locker or something while quietly and fearfully watching the pipbuck compass mark and hoping they would go away.

>>298015
Compared to how the vaults were presented in Fallout, FoE's conception of stables is... odd.

In the Fallout series, the vaults were marketed as comfortable long-term survival shelters for the population in the event of a nuclear war. Deep state actors who would eventually go on to become the Enclave after the war didn't truly believe that a nuclear exchange would occur, and secretly designed many of the vaults to include "social experiments" intended to study how humans behave in a closed environment. The vault experiments became more and more extreme and unethical as the series went on, particularly once Bethesda got their hands on it. As a result, most of the vaults eventually wound up abandoned (by choice, or because their residents all died). The few successful vaults that actually served their supposed purpose and weren't pillaged for their resources became the hearts of new population centers in the decades following the war, like Vault City in Fo1.

Vault 101's experiment was that it would never reopen - in practice, this just means it opened very late to justify Bethesda's giant timeskip in Fallout 3. Naturally, this is also the vault Stable 2 was based on. Other vault experiments included things like "what if we induce aggression in the population with white noise?" and "what if the entire population were retarded clones of one guy?"

So from the perspective of someone who's played the games, it's fair to expect abandoned vaults/stables whose residents died from wacky and gruesome experiments in a Fallout crossover. On paper at least, exploring a stable could make for a fun and/or spooky distraction. Fallout 3's conception of the vaults was essentially the precursor to Skyrim's dungeons, so the sidequest-style stable trips are at least predictable. But the ethical question of the stables being built around experiments casts a very dubious light on pre-apocalypse Equestria, to the story's detriment. I have *opinions* on this - Scootaloo is easily the most morally depraved character in FoE's wartime cast, for example; appropriately, Pip decides to take her as a moral role model. But I'll hold that back until it's relevant.

>>297837
>First of all, SteelWank is in a near-death condition as far as I can tell, and will probably die in a very short time if he doesn't receive medical attention.
Heh.

>>298100
>Makes sense. I've heard things about the story but never read it. Couldn't get past the first chapter, fictional fully-female-dominated societies piss me off more than they probably should.
If it helps, virtually everyone in Stable 99 ends up dead because the raider aids gets into their food supply. PH has bigger problems, but this isn't the thread for it.

>>298017

Anyway, moving on.

>I wondered just how long this had been going on. Was it new? Had there been signs that I was too oblivious to catch? Or had I just not wanted to catch them?
Well, there actually were quite a few signs that LP was quite oblivious to, but in any event I don't get the impression Velvet and Calamity are actually together at this point. So far they just seem to be in the flirty, liking-each-other-but-not-saying-it-out-loud stage.

The idea with this sort of romance plot is usually that the reader is supposed to pick up on things that blindside the protagonist. It's similar to a mystery story, where the Dr. Watson character is designed to be just slightly more clueless than the average reader would be, so that the reader can have the satisfaction of solving the mystery before he does. That's how it normally works, anyway; with kkat, who knows?

>The idea of “catching them” brought an entirely unwanted mental image of Velvet and Calamity to mind that I quickly shredded and burned.
Again, I don't think there's much going on physically, and they really wouldn't have had many opportunities anyway. However, I think this is mostly just LP overreacting.

>You know what would make being cheerful for them easy? A little pony in my head waved a tin at me. Fuck that little pony. I wanted to wallow just a little longer.
Oh right, she's like a drug addict now or something. If only this was something that was factored into her character overall, instead of being some weird thing that just pops up during moments where getting high on crack mints would solve a particular problem and then recedes into the ether again.

Anyway, she's wandering down the halls thinking about shit like this, when she comes across some kind of maintenance bot that has apparently been keeping this giant empty stable clean for 200 years, a la Wall-E.

>The robot started to clean in my direction. I decided to get out of its way by ducking into the Robotics Technician stall. The room was filled with maintenance bots in various states of disrepair. There were enough tools in here to upgrade Calamity’s workshop plans. I began looting.
You know, Littlepoop, maybe if you took some of the energy you normally spend on plundering random, useless crap that doesn't belong to you, and applied it towards figuring out how to win over your crush, you wouldn't be singing the lesbo-pony blues and daydreaming about popping cocaine-flavored tic-tacs right now. Just a thought.

Anyway, we've been through this enough times to know the drill. The next several paragraphs are dedicated to LP's exploration of this room. She obtains some more junk, most of which has no evident use or value, but I'm guessing there are at least two or three items in the collection that will suddenly factor into the story in like nine chapters. Naturally, there is a safe in the wall, which naturally she breaks into, and it naturally contains, among other various odds and ends, a sound recording, which, being the nosy Nellie that she is, she naturally plugs into her wrist-mo-bob and listens to.

Again, this whole episode follows a pattern that should be old hat to us by now: LP & Co. enter a dungeon, they poke around, they steal stuff, and LP begins finding recordings here and there that tell the story of whatever happened to the place they're exploring. The story of Stable 29 seems to revolve around a detail that was mentioned earlier but I didn't highlight: the Atrium does not appear to have an office for the Overmare, which LP finds unusual. The recording details an incident in which a pony died horribly due to some kind of error made by one of the robots. The speaker seems to be of the opinion that the stable ought to have some kind of authority or governing body, with the implication being that this error was due to some kind of lack of standards or authority or something.

I'm beginning to see a pattern. Each of these stables seems to have some kind of uniquely unusual characteristic, which suggests that they may have been intended as social experiments as well as being shelters from the magic-nuclear-explosion-whatever. This isn't entirely the product of my own reasoning; some of the spoilers people in the thread have dropped I believe have also suggested this, like this anon for example >>298180 . The last one had something to do with establishing a male-dominant society; this one so far seems to be some kind of experiment in anarchy, or at least in allowing a contained population to make its own decisions without formal rules or structure.

>I tried to shove the mental image of Cannikin out of my head, centering my thoughts instead on the idea of a Stable without an Overmare at all. A Stable run remotely by Stable-Tec.
Apparently this is what the author is getting at. Stable-Tec, I guess, owns and/or controls most of these places, but in this case they are deliberately taking a hands-off hooves-off, whatever approach.

There is a page break, and in the next scene Littlepoop has found the PipBuck technician room. She finds the key she needs quite easily, along with a few other tools that could come in handy should she ever need to do any advanced repair work on a PipBuck. She takes all of them, and on the way out she finds another recording sitting on the technician's desk, which contains yet another out of context sound clip. This one appears to deal with some kind of gun accident that occurred in the Stable. In the aftermath of this incident, some of the citizens I guess tried to form some sort of safety or rules commission, which I guess had to get approved by Stable-Tec or something.

As with most of this story's mythology, the purpose of Stable-Tec is not particularly well explained, nor is it clear what Littlepoop can be expected to know about it. As far as I can tell, it was a company that existed before/during the war. It may have been run by the CMC, and it is responsible for, among other things, the stables and the PipBucks.

>>298189

There is another page break, and LP is back at the clinic with Velvet.

>Velvet Remedy pushed three jars of extra-strength restoration potion over to me. “Drink these. You’ll be in perfect health in ten minutes.”
I really, really hate the way medicine works in this story. As if the magical cure-all potions we've encountered thus far weren't ridiculous enough, there apparently exists an "extra-strength" version. You know, for when you're really mortally wounded.

>Velvet Remedy shook her head. She was looking a lot better. She had stowed away her dress and removed her bandages; her hide was perfect, her coat looked pristine and healthy.
Have you been mortally wounded by a grenade launcher? Did you have half of your skin torn off by shrapnel? Is most of your blood currently watering the grass of the killing fields? When ordinary magical bandages and potions just won't cut it, you need to reach for a bottle of Extra-Strength Magical Clusterfuck Cure-All Panacea Butthole Salve™! Just rub a tiny palmful of this magic elixir all over your butthole, and in just minutes even the toughest mortal wounds will disappear without a trace. Were your legs blown off? Don't worry! Was your body ripped apart at the torso? We can cure that! Have you been decapitated and torn to shreds, with your various body parts express-mailed to different parts of the globe, where they were then dissolved in hydrofluoric acid, sealed into separate canisters, and launched into the cold vacuum of space? Don't even sweat it! As long as your butthole survived and someone can rub this elixir on it, you'll be just fine by morning.

In all seriousness, at this point I'm starting to have my doubts about this entire fandom (MLP I mean, not necessarily Fallout). Back when I was merely a spectator and not a participant, I remember being mostly puzzled by the brony phenomenon, and occasionally asking anons what the appeal was. One of the things I heard mentioned multiple times was the amount of fanfiction that had been written, and this story specifically was often cited as the best of the best. The show itself is enjoyable enough for what it is, and the shitposty aspects of the fandom are lots of fun, but I really have to question the intelligence of anyone who could read something like FoE and actually see it as a serious, high-quality work of fiction.

I wouldn't mind the ridiculousness so much if it didn't take itself seriously, but as far as I can tell the author is 100% serious about all of this. This premise could work as many different things: a campy hack and slash adventure, an action-comedy, or even as a satire of its own concept. Hell, even if the author wanted to go all grimdark with it and turn it into a serious "horrors of war" story it could be done, but in that case he'd have to drop the video game elements and melodrama and make it at least halfway believable, which he so far refuses to do. As far as I can tell, what he's trying to do is mash up a dark, serious video game with a colorful show about ponies, in order to create a story that deals with dark and serious themes and explores complex moral issues in the setting of a children's cartoon show.

Again, I fully believe it would be possible to do this well, but in this case it fails bigly. The author insists on taking the source material of both franchises 100% literally, which means that absurd cartoon elements from the series (ponies pulling a running steam train, for instance) as well as absurd video game elements from Fallout (healing potions for instance) are included as serious elements in a world that attempts to be serious. However, the result is so absurd it's impossible to take most of the story seriously.

For instance, despite being grievously wounded, the party just discovered enough of this magical panacea-potion to completely heal themselves. This shit was just sitting in a storage room. So what the hell is up with that atrium full of skeletons? Those ponies had access to the same magic elixir that LP & Co. just rubbed all over their buttholes. What happened there? How did all of these ponies die? Were they just not able to rub it on their buttholes in time, or what? Did someone lose the key to the storage closet? It just doesn't make any sense. The same goes for just about every death in this story. As I've said before, in a world where practically any injury can be healed just by downing a couple of potions, it's hard to take any threat seriously.

>I downed two of the extra-strength restoration potions and slipped the third into my saddlebags. Memories of Velvet, her hide shredded and bloody, had resurfaced in my mind. I could handle being mostly healed if it meant I had one of these ready in case of an emergency.
See, this shit right here is exactly what I'm talking about. Velvet's hide was shredded and bloody just a few short scenes ago, but now she's fine, and all she had to do was swallow a couple of teaspoons of some mysterious cure-all potion. Whatever sympathy we might have felt for Littlepoop after seeing her love interest nearly killed is completely negated if her injuries can be cured this easily. Having half of your hide torn off is about as serious as skinning your knee in this world, so the attempted drama feels maudlin and silly, and the vivid descriptions of blood loss and torn skin just sounds like the author being an over-the-top edgelord.

What are we supposed to take away from this? Velvet tells LP to swallow three magical cure-alls in order to completely heal all of her grievous injuries, but she only downs two of them, while saving the third in case Velvet gets injured again on the field, and we're supposed to see this as a tender act of self-sacrifice? It makes no sense. The storage room seems to be full of these things, and LP's saddlebag is basically it's own pocket dimension; there's no apparent limit to how many of these potions they can carry, so why not take as many as possible?

>>298193

>Calamity was also looking much better. He complained that after Velvet Remedy’s mending spell, the brace wasn’t really necessary, but she insisted he keep it on for at least another day.
This too. On some level I think the author realizes he's made medicine too powerful, so he feels the need to limit it. However, he can only do so with lukewarm measures like this one: Calamity breaks his leg, and it can be healed with magic and potions and stuff, but it's not completely healed; he still has to wear a brace for a couple of days. It was the same way with his wing when that was injured, as I recall, and it will probably be the same way with whatever he breaks next. None of this shit even matters anyway; even when the party is injured it doesn't seem to actually affect them. If you break your leg you can still walk, if you injure your wing you can still fly, if you lose half your skin and most of your blood you can still do just about anything you could before.

Anyway, I forget if I mentioned this or not but apparently while Velvet was looting supplies, she came across another one of those dumb sound recordings that Littlepoop collects because she's a nosy klepto. As soon as she chugs her healing potions, LP goes off to listen to it because it's not like she has anything better to do. I mean, it's not like some cyborg soldier who risked himself to save her is currently lying immobilized somewhere, slowly and painfully dying of internal bleeding, while these retards are wandering around this abandoned stable looking for extra band-aids.

So, you might as well poke around and see if there are any old cassette tapes lying around that you might want, eh LP? If you find any rare black metal demos or anything let me know.

>I found a chemistry lab in the back of the clinic. For a moment, all thoughts of the recording fled my mind. Looking over the drugs and supplies, I realized that along with what I had already, I had all the ingredients to cook up my own batch of Party-Time Mint-als!
Oh, and while you're at it, why don't you see if they've got the stuff you need to set up your own meth lab? You've got nothing but time, LP, nothing but time.

>And having the ability and opportunity, I couldn’t resist. It would have been silly to.
Kkat, I think you and I are working from radically different definitions of the word "silly."

>As I started work, I remembered why I had come back here.
To find some kind of key so you could open the utility panel for that guy's armor so he doesn't die, even though between all the walking and napping and exploring and looting and now meth cooking you've been doing he's probably been dead for hours by now? Oh wait, you found that key already. So wait a minute, why are you still down here again?

>I let the recording play as I ground down the regular, boring old Mint-als into a fine powder.
Oh that's what you meant. When you said "I remembered why I had come back here," I was assuming you were talking about the important, time-sensitive, life-and-death task you were supposed to be carrying out right now. However, you were talking about the reason you had specifically entered this room, which was to pop your headphones on and listen to some complete stranger's diary from 200 years ago. Sorry, my bad.

>The voice was so filled with raw despair that I quickly shut the recording off. I didn’t want to hear that.
I was just shitposting earlier, but maybe she actually did find an old black metal tape.

Anyway, she goes back to cooking her fucking drugs, but sooner or later her nosy Nellie side gets the best of her, and she plays the tape. The contents are about what you'd expect: there was some kind of malfunction with the fire suppression system, and it sounds like it flooded the clinic or something and drowned whoever was inside.

>I shut it off again. My heart was twisted up in knots. Part of me wanted to cry. Part wanted to rage at something. But there wasn’t anything obvious to rage at.
If you're looking for something to rage at, you could probably start with the fact that you came down here to find something you need to save a guy's life, and here you are cooking drugs and listening to old tapes.

Oh, why do I even care? We all know perfectly well the soldier's not dead. This is FoE; injuries here don't actually kill you. When the party returns to the spot where they left Roboponer, he's going to be in exactly the same state as he was before. Littlepoop will use her new key-thingy to open up his armor-panel-whoosit, and then she can repair his 200 year old cybernetic life-support system using only the skills she picked up as an apprentice technician fixing a type of device that is basically just a glorified Nintendo-DS. Everything will be just fine; she could stay down here goofing around for another ten years and absolutely nothing on the surface world will have changed.

Anyway, while she's occupied with all this retarded bullshit, she suddenly hears machine guns firing and runs off to rescue Velvet's sexy ass from whatever horrible stable-monster is attacking it inb4 it turns out that Calamity has a robotic penis that sounds like a machine gun when he ejaculates. She runs back to wherever she was before, the clinic I guess, and sees that for no apparent reason the gun turrets that I guess are in there have become active and started attacking them because why not. However, this turns out to be no big deal, because Littlepoop destroys them both with literally two shots. Yes, you read that correctly. Two giant-ass robotic gun turrets. Destroyed with two shots. One shot each. From her revolver.

Also, she gets injured by the turrets, but let's face it; that hardly matters. All she has to do is rub some elixir on her butthole and she'll be right as rain, and she's surrounded by literal gallons of the stuff. Instead, she focuses on what's really important: making sure her drugs don't overcook. The scene ends with a page break.

>>298196
Gg, I wrote this. Could you give me some feedback.
Actually set in the FE universe.

>>298189
>>You know what would make being cheerful for them easy? A little pony in my head waved a tin at me.
This author is really bad at integrating her crack mint addiction into the story and her internal monologue.

>Fuck that little pony.
No, fuck THIS little pony! Littlepip fucking SUCKS!

>I wanted to wallow just a little longer
Littlepip: Leave me alone to wallow in whatever it is mary sues wallow in!

>The robot started to clean in my direction
IF THERE'S A CLEANING BOT AROUND HERE WHY ARE THERE SKELETONS
WHY WOULDN'T IT CLEAN THE SKELETONS
AND SHOVE THEM INTO A RANDOM LOCKER SO WHEN LITTLEPIP OPENS IT, THE SKELETONS FALL ON HER
AND SHE GETS THOROUGHLY SPOOKED

>If healing items are so effective and plentiful why do people die? Why are there any still around after 200 years?
The lore of the games solved this problem by saying health-restoring "Stimpaks" and inferior tribal "Healing Powder" can be manufactured even in the post-apocalypse. Kkat forgot about this by making do-anything potions so much better than they should be and only rare when he wants them to be.
So much of this story is written like he never wanted to do a second draft that stripped out the loot that couldn't be looted and didn't turn out to be important later.
If he didn't want LP and friends to take all of this healing potion, why did he put it there? Why not say "All of these health potions were made by a mechanical doctor that fucked up the recipe, creating poison that smells like healing potion and the only useable health potion here was hoofmade with that chemistry set"?
What, is team LP going to leave most of the healing potions behind and then come back for them once they have a car?
"We must travel light and avoid picking up too much junk" would make sense in a realistic world where carrying 20 pounds on your back is hard. BUT LITTLEPIP LIFTED BOXCARS! Go get her a boxcar-sized flat metal tray and she could carry all the health potions she wanted.

There are "New-U Stations" in Borderlands. They're respawn points just like in The Godfather and Spongebob Squarepants: Battle For Bikini Bottom, but with a dumb joke voice line that plays every time you respawn like "We here at Hyperion are always happy to revive you and take your money!".
That dumb joke and respawn fee and early-game tutorial "Characters explain videogame functions and vending machines" scenes means they canonically exist within the world so shitloads of players are unable to take emotional death scenes seriously. If I respawn when shot, why don't the NPCs who die during cutscenes?
Nobody goes out of their way to depower or imprison or cripple a foe specifically because "The second that bastard dies, he respawns at the nearest New-U Station in peak physical condition! So he needs to stay in this prison and not die!"
You'll eventually meet the NPCs behind the health vending machines and guns vending machines, and the Catch A Ride station that infinitely respawns your cars canonically exists, so you expect the respawn vending machine to also exist. Yet the whole world functions as if it doesn't, despite how much attention was drawn to it.
It's incredibly jarring and probably the biggest moment of bad writing in these games if you don't count spoiler stuff.
There comes a point where you're better off not drawing attention to videogamey things like respawn points, or +1 Life Pickups or Reviver seeds, or an impossibly all-knowing HUD that can tell you the names of important people while giving disposable randomly-generated NPCs names like Raider Scavver and Defias Cutpurse, or your arbitrary maximum inventory size, or level-ups and RPG stats, or dice-roll based bullshit, or your ability to save and pause and reload a game, or how the player character's insane luck makes him more likely to find a fully loaded military-grade gun in a random bizarre spot than you are to find a penny on the street.
And if something like this isn't it, what is?
If you don't have a clever meta justification for this unrealistic bullshit, shut up about it and let gamers willingly suspend their disbelief for it, and don't take this bullshit with you into literature unless the world's SUPPOSED to work like an easily-exploitable RPG.
And if this world IS supposed to work like a RPG, why isn't Littlepoop reloading her gun faster by switching weapons?

>Having half of your hide torn off is about as serious as skinning your knee in this world, so the attempted drama feels maudlin and silly, and the vivid descriptions of blood loss and torn skin just sounds like the author being an over-the-top edgelord
Could be worse. Littlepip could be a group of five or more ordinary human teenagers in the 90s given the power to morph into animals by a scorpion-tailed blue centaur alien, but despite the constant nearly-fatal hyper-edgy child-unfriendly wounds inflicted by assorted aliens and rayguns, changing from human to animal and back will insta-heal you and cause a spontaneous gratuitous body horror scene for everyone except your mary sue who gets to look pretty/cute when morphing because Kunt A. Assholegate says so.

>>298196
Wait a fucking second, a "Chemistry set" could be used to make 5 free Stimpaks or a set of free drugs (1 each of Psycho, Jet, Steady, Buffout, Rebound, and Mentats) in FNV during the opening tutorial.
Elijah's one in Dead Money only made Cloud Residue (it's a long story but i deleted it for being off-topic) but if this fucking Chemistry Set is so great it can be used to make any drug whenever she wants, why is she making crack mints instead of MORE HEALTH POTIONS?
What's with this "JESSE WE NEED TO COOK!" moment?!
Realistically, a single health potion should be worth its weight in gold! Or better yet, bullets and sweet guns!
Unless health potions are easier to produce than bread once you have the required parts and tools to make it, making it cheaper than chips in isolated walled cities with "civilization" and dark secrets yet painfully rare out there in the wastes.

>turrets
LP why u no hack turrets

>>298265
>Could be worse. Littlepip could be a group of five or more ordinary human teenagers in the 90s given the power to morph into animals by a scorpion-tailed blue centaur alien, but despite the constant nearly-fatal hyper-edgy child-unfriendly wounds inflicted by assorted aliens and rayguns, changing from human to animal and back will insta-heal you and cause a spontaneous gratuitous body horror scene for everyone except your mary sue who gets to look pretty/cute when morphing because Kunt A. Assholegate says so.
Shut your whore mouth, yeerkfucker. Animorphs was great.

>>298196
>The Atrium door had closed and locked. We were sealed inside.
Considering what this place was designed for, it's unlikely the door was meant to stand open for a long period of time. It probably has some sort of timer on it that closes it automatically after a few minutes. In fact, I'd be amazed if all of the stables didn't have something like this.

>It was more of an aggravation than a real worry. I knew that I should be able to override every door in this place from the Security station.
Of course. I'd hate to think the author was going to give this group any sort of actual challenge to overcome; his time would be far better spent writing out a long, detailed list of all the random crap that Littlepoop finds in some old desk drawer.

>But reaching it meant getting past several more points where the suddenly trigger-happy security system could attack us.
Oh, okay, so there's kind of a challenge. Well, that's something I guess.

>I looked to my companions. By now, I was beginning to think of us as seasoned warriors of the wasteland (well, at least Calamity and I).
I notice that Littlepoop seems to regard Velvet with a certain amount of disdain whenever she's assessing the group's combat abilities. It's true enough that Velvet isn't much of a fighter, or a fighter at all, but condescension doesn't seem like the right attitude for her to have towards a pony she's supposed to be in love with.

Generally, when you've got a tough-guy or girl, I suppose hero character who sees a smaller, weaker, gentler character as a romantic interest, the hero usually develops protective feelings for her. However, with Littlepoop this is a little weird anyway, since even though she's supposed to be the tough, seasoned hero and Velvet is the gentle, naive pacifist who has to be rescued all the time, we also have this dynamic that was established earlier, in which Velvet is the sexy, sophisticated pop star and Littlepoop is just a mousy little fangirl who has a crush on her. What's weird is that LP seems to slip in and out of these modes at random; sometimes she's the tough, hardened warrior getting angry at Velvet for being too weak and sentimental, but then a scene or two later she's back to gibbering, lovestruck fangirl mode. Really the whole romance dynamic between these two feels completely insincere anyway, and a big part of it is that neither of these characters are particularly well developed to begin with.

Also, it's pretty damned arrogant for Littlepoop to be thinking of herself as a "seasoned warrior of the wasteland." She uses her S.A.T.S. to handle her targeting 95% of the time; if she had to rely entirely on her own aim she wouldn't be able to kill shit. Her PipBuck also has built-in radar that helpfully tells her the location of all of her enemies before she encounters them, so it's virtually impossible for anyone to get the drop on her. Most of her tactical advantages in battle come from her having a PipBuck, and the rest is just bullshit that comes from her being the author's favored Mary Sue OC, like her hacking ability and her lockpicking ability and her inexplicable ability to levitate preposterously huge things like boxcars. If a serious writer were to put this character in a serious version of this setting and take away her PipBuck, Littlepoop would probably be dead by the end of the second or third chapter.

>Velvet Remedy was looking at me sadly. I think I was fast enough, but I was guessing that she suspected what I was up to in the chemistry lab. She hadn’t taken her eyes off me since, and the reproachful look was burning into my soul.
Velvet's pity for Littlepoop's newfound drug addiction feels almost as tacked on as Littlepoop's newfound drug addiction.

Anyway, the problem now is that the door is locked, and the only way to open it apparently involves going to the security room in the special VIP area that apparently replaces the Overmare's quarters in this particular stable. Calamity finds a map, and they head off in that direction.

>We moved towards the stairs, stopping at a bulletin board covered in the usual notices. I shrank back; somepony had written “STOP KILLING US!” across the board in what looked like blood.
Sacrebleu! Le edge!

>“Oh my,” Velvet whispered. To my surprise, she magically tugged one of the notices off the board, floating it closer for inspection. The notice had been between a posting of new safety regulations and a flier for two missing fillies whose smiling faces had stared into an atrium of corpses for centuries.
Mon dieu! Le edge! LE EDGE!!

Anyway, apparently this flyer that Velvet finds is advertising an old concert with none other than Vinyl Scratch as the DJ. Why this information would be important enough that any of them would stop and take notice of it is the kind of question I should probably have learned to stop asking by now. Calamity notes with mild surprise that it looks like Vinyl had survived the balefire bomb after all. Littlepoop grumbles to herself about how much she dislikes stables, and then there's a page break.

>Between stealth and Little Macintosh, the other turrets proved little threat.
Oh, good. I'd really hate to have the story sidetracked by something as mundane as a trek through a creepy abandoned bunker where murder-turrets could attack at any given moment. Anything that distracts from descriptions of Littlepoop manufacturing homemade drugs or cracking old safes open is just a waste of page space, in my opinion. Come on, kkat! Get to the looting already! What does LP find in the security room? An old shoe? A 200 year old can of Bush's™ Baked Beans? More drugs? Come on, I need to know! Does she ever find all the crap she needs to build that stupid needle gun she's trying to make? The suspense is killing me! Quit wasting our time with all of this action and adventure and just get to the important stuff, for land's sake.

>>298362

>I sat down to hack the terminal, trying to be respectful as I floated the pony skeleton off of it and laid it down in the corner near the others.
You know, it occurs to me that they might be misinterpreting history a bit here. Did it ever occur to any of these ponies that old Edgequestria might have been ruled by a noble race of skeletons, and they're all under a sleeping spell right now?

Anyway, Littlepoop of course effortlessly hacks the terminal, and of course the first thing she does is open the door to the armory so Calamity can loot it. While she's at it, she of course decides to root around in the old security logs.

The logs she finds are pretty much standard fare by now. Apparently the Stable developed some sort of artificial intelligence and began attacking the ponies inside for no reason; either that, or the Stable-Tec guys who were remotely controlling it got bored and decided to have some fun. It actually appears to be the latter. In any event, blood and guts and carnage abound, and no explanation is given for why Stable-Tec would want to do this to them exactly.

It's not clear whether the logs are text files or audio files, but I'm guessing audio as Velvet seems to be affected by them as well. Littlepoop becomes overwhelmed by emotion as she sifts through the various files.

>I reached to trigger another when Velvet Remedy physically pulled me away from the terminal.
>"WHAT!?" I yelled in pure rage, my body shaking so hard I felt like I would explode.
>"Littlepip," she said, and I realized she was crying, "You need to stop."
I literally burst out laughing when I read this. Most writers would take that as a warning flag that maybe they didn't convey quite the emotional timbre they were going for.

So, if I'm understanding it correctly, the situation here is that Stable-Tec put all of these ponies down here, locked them in with no Overmare, and then started shooting at them and killing them all of a sudden. One question springs to mind: WHY?

It doesn't seem like it, but this is really not that difficult a question to answer. The trick is to realize that you're not supposed to actually think about it. That some giant corporation would go to all the trouble of building a huge facility that probably cost billions of dollars bits, whatever, just so they could throw a few ponies in there and murder them for no reason, would provoke curiosity in a normal person. However, once you understand the logic of Fallout: Equestria, it becomes quite simple.

Stable-Tec murdered the inhabitants of this stable for the same reason that the slavers round up children and the raiders decorate their bedrooms with the guts of their enemies: they're bad baddies, who do bad things because they are bad. Their only role in the story is to be as edgy and evil as they possibly can. In other words, it's pure shock value. The reader is supposed to be so utterly horrified by the horrors of this horrible horror that they never realize that the whole scenario is absurd to the point of being actually funny.

Earlier I mentioned the movie Crank as an example of a story that is completely absurd, but still manages to be entertaining and fun. The secret of a story like that is that it's aware of how ridiculous it is, and it deliberately pushes its ridiculousness to the furthest extreme possible. A formula like that could easily work with a premise like this, since frankly the premise is completely ridiculous to begin with. However, it would need some self-awareness to be able to do this.

A film like Crank is in the category of "bad on purpose." Sure it's bad, but it knows its bad, and it's trying to be bad, and that's why it's fun to watch. Meanwhile, the sort of film you could compare FoE to would probably be something like The Room; a terrible, pointless story written by a complete hack who has no idea that he's a hack, and who legitimately believes he has something beautiful and important to share with the world.

Nearly everything in FoE is completely and obviously ridiculous, yet it presents these absurd situations without any apparent irony or humor. As far as I can tell, the author is trying for a serious, heart-wrenching moment here; the story of Stable 29 is supposed to be horrifying beyond belief, and we are meant to genuinely feel for Littlepoop's reaction here. Some big bad meanie corporation rounded up thousands of ponies and stuck them in an underground bunker and then gruesomely murdered them for no obvious reason, and now Littlepoop, who is listening to a recording that someone, for some reason, made of this event and then saved on their computer terminal, is tearing her hair out and screaming "oh the horror of it all!" while Velvet sobs in the background. The fact that this entire scene is being acted out by cartoon ponies pushes it completely over the edge for me; this scene is quite possibly the funniest fucking thing I've read all year.

It keeps going after the page break, too:

>I was seeing red like never before, and I couldn't even attack the source of my anger because they were all dead. Dead decades and centuries ago. My body hadn't stopped shaking.
You read it here folks: Littlepoop is literally shaking right now.

Anyway, while she is in this state of whatever the fuck, she randomly comes across Vinyl Scratch's old room, because why the hell not?

>The room inside had been untouched since the night of the party, three months after the door of Stable Twenty-Nine closed, trapping everypony inside.
And she knows this how? I went back over the sound recordings, and I didn't see anything in there that provided any of these details. The only clue I can see about the three month thing is that the flyer calls it a "three month survival party," which I suppose implies that the party took place three months after the group entered the stable. Assuming they were locked in from the very beginning this would make sense.

>>298362
>Velvet pities the junkie
Is it really right for Velvet to take pity on a junkie?
She's a formerly-rich bitch celebrity from her stable's upper crust.
If she wasn't constantly surrounded by drug-taking celebrity faggots who ruined their boring lives through addiction, she should have an absolute hatred for drugs and the 'lowlife lowborn stable-scum' that takes them for fun.

>VIP area
If there is no leader, why even have a VIP area or name it such? If it's necessary for something as important as opening and closing the vault door that keeps your stable protected from the outside world, why not put the security specialists/experts in charge of it?
Also, Kkat's a faggot for badly writing this leaderless Vault. Leaderless zones don't stay leaderless for long. Eventually someone good at managing and planning and getting others to listen to him basically ends up in charge of (at the very least) a good chunk of the zone. If someone good at managing doesn't take over, someone who thinks he should manage things eventually will.
Why the hell would the absence of an "Overseer", the all-powerful boss with "Watch the cameras everywhere" as his job, the faggot who's in charge of the all-powerful "Stable Security" militarized police force, result in the stable lacking any kind of authority or responsibility?
If the automated security starts fucking up, which mechanic is in charge of fixing it? Which mechanic is the boss of other mechanics in charge of training new mechanics, if one exists?
If you think the automated security system is malfunctioning and killing innocents, what's stopping you from bugfixing that or getting a mob to destroy the easily-smashed gun turrets if it's not whoever's really in charge?
And if this Stable gets its orders directly from Stable-Tec instead of a local Overseer...
1. How did Stable-Tec survive? In a normal experiment-free stable of their own?
2. What the fuck kind of experiment in "Anarchy" does that make this, if this civilization needs the permission of a company to wipe its own ass and/or was effectively ruled by the facility's own guns?
3. When the gun turrets got this genocidal, how did they stay functional for this long if it's easy enough for Littlepoop to take them out with her mediocre hunting pistol? During the start of this Kung Flu panic, people smashed up 5G towers thinking they had something to do with it. And possibly smashed up some power lines that looked like 5G towers but there might have been feds doing that instead to make the anti-5G guys look bad.
4. AIs don't just "happen" and come out of nowhere like a videogame spawning in a new enemy. AIs are fucking hard to make! What retarded fucking Assman-tier Anti-Humanist Transhumanist Double-Nigger Moment of anti-logic caused a robot to think genociding all of its poners was its job?

>"Littlepip," she said, and I realized she was crying, "You need to stop. Your crack addiction is tearing this family apart!"
Littlepip: There are spiders under my skin and secrets to uncover in the journals and terminal entries of long-dead ponies!!!

This reminds me of a Vault in Fallout NV that seems brilliant at first but falls apart once you think about it. It's that Vault where the Overseer is elected for a year, then killed.
So big Voting Blocs form to rule the vault and vote for anyone who displeases them, and posters saying "Carl is a communist sympathizer, vote Carl for overseer!" coat the walls.
This shit went on for about 200 years without any change.
Eventually one person got voted into power and decided to actually use the Overseer's absolute power to replace voting with a random lottery. So a civil war happened and fucktons died.
All but 6ish vault occupants died. They agreed to vote nobody in as Overseer even if it gets them killed.
The vault said "Congratulations! You've proven humans will not execute one human a year even if we tell them to."
Sad, the survivors agreed to make an edgy audio log and leave it on the floor so random looters can find it. Then they all kill themselves except I think some chickened out.
Anyway this vault sounds smart and deep at first but was really dumb and edgy in retrospect. It's like this Stable, because at first it's horrifying but then you realize it's kind of funny.
But it's still a step above this piece of shit Stable where poners exist in an underground facility that gradually kills them over time for no fucking reason. Come on, where's the GLADOS AI that likes testing stuff even if it kills? Where's the lesson here, besides "Not everyone can write"?
At least Shadow The Hedgehog's stupid "Everyone in this expensive facility was killed for no reason" backstory got aliens retconned in to be less retarded.

>be Eggman's grandfather
>daughter has super-AIDS named NIDS
>take her to Space Colony Arc
>make giant lizard and Shadow The Hedgehog while trying to cure her Space AIDS
>collab with genocidal alien Devil Doom and his race the Black Arms on Shadow
>Guardian Unit of Nations (GUN) slaughters everyone on the ARK including Maria
>brainwash+freeze Shadow until Sonic Adventure 2

Remember that time Littlepip linked her PipBuck's targeting program to some turrets, so they'd open fire on anything her PipBuck considered an enemy to her while sparing her and her friends?
Bet the dead poners wish they thought of that.
If LP did that upon entering the stable, she wouldn't have to purge the vault of anything violent towards her like the gun-turrets.
Her PipBuck's never fucked up and labelled a potential friend as a Hostile(TM) before, so it's not like doing this would make a spiteful Dungeon Master say "This vault actually had survivors who were starving so badly they'd rob anyone they encountered... but they could have totally been reasoned with if you tossed some food their way. Unfortunately your trick made the automated turrets kill them all. Yes, even though these turrets were already killing ponies so these survivors would have no reason to go near the damn things. Shut the fuck up and enjoy the edge."

>>298363

What isn't clear, though, is why this room would be untouched since the night of the party, or how LP would know this for a fact. For this to be the case, Vinyl would have to have died on the night of the party, or at least stopped using this room after the party. Is the implication here that the night of the party was the same night that all the brutal slaughter detailed in the last batch of recordings took place?

As usual, timelines here are vague; all we really know is that Stable-Tec, for some bizarre reason, was using its remote control of the stable to murder all of its inhabitants. It started off by killing a few here and there using events that appeared to be accidents, but eventually it just unleashed an all-out bloodbath, using the automated gun turrets that were placed all around (this seems like kind of a strange design feature in the first place). However, we don't know how long this took or when any of these events occurred. It's possible that the accidents took place over the course of three months, and the bloodbath occurred on the night of the party; however, if this is the case it's not clearly stated anywhere. They could have just as easily been down there for years and years before any of this started happening.

However, what I think the author is getting at is that the "accidental" killings were taking place over the first three months, and then at the concert Stable-Tec decided to kill everyone at once. More than likely, the concert was held in the atrium and this is probably what all the skeletons in there are supposed to be about.

Anyway, Littlepoop wanders around Vinyl's old room, looking at all of her stacks of records and DJ equipment and whatever the fuck, thinking to herself that she could just randomly break all of this shit to relieve some of the stress she is feeling about all the ancient murders or whatever. However, she doesn't quite feel right about destroying the beloved possessions of a pony who was just another victim of the evil meanie-pants baddie corporation that was bad because badness. So, she decides to do the decent thing: steal those possessions instead. She goes through Vinyl's old record collection, takes whatever the fuck she wants because she's a goddamn klepto, and wanders off, once again feeling as though she has somehow done something noble here.

>When I returned to the others, I would have Velvet Remedy lock them in one of her medical boxes where it would be safe from bullet fire. I still remembered that apple.
If transporting vinyl records or wax 78s or whatever the fuck they have in Equestria across the wasteland is such a complex and delicate task, why not just leave them where they are? Why do you need these records? Why do you need any of the junk you pick up? You need help, girl.

Also, what apple? What the fuck are you even babbling about, you loony twat?

Since it wouldn't be a room in Fallout: Equestria if there wasn't a safe, Littlepoop of course finds a safe. She of course "hesitates," because she "doesn't feel quite right about this," but of course this feeling doesn't ultimately stop her. She breaks into the safe, which of course just contains sentimental objects of Vinyl's that are of no practical use to Littlepoop or anyone in her party.

However, for no obvious reason, there are also four memory orbs in there. One of them is called "Pinkie Pie's Last Party," so she takes that one and leaves everything else.

After doing this, she leaves Vinyl's room, and goes to another room marked "Shadowhorn," which I guess was the name of someone important in Stable 29. The name was mentioned a few times in the recordings. Since LP has apparently completely forgotten about both her friends and the probably now dead cyborg soldier she was supposed to be trying to rescue, and since she can hardly resist the opportunity to rifle through another dead stranger's belongings, she goes inside.

>The mare in charge of maintenance was a V.I.P. in the Stable? Even in the midst of my barely-reined fury at Stable-Tec, my pure hatred towards whom could not be told, part of my brain recognized that seemed odd.
I had to read this like five times before I figured out what the hell the author was trying to say here. This is easily one of the most awkwardly-written sentences in the entire book.

Anyway, she goes into this dead cunt's room and, surprise surprise, there's another goddamn safe in there, which she of course breaks into. There is another recording inside.

>When the safe opened, it revealed another recording. This one looked startlingly similar to the one I found in the Overstallion’s office.
Couple of things here. For one, I thought there was no Overstallion here, and that was the whole point of this place. For another, since it specifically says Overstallion and not Overmare, I'm assuming what the author means is that the recording resembles the one LP found earlier at the other stable, the one that was so shocking because it had a boy leader instead of a girl leader. Since that happened like forty forevers ago and I don't even remember what that recording was even about, let alone what it looked like, we should probably go back and see what the description of the first one was.

>But within his locked safe, I found both it and the recipe, as well as an old recording. My guess was that it was his last words.
This is literally all the text has to say about the Overstallion's recording found all the way back in Chapter 5. So, if a description of the first recording is never given, how exactly is it helpful to tell us later that a second recording resembles it? The answer: it's not helpful. It's not helpful at all. It's also not helpful that the text has yet to even give us a description of any recording; the only reason I have even a vague idea of what these mystery objects look like is because a helpful anon in this thread gave a brief description of the ones in the game.

>>298367

Anyway, she plays the recording itself, and...hoo boy. Let's just say that the actual truth of what happened here is different from what the text has thus far been hinting at, but it's no less ridiculous. In fact, it may actually be more ridiculous. This recording is probably worth going through closely, because there's quite a bit of information in here.

>Hello, Shadowhorn! The following is for your ears only. I am speaking to you because you have been selected for a very important job, due to your sense of loyalty and duty both to this company and the ponies around you.
This appears to be another super-sekrit message from Vice President Scootaloo at Stable-Tec to the Overmare, or Chief Security Officer, or Designated Shitting Pony, or whatever, from this particular stable. The format resembles the one which opened Chapter Six, if anyone gives enough of a shit to go back and read it.

>Hello, my name is Scootaloo, and I’m the vice-president of Stable-Tec. If you’re hearing this, that means that the Omega-Level Threat Protocols have been enacted...
Blah blah blah, the magical nukes went off and everyone is dead now, time to implement Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Anyway, after her preamble, Scoots basically tells Shadowfax that in addition to being a survival bunker, Stable 29 has been selected to participate in some kind of social experiment:

>but there is a higher purpose to your Stable, beyond saving individual ponies. We here at Stable-Tec understand that it doesn’t do ponykind any good to save ourselves now only to annihilate each other later. We must figure out where we went wrong. We must find a better way. And we must be ready to implement it as soon as possible once the Stable doors open.
Normally, a speech like this would imply that Stable-Tec probably wants #29 to implement some kind of bullshit common-core style learning program in which tolerance and friendship and shit is taught to the young, in order that the next generation of little ponies won't want to annihilate each other with nuclear missiles or whatever the fuck. However, in this story, I'm assuming it will be something about rampaging killbots instead.

She goes off on a bit of a tangent after this, mostly spouting cliched lines like:
>dammit. How did we come to this?
and
>Bad decisions, emotional decisions… they’ve dragged us into a war nopony wanted. They’ve pushed us to the brink of extinction
and
>dammit all to hell. Damn us all to hell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WQCoPL3-wo

Anyway, she eventually gets back on topic, and once she does we get some interesting tidbits of information:

>Your Stable has a very exceptional design. Despite the official documents, this Stable has no remote connection to Stable-Tec whatsoever. Instead, replacing the normal Overmare position, we have fitted Stable Twenty-Nine with a Crusader-class computer system.
So, apparently, it wasn't Stable-Tec who intentionally murdered everypony for no reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LGu1sOvxYs
The question now, of course, is who did?

>The Crusader-class Maneframe is the most advanced supercomputer ever created by ponykind, using the greatest available improvements in arcano-technology. The Crusader is capable of independent thought, creativity and learning.
Oh, sweet baby Jesus. I think I see where this is going. Also: "maneframe?" Seriously? There's a time when cutesy horse puns are appropriate, and now does not feel like one of those times.

>The goal of this social experiment it to remove the emotional, fallible pony from the equation. To see if we can do better through a pragmatic and logical system of government that is not subject to our own faults.
Yep, it's basically what I was afraid of. This is another "artificially intelligent supercomputer goes awry and kills everyone" episode. It's a first for this story, but it's bringing back some unpleasant memories of Assman and his "Celest-AI" spergery.

Anyway, there's some other shit in here that I'll get to in a minute, but the long and short of it is that the Cutie Mark Crusaders built some kind of magic supercomputer, which they gave to this stable in order to test as part of some kind of experiment in AI government. Naturally, this machine went amok and killed everyone in the stable.

What happened specifically is that some little kid accidentally shot the magic crystal thingy that generates drinking water (this is mentioned in one of the earlier recordings), and he caused some kind of permanent damage to it. The diminishing supply of drinking water caused the computer to reason that the population needed to be reduced, so it killed a few of the ponies. However, since the water crystal couldn't be repaired, the supply kept dwindling so the computer had to kill more ponies. Eventually the supply ran out completely, so it decided to just kill all the ponies at once.

There are several WTFs here. First of all, it seems like a pretty stupid idea to do something like this in the first place. If this AI has never been tested before, it makes little sense to test it in the middle of a life or death survival situation where literally thousands of things can go wrong. However, I get the impression that this was basically the author's point, so we can probably skip that one.

More pertinent is that the latter part of the recording details measures that this Shadowbolt character could use to manually take control of the system if it ever went awry. If it started killing ponies a few at a time, it seems like it should have been obvious to Shadowcat that it was doing something it shouldn't, so why weren't the override controls implemented? However, I actually suspect hope the author may be going somewhere with this, so I'll skip that one for now as well.

I'm running out of space, so I will finish this thought in a new post.

>>298376
>What happened specifically is that some little kid accidentally shot the magic crystal thingy that generates drinking water (this is mentioned in one of the earlier recordings), and he caused some kind of permanent damage to it. The diminishing supply of drinking water caused the computer to reason that the population needed to be reduced, so it killed a few of the ponies. However, since the water crystal couldn't be repaired, the supply kept dwindling so the computer had to kill more ponies. Eventually the supply ran out completely, so it decided to just kill all the ponies at once.
I'll give Kkat one tiny bit of credit here - this ties together a handful of things from the Fallout games quite cleverly. Janky, homicidal AIs suffering from logic errors show up frequently in all of the games so this sort of scenario isn't out of place in a Fallout story. Fallout 1 establishes that vaults rely on a small but vital component known as a 'water chip' to process their water supplies. And in Fallout 3, the shooting tutorial is framed as your (character's) father taking your ten year old self down to the maintenance level to practice with the BB gun he gives you for your birthday. Broadly speaking, the scenario makes a degree of sense and a tragic story could probably be spun out of it with a little effort.

However, as with most things in FoE it's integrated with the rest of the story in a very slipshod manner.

>>298376

The big issue as I see it is that the water crystal was damaged beyond repair. This whole tragedy is being presented as the end result of some monumental error in judgement on Stable-Tec's part, but neither Stable-Tec nor their AI are ultimately responsible for what happened. The crystal was damaged by accident, but once it was damaged it was irreparable, so everyone would have died sooner or later anyway. While I'm sure being suddenly murdered by killbots in the middle of a rave must have been unpleasant for most of these little poners, it was probably a lot less agonizing than slowly dying of thirst would have been. This was basically a situation where death was inevitable for everyone; the only choice would be when and how.

The author seems to want to emphasize the horror of this soulless machine ruthlessly murdering the living beings under its care because it made some calculation and determined that it was necessary. The message, such as it is, seems to tie in to what I have heard others in this thread refer to as the main theme of this work: that good intentions can lead to evil results. Here, the implication seems to be that Stable-Tec meant well: they created a government AI in the hopes that a purely rational machine wouldn't make the same impulsive and emotional decisions that a pony would. But, their good intentions ultimately produced this horrible result. That seems to be what the author is trying to communicate, as far as I can tell.

However, as I said, the reality is that whether this stable was being run by a machine or a pony, the leadership would have needed to deal with the same reality, which is that the water-jiggy was broken, it couldn't be repaired, and everypony was going to die one way or the other. The computer didn't break the water-whoosit, nor did the kid who shot it do so deliberately, but the end result was ultimately the same: it was irreparably damaged, and everyone in the stable was therefore doomed.

You could look at it this way: the machine probably made the right call by putting everyone to death quickly and...eh...relatively...painlessly with a mass shooting, instead of letting them all die slowly of dehydration. If the water had been allowed to simply run out, eventually the ponies would have noticed, and there would have been a panic. Ponies would probably start hoarding what water they had, and killing each other to obtain water hoarded by others. Some would probably try to leave the stable (if that were possible) and would die of radiation or whatever on the outside. In the end, whatever measures were taken, all paths would end in the death of every single pony in the stable. Killing everyone swiftly and at once was probably the best call here, and a machine could figure this out easily. A flesh and blood pony would have struggled with it and possibly would have chosen a path that, despite their good intentions see what I did there?, would have produced a far more gruesome end for most of these poners than simply getting shot by the turrets.

Let's look at exactly what happened with the water-doodle:

>Shadowhorn called us into a meeting this morning. We nearly had a major disaster yesterday. That idiot Buckbright built his colt a BB gun for his birthday, then brought the kid down to the reactor level for target practice. What was he thinking? Kid missed a radroach and punched a small hole in the environmental system. Actually nicked the water talisman. Thankfully, it’s working fine, but another half an inch and the whole Stable would be in serious trouble.

You will notice that even though it was done unintentionally, the damage done to the water-whatsit was the direct result of bad judgement on the father's part. So basically, this tragedy that the author seems to want to blame on the cold, heartless machine was actually the result of human error pony error, whatever. It was ultimately Buckbright who was responsible for the deaths of everypony in Stable 29, since he was the one who allowed his kid to fire a BB gun in the reactor area. You'll also notice another crucial error made by a pony: the narrator of the journal says that the talisman water-kerfluffle was fine and the damage wasn't serious; it actually turned out to be quite serious. Perhaps if the situation was understood and addressed sooner something could have been done. In any case, the...*sigh*..."maneframe"...in this situation is essentially blameless; it was faced with an impossible decision and made the best choice it could make.

I know I literally just bantzed the crap out of this story for being ridiculous a few posts ago, and in my defense this story is indeed very ridiculous most of the time, but now that I've read the whole section I will grudgingly give the author a few points here. Whatever he may have been trying to do, he wound up creating an interesting ethical dilemma with no good solution.

The irony is that kkack actually touches on something much deeper here than he realizes. His intended message appears to be "good intentions can lead to evil results," but in this case it was a completely unintentional act that led to a deadly no-exit scenario. If anything, it illustrates the ultimate indifference of the universe to man's pony's, whatever intentions in the first place. The tendency of humans and/or ponies is to look at the world like a puzzle, with the assumption that some "right" action is always available that will lead to a perfect outcome, and it's just a matter of figuring out which action is right. In reality, there is no right-action and wrong-action; all actions simply have consequences, and often they are too complex to predict the result. If the author really wants to use this story as a vessel for exploring complex moral issues, he'd be better off abandoning the white-hat vs. black-hat melodrama he's written so far, and delving deeper into questions like this instead.

>>298383
>Janky, homicidal AIs suffering from logic errors show up frequently in all of the games so this sort of scenario isn't out of place in a Fallout story. Fallout 1 establishes that vaults rely on a small but vital component known as a 'water chip' to process their water supplies. And in Fallout 3, the shooting tutorial is framed as your (character's) father taking your ten year old self down to the maintenance level to practice with the BB gun he gives you for your birthday. Broadly speaking, the scenario makes a degree of sense and a tragic story could probably be spun out of it with a little effort.
Several things in this chapter are a bit clearer in light of this information

>>298390
It's also the author yelling "Fuck you!" at the opening of Fallout 3 where you play as a child, your dad gives you a BB gun, and in a maintenance room underground you shoot some targets and shoot one Radroach that somehow conveniently got into the vault and that underground level at the perfect moment. Guess Kkat thought firing a BB gun down there should be dangerous.
The stuff about the water chip was "inspired by" a mix of Fallout 1's "Our water chip is fucked and there is no workaround. Go into the Wasteland solo and get us a new one" main quest and the role played by the player's father in Fallout 3.
In that game your dad left the vault to enter the wasteland and work on Project Purity, a big water purifier that cleanses all the water in the Ptolomac (logically the irradiated riverbed would be unchanged but Bethesda didn't realize riverbeds can be irradiated) and also magically un-irradiate all the water in all of post-apocalyptic Washington DC. oh and the purifier relies on a magic matter reassembling doohickey that'd be put to better use making food from dirt. You get him the doohickey with the help of a giant overpowered GMPC who could have done everything for you.
Guess Kkat thought it would be extra funny and ironic and tragic if your character from Fallout 3 and his dad voiced by Liam Neeson, the life-giving water-bringing heroes, fucked up the vault for everyone and prompted the Robo-Overseer to decide killing everyone quick would be better than any other method of getting or purifying water. It's a shame the vault RepairBots couldn't fix anything.
Doesn't it feel weird for Kkat to spit on Fallout 3's characters and plot when so much of the shit in this story was ripped straight from Fallout 3 and then clumsily shoved into his edgy take on ponyland?
We can't know the robot chose the right option. Any of this vault's ponies could have been the next Littlepip. The vault only needed one good reliable water source. How about groundwater or purified ocean/rainwater? The robot chose the quickest and easiest defeatist option, but would a human (pony, whatever) have tried harder to survive? Would a pony overseer pin all her hopes and dreams on one random character kicked out of the Vault and hope for the best? An AI programmed to minimize suffering might choose mass euthenasia at the earliest opportunity, but is that right? Is that what robots, the children of man (pony, whatever) should aspire to be? Isn't a tiny chance at success better than guaranteed failure? What did mankind or ponykind ever strive for, if there ever comes a day when we all agree with a machine that thinks giving up is better than trying? That "Maneframe" computer should have some ebooks on water talismans and engineering and magic. Why not gather the best unicorns and engineers in the vault and try to replicate another water talisman or summon water from the aether or create a portal to a realm of water or trap a filled water cooler in a time loop so it's always full no matter how much you take from it, or anything else that can be attempted with magic's limitless possibilities? That damn machine didn't even have the decency to construct a fake Ponyville and fill it with brain-scanned knockoffs of the Vault's inhabitants before giving up on life.

>>298392
One more thing...
Isn't it ironic that what Kkat would call masculine behaviour (Teaching your son to shoot) ended up destroying a Stable with "Ruled by a robot" as its gimmick, but a Stable themed around ManDom and Masculinity ruling only failed because some mutant monster cats were created?

>>298177
I dunno, maybe. most of the "Action" happens "off-screen" In the aforementioned scotch tape scene we have scotch acting like a thirsty cunt, Blackjack puts on the perceptitron thingie, accidentally joins her mind for a second
>Oh now i know hes not hurting her
And thats the end of it. Seahorse abstracts it quite a bit and every other sexual encounter is a cut-to-black experiance.

>>298401
Huh, neat.
What writing lessons do you think can be taken from Project Horizons?

Btw was thinking more about the "an evil mastermind or god did it and dies in the end" cliche. Starting to think it's lame now. If everything was part of one villain's machinations, did anyone have free will? Would everything have turned out fine without that villain's involvement? A moral like "geeed is bad" gets thrown in the trash and replaced with "don't get manipulated or mind controlled by a god or asshole or asshole god".
It takes everything that could have been said with the story and everything the heroes could have grown from and throws it away to turn the entire story into the tale of one baddie and the puppet show he was able to put on for himself until he got shot in the dick. Trying to make the final boss the biggest spectacle like that is a cheap writing trick and that's all "I was actually responsible for everything all the other villains did and the creation of those villains" is also cheap spectacle whenever it isn't a clever reveal that was subtly hinted at. In the books I've read so far the best final bosses are more than baddies who do bad because they are bad or told to be bad by the big bad god of evil. Punching out a dark god of darkness with raw firepower is some Kirby/Sonic shit. Not some Fallout or Pony shit. Fallout would have a choice between deep smart dialogue and a firefight and maybe some clever third thing like a self-destruct base button to trigger and run without ever meeting the final boss. And poners would solve the problem with glowy friendship lasers.

>>298491
>Btw was thinking more about the "an evil mastermind or god did it and dies in the end"

I dont think that accurately explains anything. Goldenblood had his dirty mitts on everything but he wasnt responsible for the goddess. You can argue that his interference with Gardens was what led to the Goddess, but it was 100% twilights fault. The enclave and red-eye are almost entirely seperate.

If youre referring to the Eater or his dragon, the eater didnt actively do anything until the very end, and his dragon is basically only confirmed to be responsible for littlehorn.

Goldenblood isnt the final boss, the dragon actually was killed with a speech check by way of the eater, and Tom was the one who killed the eater. Blackjack only got her there.

If the Eater wasnt there, the dragon probably would still have caused littlehorn which was the inciting incident to the war. If the dragon wasnt there, its still reasonable to expect that the war would still escalate to where it ended. If goldenblood wasnt around, One of the more hawkish nobles at the time probably would have made everything go boom faster. Most of the events of KKat's backstory probably still happen.

KKat's equestria has quite a few manipulative monsters

>>298401
>>298491
>>298492
Can we maybe NOT derail this thread into discussing a spinoff that's three times as long as, and no less autistic than, the story already under discussion?

>>298491
>geeed
*greed
Persona 5 did the God Copout and it sucked but saying why would take many off-topic posts.
>>298492
Thank you. Some day I really should read that fic.
>>298493
Sorry, I'll stop.
To try and get this thread back on-track, Calamity and Velvet's shared "I hate that self-righteous elitist prick/impulsive ruffian prick" moment seems like bad writing since they've gotten along great until now. They disagreed over how to handle the Stone Prison Arc since Velvet thought killing because a merc told you to was wrong but aside from that, they got along great. They even started singing cheesy made-up songs together!
Did the author decide he got them too close together too quickly for a proper "will they won't they" romance arc, and use this scene to retcon their relationship status? Perhaps Velvet could secretly resent him but so far Calamity doesn't seem like the type to hold grudges in secret.
This kind of "Fuck this fancy bitch/unfancy bastard" talk probably should have been moved up earlier in the story, before they bond over a shared love of music with some cheesy campfire scene where Calamity whips out a beaten-up acoustic guitar and tells Velvet dad taught him how to play.

>>298005
>>298099
Okay quarter-jew britcuck. I've got hobbies, duties, a family, and a home to take care of. Your only goal in life is literally being retarded while having absolutely zero solvency whatsoever aside from sperging out like a common crackwhore nigger. Also, great job at trying to poison the well since you clearly cannot even BEGIN to realize how many anons hate how fucking stupid you are! You're worse than the average leaf, which is an amazing feat. "M-O-O-N" spells dipshit britnigger.

>>298070
I take it you haven't seen enough of Nigel's rants on this Cambodian equine hoof care site to understand. If not, don't bother. His mere existence is enough to give even the most hardened channer such massive degrees of turbo cancer that the fatality rate is over 100%.

>>298389
The problem here is K "I can't stop sucking dicks long enough to breath" Kunt tried to pull BOTH a giant "Dues Ex Machina" and reverse-write-in a reversal at the same time while pretending that his 'story' was coherent to begin with. Destroying any nuclear reactor with a standard BB rifle is so far beyond a DEM situation that it would be a one in a negligible attempt. Only a complete moron would place sensitive equipmarent in an exposed position. The "ethical dilemma" is not only utterly shoehorned into the story without any TRUE repercussions (aside from the faux-emotional state of those that "experience it") and the fact that another vault is 'lost to the sands'. Oh, so a vault was destroyed because of someone being trained in a location that isn't perfectly secure? Too bad, that's the Wasteland for ya! Oh so that same vault is gonna be annihilated by a defective robot that makes an error which wasn't programmed out/was flawed to begin with? Too bad, that's UNStable-Tec for ya! The entire """tragedy""" is worthless except for being nothing more than shitty animu filler episode material. Pic painfully related in this case.

tl;dr: the only 'moral' that one can even bother taking from this is: don't be a shitty, retarded wannabe-writer like kkunt.

It's okay to not say anything.
>>298500
God fucking damnit. Nearly every single post you've made is off topic. Yes he needs to constrain and limit the words to the utmost pinpoint they could be.
Just post the damn good post detail how it's a damn good post and make the shit work. It's been years, that method isn't working so move on to something that does. You wanted a better poster so suit up.
Both of your actions are well enough laid out yes it's frustrating at times and frankly I've had it. I have nothing to say on the story besides what has already been said. I've already said what I would have said and repeating what I'll said again ad infinitum is redundant.
Sorry I'm a bit short at the moment I'm sure I'll grow out of it soon.
Sometimes not saing anything is better than filling in the companionable silence.
Have a poner everyone.

>>298205
Yes, I will take a look at it.

>>298514
Thanks.

>>298500
Please try harder to focus on the thread topic instead of trying to start a tiresome pissing contest between us. It doesn't help anyone when you insist I'm a part-jew that gives people turbo-cancer or some gaslighting mastermind out to ruin your day or any other delusion. What's next, will you say I breathe fire? I know I'm not perfect, but this is absurd. I know I'm not perfect, but I'm working on that. When I do something that pisses you off, tell me what it is so I know why you're upset and what I could do about it. Simply expressing how upset you are with these tantrums isn't constructive. When you scream and cry at me because you sometimes find me annoying, it is immature and unhelpful. Offense is taken, not given. It's not my job to manage your mood, but if you want me to do so anyway, communicate better.
Anyway, a nuclear reactor wasn't damaged by a BB gun. It's worse.
The child aimed at a RadRoach that somehow got into this "Perfectly-sealed underground location" (Did the first ponies to get into this vault take roaches in with them? Where did the roaches get the radiation they needed to mutate?)
and he missed.
He missed the dog-sized roach on the floor, punching a small hole in "the environmental system", damaging the water talisman.
Are those armour-piercing BBs?
These "Lmao it worked in Fallout 3 so it must work in real life" moments are fucking retarded. Yes, in Fallout 3 a BB Gun is a deadly weapon that can kill an adult in only slightly fewer shots than better guns with better damage numbers. But IRL, BBs aren't going through steel unless something's gone very wrong. Pics related, it's where your dad took you to shoot in Fallout 3. Sorry about the watermarks.

Shortly after saying this crap about the water chip, the text also ruins this Vault's "Everyone here thinks they're relying on Stable-Tec for their orders and thinks they must continue to do so" premise.
>“As head of Maintenance, Shadowhorn laid down a whole new series of safety protocols. They aren’t official until she gets them passed through Stable-Tec, but we’re going to follow them anyway. If Stable-Tec doesn’t like somepony giving the orders for them, well they can trot themselves down here and say differently.”
Despite all this time without a local leader for an Overseer, despite all this time spent obeying a computer they thought was Stable-Tec, they suddenly decide they can make up their own rules and follow them and enforce them without needing the permission of "Stable-Tec" aka the machine guiding them. That makes the prior "There are no safety rules because nopony is in charge down here! If only someone was in charge to tell us to be safe!" part of the chapter really fucking stupid.

Why the fuck would the "Stable-Tec" robot "Maneframe" take so long to guide them that they start to bitch about how long Stable-Tec takes to tell them anything/permit them to do stuff?
Why would the rule of an all-seeing all-knowing AI in charge of this underground facility and its gun-turrets take such a hooves-off approach to managing things?
It's an AI in a book that doesn't understand how AIs work, so it can make decisions faster than people can despite making retarded leaps of logic like "Reducing pony population didn't prevent water starvation. Must continue reducing population until 0 is reached!".
If anything, shouldn't an AI like this micromanage its populace until their yoke starts to chafe?
And what's with the way that maintenance ponies think the water talisman is fine at first, but then the AI decides it's fucked and the water supply's fucked and water-recycling is a myth and the population needs culling, Green New Insanity-style?
Team Littlepip is only here to get that McGuffin they need to save SteelCunt's life, and get the fuck out.
So they should act like they're on a strict time limit.
But instead, they scavenge for supplies and get some health potions, so they can see another hint to the fate of a Stable they have no reason to care about.
Then Littlepip makes drugs so Velvet can think she's a faggot.
And then the door suddenly closes just so the heroes have to go to the door switch, and of course they stop to investigate everything about the Stable along the way, just so Kkat can show off all the "work" he put into this stupid stable and its lore.
He can't just give us a handful of clues and expect us to work it out, maybe coming back to it in another side story. No, he feels the need to walk you through absolutely fucking everything and spell it all out, no matter how many words that wastes.
Everything about this stupid Stable feels like it was hastily written around a desire to piss on Fallout 3 elements and include an evil supercomputer just like the ones in Fallout 3 somewhere, despite the hypocrisy of pissing on the heroes of a game that served as your primary source when writing something this creatively bankrupt.
But Kkat couldn't think of any ways to turn "Stable ruled by an evil AI" and "Stable doomed because of the Water Bois from DC and their taste in makeshift gun range locations" into two distinct and interesting Vaults that failed due to separate lessons the ponies failed to learn in time.
So they're shoved together even though it means neither are compelling.

The lack of leadership, safety restrictions/protocols, and realistic physics meant BBs went through steel and fucked up irreplaceable magitech bullshit.
An AI could either send ponies into the wastes for a new water chip- I mean water talisman or commit die and take its whole stable with it to the sound of DJ Pon3 music.
And now Team Littlepip is only down here in this particular Stable because they need to save the soldier bleeding out on their watch, and they found more than enough healing potion for him plus the McGuffin needed to unarmor him (why didn't LP psychically take Steelcunt down here with them?) but they're acting like they have all the time in the motherfucking world to learn exactly why this little social experiment failed.

>>298547
>Everything about this stupid Stable feels like it was hastily written around a desire to piss on Fallout 3 elements and include an evil supercomputer just like the ones in Fallout 3 somewhere, despite the hypocrisy of pissing on the heroes of a game that served as your primary source when writing something this creatively bankrupt.
On the contrary, I get the impression that Kkat absolutely LOVES Fallout, particularly 3, and wants to cram as many things based on or directly lifted from the game as possible. That's not a recipe for good writing, but it's an understandable goal for an amateur writing a crossover fanfic. The main problem is that Kkat doesn't have a good grasp of how to establish stakes or maintain tension, because he gets his understanding of storytelling from open world RPGs he's sunk dozens/hundreds of hours into rather than books.

This diversion does at least serve to introduce the concept of crusader mane(ugh)frames, which show up again later as part of the main plot.

>>298599
That makes sense. I guess we'll never really know if he considers "And then the heroes from my favourite game semi-indirectly caused the death of everyone they ever knew and loved long before the heroes from my fanfic got here" to be a loving cameo tribute unless he says so. Wee know he's bad with implications because of the Zebra stuff. Not that I have a problem with an author painting african-inspired creatures as 100% evil apart from one obligatory good one who's specifically good because she acts un-african. But it didn't seem like he intentionally wanted to write the Zebras that way.
I wish he did some kind of "Behind the scenes" series of journal posts on Fimfic.net where he describes his writing process, what he was thinking when he wrote this, and what he wanted each chapter to accomplish. That would be hilarious.

>>298602
>I wish he did some kind of "Behind the scenes" series of journal posts on Fimfic.net where he describes his writing process, what he was thinking when he wrote this, and what he wanted each chapter to accomplish.
Kkat has written *extensively* on FoE in his fimfic blog over the years. It's quite a trip.

>>298733
For real? Awesome! Does it spoil upcoming events in the story? Does he organize his thoughts on different chapters, organize his posts by specific topics in the story, or just post whatever he thinks of without organizing any of it?
If he did a "Writer's Commentary" thing where after each chapter he tells people what he was thinking when he wrote this, that would be perfect for a "Review the chapter, and then what he said his goals were when writing it" format.
Reviewers like the Angry Video Game Nerd often ask "What were they thinking?" rhetorically, but this is a great opportunity to see exactly what they were thinking and criticize how he went about attempting what he said he wanted to accomplish with this character, or that chapter, or this faction, or that abrupt dump of a tragic backstory.
Environmental storytelling is about suggesting what might have happened here, not spelling it out for the audience in one of eighty collectable tape recordings/diaries detailing every last detail especially ones that weren't suggested in the environment at all. It's about making people speculate over what could have happened somewhere, and making it a rare treat when we get enough information to definitively figure it all out. Not just putting hugging skeletons in well-travelled and entirely-expected and often even currently-inhabited places that have somehow been undisturbed for 200+ years along with a journal to painstakingly explain everything for BugthEAsderp's target audience. It's about suggesting there's more going on in the world than the player's adventures, not leaving collectible journal pages around that only the player character can pick up or see or hear. People still talk about Lavender Tower and Cinnabar Island. Nobody gives a fuck about the random skeletons in Fallout 3 or 4, and by the time 76 rolled out it featured so many skeletons and Dead Guy Journal holotapes everyone got sick of it.

Also I forgot if I've already said "I hate how Littlepip goes out of her way to learn how random poners died but never tries to take any kind of logical wisdom from it/fulfill their last requests/carry on their legacy" or not, but I still hate it. Littlepip doesn't have an in-character reason to be such a nosy cunt, but she should. It's jarring when LP reads some dead pony's diary because she's never given us or herself or her friends any excuses for it, and her friends never call her out for it so we want to do it ourselves.
She's got no excuse to have such an entirely random knowledge of the pre-war world. Sometimes she doesn't know something she should know, giving characters an excuse to exposit things to her (and us). Sometimes she does know things, but can't mention it until it's time to awkwardly expositionate about it to her friends (who already know) and us.

They could have fixed the "Velvet and Littlepip expositing to us" problem by making Calamity play dumb about the pre-war world to hide the fact that he's a Dashite at first, giving them excuses to fill "him" (us) in.

Maybe my "Littlepip and Velvet should have been raised on hyper-simplistic Pony Propaganda, Calamity should know more than he lets on to add to his mysteriousness and hint at his Dashiteness, and LP should believe learning of what really happened before the war is the best way to make sure whatever killed Equestria never happens again" idea isn't the perfect solution for this problem.
Someone else could probably think of a better solution than that.
Anyway, this problem needs fixing because it makes LP's love of holotapes and diaries (which the author relies on to tell the audience what he did with this canon character and that location and this fallout element and that fanon meme) stupid. "My OC needs to do this because I want her to and gamers did it in Fallout 3" is stupid.
Give your characters reasons to do shit! They can be bad ones! They can be fucking shit reasons! But they need to be good enough to convince your character to do shit, and convince your audience that your character would be convinced by a reason like that.
Although with how hyper-edgy and hyper-bleak this world is written, are there any societal lessons Littlepip could take from the dead that aren't obvious things like "Don't be in a prison full of rapists when nukes fall and society ends" or "If you want to make a slavery-free town, don't make it at the end of a slaver-operated railroad track that leads straight to a slaver city" or "Don't play with a BB gun in an absurdly fragile maintenance room"?

>>298389

Anyway, what I've provided is a rough summation of what happened to Stable 29. This information was obtained from both Scootaloo's message to Shadowcunt, as well as a short subchapter section that follows this message. To be thorough, I'll briefly go after the second subchapter.

After listening to Scoot's recording, Littlepoop goes to investigate the security junction she mentioned:
>There is an access junction between the Security station and the V.I.P. rooms through which you can access the Crusader Maneframe.

She locates the junction. We are not told how she found it or where she found it, only that it was easy to find. This seems a little strange, since one would think that a security override that would allow a pony to take control of the entire stable is the sort of thing that would be well-hidden and well-protected, but at this point I don't think a detail like this matters too much. At present, Littlepoop only knows that the stable's population was killed by the AI acting alone, and that neither StableTec nor any of the ponies ostensibly in charge of this stable are to blame. However, she does not know the full story, and she is curious. Once again, her curiosity about some 200 year old tragedy supersedes her actual mission (which at present happens to be saving Private Cyborg, which I'll once again protest should logically be a time-sensitive goal).

Anyway, she opens the junction box and finds some kind of device inside that allows a PipBuck to connect. From one of the previous recordings, she knows that one of the other ponies was electrocuted attempting to connect to this box:

>Shadowhorn passed away last night from complications after being nearly electrocuted early yesterday morning while trying to access the junction behind a security panel with her PipBuck.
This text is from the recording she found before she found the Scootaloo recording, the one that had her freaking out and kicking at walls. Between this information and what she just learned from Scoot's message, she can reasonably surmise that Shadowtwat was attempting to override the AI, and the AI somehow detected this and killed her. This is a satisfactory answer to my earlier question of why the security override controls weren't implemented. There is, however, a minor logical issue here: if the purpose of the override is to allow a pony to take control of the stable in the event that the AI has gone haywire, it would stand to reason that the AI should be blocked from interfering with this process by design. The override system should be something that the AI is prevented from tampering with; however, this assumes that the system was sensibly designed. It's entirely possible that StableTec is just incompetent.

Anyway, in order to bypass this danger, Littlepoop takes out Velvet's old PipBuck, which she is still carrying around with her for some reason, and jacks into the control panel while levitating it a safe distance away from herself.

>I pulled out Velvet Remedy’s PipBuck for the first time since shortly after I found her. It was a thing of beauty, but I realized it had a less pleasant meaning to her.
I'm not sure why she describes it as a thing of beauty; I don't remember there being anything special about this particular PipBuck. As to what the "less pleasant meaning" it has to Velvet is all about, I have no idea. My guess is that it's tied into her whole "I don't want to be in le cage" deal somehow. In any event, this sentence is vague and awkward; I would either rewrite it or delete it.

Anyway, she jacks into this thing and manages to not get electrocuted. Inside, she finds a log of the AI's actions, and discovers what it did and the reasoning behind it. As I've already explained, the issue was basically that the water-thingy was damaged and was not repairable, and the AI determined that the solution was to gradually cull the population until the water eventually ran out entirely. At that point, it decided to kill everyone.

Nigel has brought up some decent points that contest the logic of this, namely that the water-dealy would need to be both very delicate and basically unprotected in order for a low-velocity projectile like a BB to fatally damage it. The text doesn't go into detail about the reactor level or how things in this area were designed and/or armored, but if it was possible to damage something this important this easily, it seems like another serious design flaw on StableTec's part. There is also the question of how a rad-roach would have made it into the stable in the first place, since the whole point of the structure is that it is supposed to be hermetically sealed so that nothing from the irradiated outside world can get in.

These are both reasonable points, to which I will add an objection of my own: if all of the critical stuff kept in this area is indeed this poorly protected, it seems like it would be a pretty dumb place to practice target shooting in the first place. Buckbright ought to have known this and thus it makes little sense for him to have taken his son down there for that purpose. It would have made far more sense for the kid to have just gone down there on his own without telling anyone, and nicked the water-bippityboop by accident. This actually could have made the situation more plausible, since being a child he wouldn't understand the severity of what he'd done, he'd simply be afraid of getting in trouble, so he would likely have just fled the area and not told anyone about shooting the water-whatchamacalit. Since the AI was entirely in charge, only it would have known about the damage, and it would have handled the situation in its own way, leaving Shadowcack and whoever else to simply guess at why it was killing everypony.

My guess is that kkack simply wanted to emulate the scene in Fallout where the player's father takes him shooting mentioned by another anon, so that is why he chose to do things this way.

>>298846

>After three months, the water talisman failed altogether. The Crusader acted accordingly. To preserve Pony Life.
And with this, the subchapter concludes in a page break.

The next scene opens with Littlepoop drowning her sorrows in liquor:

>I poured what was left of a bottle of apple whiskey down my throat, enjoying the burn. The rage had drained from me, replaced by a numbness that was even worse.
It's unclear where she is in physical space at this point. Is she still by the junction box, which incidentally we don't even know the location of? Is she back in Shadowbutt's room, or maybe Vinyl's? Where did she get the whiskey? Was this just something she was carrying around with her, or did she find it in the stable somewhere? These are all minor questions, but answering them would make it easier for the reader to visualize what's happening.

At this point I'm just assuming it's stupid to ask if she still gives a shit about getting back to Roboponer before he dies. If the actual reason she is exploring this vault in the first place is anywhere near the forefront of her mind, she doesn't mention it in her narrative. Anyway, traumatized by the contents of the recordings she just wasted a fair chunk of time listening to, she now decides to waste even more time by delving into the memory orb she found, which the astute reader will recall is titled "Pinkie Pie's Last Party."

The memory appears to be Vinyl's. LP finds herself looking through the DJ's eyes at the dance floor of a large party. Rainbow Dash is apparently in attendance; she flies up and compliments Vinyl on her choice of beats:

>“Awesome beat, Vinyl Scratch!” she grinned, “Your rhythms always makes for the best parties!”
"Your rhythms always make for the best parties" would be the technically correct way of wording this, although the sentence is still awkwardly worded. I'd probably have her say something like "You always know what music to play," or "The music at your parties is always the best," or "I want to stick my tongue in your butthole."

>And, whoa, was Vinyl Scratch checking her out? She had my gaze going up and down… No, wait, that’s just headbobbing.
Hurr durr lesbian hoerses.

Anyway, another pony, clearly Applejack though her name is only given as AJ, approaches Rainbow Dash. She identifies her by name, and they talk about drinking and drugs sacrebleu! this story is so le dark and so le mature!. AJ is attending the party with a stallion whom Dash identifies as her boyfriend, one Sergeant ‘SteelHooves’ Applesnack. Since this story doesn't seem to have a problem with preposterously implausible coincidences, I'm going to assume this is the same 'SteelHooves' who is currently bleeding to death on a lonely battlefield, while the pony who was supposed to be bringing him medicine is sitting here watching this stupid memory orb.

Vinyl's attention is at this point diverted from AJ and RD's conversation to a nearby balcony, where an argument is going on between a pony that LP recognizes as Pinkie Pie and a second pony whom she does not recognize. The second pony is described as a "purple unicorn," and a few lines later Pinkie addresses her as Twilight. It's not clear what exactly they are fighting about, but Twilight seems to have a problem with Pinkie's behavior. A moment later it becomes clear that Pinkie has developed an addiction to the very same crack-mints that Littlepoop is apparently now addicted to, and Twilight feels that her mint-abuse has gotten out of control. She also implies that it is becoming a wide-spread problem at Pinkie's parties mon dieu! le drugs and le sex and le violence in le pink and pastel pony cartoon! so much le edge!!.

Anyway, Twilight loses her shit on Pinkie Pie and tells her that if she doesn't get her mint problem under control they can't be friends anymore. She storms out of the party, and the memory ends. It is actually a pretty decent scene, but like most of these flashbacks it has no apparent connection to the main story (to the extent that there is one).

>One thought hit me as I collapsed from the memory like I had been kicked in the stomach. (I had, in fact, vomited on myself.)
This is a very, very awkward sentence, but I'm too lazy to go over it in detail. At this point if kkack wants technical help he can pay a professional to wade through this clusterfuck, though I don't envy the poor soul that takes the job.

>Leaning against the wall, I assured myself, “I’m not that bad…”
>“But I have to be careful with you,” I said to the Party-Time Mint-als in my saddlebags. “I can’t let Calamity or Velvet Remedy get to thinking I have a problem with you. I don’t want to lose my friends because they think I’m addicted.”
The author attempts, rather weakly, to connect this disjointed scene to Littlepoop's own supposed drug addiction. Again, I don't disapprove of the addiction as a part of her character, but I do object to the way it's been rather gracelessly tacked on. We have not seen her use these mints more than a couple of times, hardly enough to constitute serious abuse, and her "addiction" has barely factored into the story. Also, while I actually thought the memory orb scene was decently written, it is unfortunately just another random event from the past that has little bearing on the present.

Pinkie and Twilight are complete strangers to LP, and she has no real reason to be emotionally affected by any of this. Moreover, this scene shifts the focus rather abruptly from the tragedy that occurred in Stable 29 to the issue of LP's supposed drug addiction, and her investigation of the Stable 29 incident is itself a diversion from her primary objective of helping Roboponer. Far from adding depth and emotional resonance to the story, these layered subplots feel like the author is bouncing around randomly from idea to idea, like a kid with ADD aggressively flipping through channels instead of just finding something to watch and watching it.

>>298850

Anyway, that was the end of Chapter Fourteen.

Chapter Fifteen: Whispers in the Darkness

Today's Fortune Cookie:

>“Psst! Pinkie Pie, are you asleep yet?”
This quote, evidently, was spoken by Pinkie Pie's rapacious Uncle Jeff, who would periodically sneak into her bedroom on the farm and shove entire pineapples up her plot-hole, and long story short that's why she developed a mint-abuse problem later in life. Actually I'm just kidding; as is the norm with these epitaphs, I don't have the slightest fucking idea who spoke this line or what the context is.

Anyway, the chapter opens with another of Littlepoop's dream sequences. She's having nightmares about all the fucked-up shit she's learned about the wasteland during the unspecified amount of time she's spent here (at this point I'm estimating about 3 weeks). The details of the dream aren't particularly important and mostly deal with events we already know about.

As I've complained many times before, the disconnected episodes from the past that LP keeps digging into have very little to do with the events of the present. Though they seem like they would be compelling enough stories on their own, there has been absolutely nothing done to connect any of these events to the main story involving Littlepoop and her friends. What makes all of this even worse is that there (still) is no main story; since she left the stable, LP has done nothing but wander around getting into random fights with random bad guys, without any hint of a larger overarching plot.

What makes all of this so vexing is that the author, as far as I can tell, is far more interested in writing about the history of the war that led to the apocalypse than he is in writing about anything going on in the post-apocalypse present he chose to set the story in. Moreover, most of these episodes from the past seem like they would be considerably more interesting to read about than the present story, which is painfully dull. Littlepoop is not a particularly interesting or likable protagonist, and she doesn't really do much besides wander around collecting junk and picking fights with random enemies. Her friends are not particularly well thought out characters and there is little interesting chemistry between any of them; it's not even clear why the three of them are friends. None of them have any tangible goals or objectives, so the story has nowhere to go. As I've complained before, the author seems to want to use Littlepoop's explorations of the present, ruined world as a framing device to reveal what happened in the past, but as I've also complained before, she has no obvious reason to even want to dig up the past, so this story just feels like a bunch of disconnected anecdotes that hint at a considerably more interesting story than the one we're actually reading.

The episode we just witnessed in the memory orb, for example, was actually a pretty well developed scene. We see several of the canon MLP characters at a much later stage in life, and while they appear to be partying and having a good time, it's clear that everything is not well. Pinkie Pie's exuberant personality seems to have led her to a life of constant pleasure-seeking, which has led to addiction. Her problem has gotten bad enough that it is affecting her friendships; there is also an implication that the availability of drugs in Equestria is becoming a broader social problem, and that Ponk is somehow responsible. Twilight Sparkle, one of her best and oldest friends, has just given her an ultimatum to either get her shit together or they're finished.

Not only is this a good scene, there's a lot of material here for a compelling character arc. Pinkie is a character who loves fun and parties and good times; addiction is often born from chasing a continuous dopamine rush, and chemicals that produce this affect artificially would plausibly be attractive to her. It's easy to see how she could become addicted to something like cocaine-mints. If I had to place a bet on which which mane 6 character would be most likely to have an addictive personality, Ponk would be my choice.

Now compare this to Littlepoop's supposed "addiction" to the same substance: basically, we have a pony with no prior history suggesting she might have addictive tendencies, who just tries the mints one day and then suddenly gets addicted to them. Is it plausible? Sure; if a substance is addictive enough nearly anyone could get hooked. But from a literary perspective, it's not interesting.

With Pinkie Pie, the author has explored some possible dark sides to her established character. You could easily do this with any of the mane 6, btw; the trick is to simply take the traits they are known for and push them towards extremes that turn them negative. Twilight's smarty-pants bookishness and obsessive organization could turn her into a tyrannical bureaucrat a la Barack Obama or Angela Merkel. Rarity's vanity and desire for popularity could turn her into a shallow social climber; her obsession with her fashion enterprise could turn her into a workaholic. You could pretty much go down the list and do this with all of them.

The mane 6 are examples of well-built characters: they each have their strengths and weaknesses, and you can easily pull their arcs in a positive or negative direction depending on what you emphasize. The series itself focuses on developing their strengths or at least what the later writing staff interpreted as their strengths, but with a story like this, where the tone is darker, it would make sense to focus on and draw out their weaknesses.

Unfortunately, kkat's OCs haven't been developed in this way, so there is nowhere to take them. So, we get this meandering bullshit about a bunch of random boring characters who become friends by default for no reason other than convenience, and then wander around the wasteland for 500,000 excruciating words, looting and killing because reasons.

>>298852

Anyway, I got a little sidetracked there. Continuing with the actual story.

The chapter opens with Littlepoop having a bad dream, and then she suddenly wakes up. Once again, we have absolutely no idea where she is or how much time has passed since the end of the previous chapter. This is the information we are given:

>I was laying… somewhere. A bed. But every time I tried to remember exactly where I was, or how I got there, the memories slipped away. I opened my eyes. The room was dark, but light poured in through a cracked-open door. I didn’t recognize the walls with their shadowed posters or the roof with its still and silent turret.
Maybe Pinkie's uncle slipped her a roofie.

Anyway, it's clear that there's something wrong with her, but it's impossible to say what. She was drinking whiskey the last time we saw her, so it's possible she got drunk and blacked out, and had to be carried...somewhere. It could also be the comedown from the crack mints, I guess. It could be any number of things, really, since we have absolutely no sense of time or space here. For all I know, six years have passed since the end of Chapter Fourteen, the party lives in Saddle Arabia now, and Littlepoop caught pony AIDS from being gang-raped by a bunch of raiders on motorcycles.

These are her symptoms:
>My body felt wrong. I ached, I felt horribly weak. I had chills when I wasn’t sweating profusely. My stomach churned. My mouth tasted strange and mushy.

Meanwhile, Velvet and Calamity are talking outside, and LP overhears some of their conversation. They mostly seem to be discussing her the way they would a sick child, which LP takes as something of a blow to her self esteem.

>My stomach convulsed violently. I wanted to cry. My eyelids were too heavy to look around anymore, and I didn’t fight them as they closed on their own. I turned away from the slice of light coming through the door, falling again into fitful sleep.
This ends the subchapter.

I have to say, when I read the first few paragraphs of this chapter, I had to go back and make sure I was actually on the right chapter. It legitimately feels like we just skipped a huge chunk of the story here. I know this author is into these weird time-skips, but this seems like a major skip even by his standards. Absolutely nothing from the previous chapter has been resolved; we have no idea how (or even if) they made it out of Stable 29, we don't know whether Roboponer got his medicine or died or what, we don't even know why Littlepoop was unconscious or what's wrong with her or how she came to be in this state.

It would be one thing if the chapter had ended with Littlepoop getting clonked on the head or blacking out from booze or injected with some kind of mystery serum or something; waking up in a strange location after a time skip would be appropriate in one of those situations. However, the chapter just ended with her thinking to herself that she needed to keep her drug use in check so her friends don't treat her as an addict. The chapter had gone completely off the rails by the time it ended, but that doesn't mean the author can just abandon the story where it's at and pick up at some random point in the future; you need to at least make an attempt to resolve things before ending a storyline and moving on to a new one.

Their location right now is a complete mystery. Since I haven't been told otherwise, I would assume they are still somewhere in Stable 29, but that doesn't feel right somehow. They could be on the moon for all I know. Let's take another look at the description the author gives us of LP's immediate surroundings:

>The room was dark, but light poured in through a cracked-open door. I didn’t recognize the walls with their shadowed posters or the roof with its still and silent turret.
"Walls with shadowed posters" could describe any number of locations in this story, but I'm particularly confused about this part:
>the roof with its still and silent turret.
The roof? How the hell can she see the roof? She's in a dark room, which would imply either that there are no windows, or that it's night outside. The last place we saw her in was underground, so strictly speaking there shouldn't even be a roof. Did the author mean to say "the ceiling?" But that doesn't make sense either; why the hell would there be a turret on the ceiling? I have no idea what the fuck is even going on anymore.

Oh well, let's keep reading and maybe we'll figure it out. Together we can solve the puzzle.

When the next subchapter opens things are unfortunately not any clearer. LP is still in some kind of mental fog, and we learn from Velvet that she has a fever. Calamity and Velvet seem to be deepening their romantic bond over their mutual concern for LP, which is actually pretty funny. I'll give the author 20 points if he has them fuck on top of her unconscious body.

Anyway, they banter back and forth for a bit, but nothing of any serious importance is discussed. Calamity tries to convince Velvet that she needs to start wearing armor. She is vehemently opposed to wearing raider or slaver armor, but Calamity informs her that, believe it or not, there are other types of armor and they can probably buy some when they get to Tenpony. Why they are going to Tenpony or when it was decided that they were going there has never been mentioned to my recollection.

As long as I'm complaining, I'd like to point out that this scene is yet another example of how absurd medicine is in this story. Littlepoop has some inexplicable fever that seems to have downed her for the time being, yet all it took to heal the mortal wounds that she and Velvet sustained during their fight earlier was a few swallows of magic potion. Does that shit just not work on ordinary illnesses? In all the years of developing all-powerful healing potions and crack mints and all the other weird shit they have in this world, it never occurred to any of the Equestrian scientists to cook up something like Tylenol?

>>298846
Bit curious to but with the radroach how did it actually mutate into that so soon. Sure got magic and all but the water purifier breaking seems to have happened only a few weeks after the stable was sealed since it was that 3 month anniversary party when the population was killed. Seems like damn near the moment the bombs dropped immeditly every endemic creature mutated into giant hostile monsters. Makes some more sense in Fallout 3 since it's 2 centuries after the war so plenty of time for things to mutate and could assume the vaults would have some stuff break allowing them to scurry inside.

>>298846
Considering all the absurd combat advantages given to Littlepip by her PipBuck, Velvet's a retard for not wanting to wear it.
If LP and Velvet travel together, and the Overmare for their old Stable can track Velvet's pipbuck, the Overmare knows where Velvet is.
Velvet's all "I don't want to wear that thing, it's a shackle! It reminds me of my time in the Stable!" but that's retarded.
This thing saves Littlepip's life constantly.
Kkat knows if Velvet also wore one of these, she'd have the same enemy radar and the same HUD/Eyes-Forward Sparkle. She'd instantly become the same SATS-target-assisted instant-badass Littlepip is, perhaps an even better one, because Littlepip's combat prowess is 69% Pipbuck, 30% overpowered gear she conveniently has, and 1% retarded moments of "Creative thinking" that only work because the author's dumb enough to decide hiding yourself with a cumstained sheet makes you invisible and not a single Alicorn ever encountered or heard of a memory orb, not even their leader.
Littlepip should want Velvet to wear her Pipbuck. She faced the goddamn Wasteland to bring it to her!
Calamity should want Velvet to wear her Pipbuck, because SATS can bail you out of any combat situation that goes bad and practically carry you through them.
Velvet in a Pipbuck would steal Littlepip's thunder. Hard to pretend wearing something special on your wrist means your protagonist's a "Veteran badass Wasteland master" when anypony else could wear their own copy of the damn thing to get the same overpowered bonuses.
The Pipbuck, its automatic map, and the way it puts markers on your map and in your HUD for you to follow... That was briefly and cleverly mocked in Fallout NV's Dead Money DLC, where a big blue fecker named God says your pipbuck and easy-to-follow quest objective markers makes you a dog on a leash. Or something like that.
But it's a leash that binds you to your current objective. And you hold your leash's handle when you decide which quests you complete and how, and which quests you ignore.
Velvet has no excuse to be so pretentious and virtue-signally over not wearing such a blatantly overpowered god-watch.

>AI's action log
A convenient log that spells out everything wrong the robot ever did? Sweet. Bet the ponies of this vault wish they saw this sooner. Bet any nice ponies at Stable-Tec, if they exist, wish they stopped this robot upon seeing that log.

>Applesnack
This name is so stupid it's like something canon Sweetie Belle or maybe Scootaloo would come up with after trying to think of an apple pony name for DND night.
There are websites out there that list EVERY TYPE OF APPLE EVER! I know, because I looked at one when trying to figure out how I could subtly give my character a name that's an incredibly subtle reference to his actual identity as a cowboy apple pony, but also something he'd choose to name himself given the chance. I didn't even know Star Apples existed until the day I saw that site. Silver stars bring sherrifs to mind, and silvery-white stars in the sky, so the name Silver Star blends in over in Canterlot while sticking out if you know what to look for. Fuck Kkat for doing absolutely no research on apples and their silly names and the creative things you can do with pony names.
Doing something dumb/lazy and then making your characters snark about it is the laziest and gayest joke possible. If your own subconscious telld you this is uncreative and dumb, why go through with it anyway?

>Steelhooves keeps bleeding, keeps keeps bleeding and uh
LP's lifted heavier shit, she should have psychically picked him up like another gun and carried him through the dungeon. Or dragged him behind them, if too tired for that. It'd mean dragging him closer to the health potion/Suit Unlocking Spell Matrix they're after. And if they leave him outside, there's always a chance some Raider/Bandit/Slaver or non-union criminal without the uniform or training might decide to finish him off and take whatever goods can be found in his steel-coated pockets.

>"Pinkie, your crack addiction is tearing this family apart!"
why are fandoms so unfunny? Why do they repeat the same simple jokes until they drive them into the ground?
"Hahaha Italy likes tomatoes"
"Hahaha Akechi likes pancakes"
"Hahaha Deadpool likes chimichangas"
"Hahaha Jeremiah Gottswald likes oranges"
"Hahaha Celestia likes cake and Twilight loves books"
"Hahaha Sonic likes chili dogs"
Then when those stop amusing the fandom they get taken further but not in a funny way.
"Sonic only eats chili dogs and all the framed photographs in his house are of him with chili dogs"
"Celestia wants to fuck cake"
"Pinkie does crack and Twilight is legally married to a book"

>Velvet should wear armour
Yeah, and her fucking Pipbuck.

>>298862
Good point.

>>298852
Oh I think I know the origins of that quote! Not sure what the context is for the story but I think that was from the episode when they first visit Appleossa and are on the train ride at night with the girls unable to fall asleep. Can't remember the full context but AJ had that giant apple tree with them in the car which I recall was making the others uncomfortable.

>>298898
Is it the scene where Fluttershy says she'd like to be a tree?

>>298855

>I felt doomed to wander until either I found my place in this hellish outside, or… or I fixed it. At least, as much as I could. I supposed I was searching for my virtue, as Watcher had suggested, like a filly trying to invoke her cutie mark. But Calamity and Velvet Remedy were not burdened by my quest, or my sense of being utterly lost. Why wouldn’t they leave me to it on my own once they had found some place to stay? Tenpony Tower, for instance. Why shouldn’t they?
Once again, the author demonstrates that he is aware of exactly what's wrong with this story, and specifically with this character, and yet once again rather than taking this as a signal that he ought to rewrite the story in order to correct the problem, he instead chooses to simply take note of it and move on. In this rare moment of introspection, Littlepoop attempts to look inside herself, only to discover that there is basically nothing in there. Not only does she lack external goals, she does not have any internal drive or motivation either.

For comparison, let's look at Applejack for a moment. She, too, is a character without external goals; this is a big part of why the show's later writers had so much trouble figuring out what to do with her once it became an event-driven story. However, the gulf between AJ and LP is yuge. Applejack is pure zen; she doesn't have external goals because she doesn't need them. AJ's life revolves around her family, their farm, and the community of Ponyville at large, and in the day to day tasks that go into maintaining that existence. In other words, she finds meaning in life itself, without the need to pursue anything beyond what she has already.

Littlepoop, by contrast, has nothing of the sort. We hear briefly about her mother at the beginning of the story, but she hasn't mentioned her or thought about her since then, so we can only assume they aren't particularly close. She doesn't seem to miss any of the ponies she used to live with in the stable, nor does it seem to bother her that she just walked away from the only life she's ever known. If she had some concrete external goal, like a quest or an archenemy or something, the author could probably get away with having a one-dimensional protagonist; it's been done often enough. As I've said before, this premise would work just fine as campy action-adventure, and characters don't really need much depth if the whole story is just about fighting.

However, LP has no such external objective, nor does she have any inner motivation to keep her going, and these two things combined make her a depressingly empty character. Who is Littlepoop? What is she struggling for, or against? What reason does this pony even have to drag her sorry self out of bed in the morning? Her friends? Her "love" for Velvet? Puh-lease. Her friends are as empty as she is, and anyway the three of them are barely even friends; allies or traveling companions would be more like it. Her love for Velvet is an adolescent crush based mostly on physical attraction and proximity. The two have done little serious bonding even though they've been traveling together for some time now. So apart from this, what else does she have? Her cocaine-mint addiction? She even manages to do that half-assed.

All of this is made even more depressing by the fact that LP herself is aware of how empty she is. She asks herself what she's even trying to do, and can come up with nothing better than this abstract desire to "fix the wasteland." Fix it how? For what reason? Once she's "fixed" everything, what then? She doesn't know.

Littlepoop has nothing she actually cares about, so she throws all of her energy into the maudlin false-empathy she displays for the ponies whose voices she hears in the recordings she collects. She convinces herself that these centuries-dead ponies to whom she has no direct connection are lost souls crying out for justice that only she can provide. So, she goes around beating up every slaver and firebombing every raider camp and looting every stable, because "justice." Ironically, all of this only serves to depress her further, because the more of this shit she does, the more she realizes that even this is a pointless goal; the past can never be changed, she still has nothing to live for in the present, and even if she succeeds in "fixing" the wasteland, she will still be the same boring, empty, purposeless twat she was to begin with. So, she keeps going, not because of some deep-rooted inner drive to do good, but simply because she has no better use for her time. She ruthlessly murders anypony her tacked-on boilerplate sense of morality tells her is "bad," and then wanders around the wasteland collecting random junk, because she's bored and empty and she can't think of anything better to do.

Ironically, once again, the author has actually managed to make a much deeper statement than he ever intended or even realized he was making. Littlepoop is pretty much the quintessential modern millennial; in fact she is probably a subconscious self-insert for the author. Bored and rootless, depressed and directionless, completely lacking any serious sense of purpose, no strong ties to family or community, no meaningful friendships. LP's bloody crusade against raiders and slavers and the horrors of the wasteland can easily be likened to BLM riots or anti-Blumpfh protests. She has no serious values; she's just hurling bricks because she's depressed and empty and miserable, and deep down she knows that once the "wrongs of history" have all been righted she will still be miserable.

Oh, and the bit about being on a quest to "find her virtue," or whatever? That's a crock of shit too. It's no different than some vapid twat jetting off to Europe to "find herself," only to end up spending six months wandering around Prague, blowing strangers and taking pictures of her meals to post on Instagram.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivOvQBlaRIQ

>>298920

Anyway, Littlepoop continues to whine to herself and wallow in her own pointless misery. That single paragraph I highlighted is about as much introspection as she can manage; she now diverts her attention towards her false empathy for the long-dead ponies of Stable 29, to whom she has no responsibility and for whom she can do nothing. She purposelessly racks her brain to try and think up a possible solution to their problem, and the best she can come up with is to reduce the strain on the water-whoosafudge somehow, so that the collapse of the stable could be padded out across several decades though it would still eventually collapse; thus she is still arguably just prolonging everyone's suffering. However, this would apparently still require some loss of life. The details of her plan are never revealed, because she apparently considers whatever she thought up to be too horrible to imagine, so she quickly dismisses it. Eventually she falls asleep again.

Page break. When we rejoin her, she is still in the same situation. We get some more graphic descriptions of her fucked-up dreams, which aren't really worth going over in detail. Most of it has to do with her anxiety over Calamity and Velvet's budding relationship. Then, she wakes up again.

>Despair tainted my hope, like a cupcake with ashes mixed into the batter.
How the hell do you write a sentence like this and not burst out laughing?

>Grey daylight seeping between heavy curtains (were they armored mesh?) raised the ambient illumination in the room.
This, at the very least, gives us a better picture of the setting. She appears to be in an above-ground room somewhere, so presumably they left the stable at some point.

>Relief was like a flood of painkiller, numbing the irrational fears of my night terrors which clung to me like leeches.
Kkat, you're no longer allowed to attempt simile or metaphor. Your prose is a warm stream of diarrhea flowing endlessly from your warped imagination to the page, much as the previous night's saag paneer will flow from the butthole of an Indian man to the designated street beneath him.

Anyway, this shit just keeps going and going. Littlepoop is delirious, feverish and sad, and much of her emotional energy is directed towards wondering what Calamity and Velvet's relationship has progressed to during the time that she has been unconscious. All of this would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that we were just dropped into this scene with absolutely no preamble. As I said, nothing in the previous chapter was in any way resolved, we don't know where she is or how she got there, and we don't know what's wrong with her or what made her sick.

We are gradually given information, but it's fed to us in very small doses in between LP's obnoxious, stream-of-consciousness whining. Eventually we learn that she is in SteelHooves' shack:

>On the opposite wall was another copy of the recruitment poster. (“You too can be a Steel Ranger!”) I realized where I must be. Lifting my PipBuck, I checked the automap. SteelHooves Shack. I collapsed back onto the bed, feeling unbearably exhausted, physically and mentally.
First of all, if she had just checked her stupid PipBuck to begin with, she would already have this information. Second, this still doesn't answer any of the pertinent questions. Namely, did they actually save SteelHooves as they had planned, or did they just commandeer his shack after he died waiting for them? My understanding is LP's technician skills were required in order to save him, and if she's been in some kind of weird fever this entire time, I don't see how he could have lived.

>And, even worse, I felt horny. Which was not a sensation that mixed well with illness. Maybe it was having Velvet Remedy so close, her head pressing against my flank as she slept partially on my bed. My stomach twisted in warning. I didn’t care.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention; the last time she woke up she found that Velvet was sleeping platonically next to her.

Anyway, as she notes above, Littlepoop is sexually aroused, and decides that she needs to masturbate. She spends several nauseating paragraphs babbling autistically to herself as she tries to decide which dead pony from the past she should fantasize about, and eventually settles on Rarity. She clops for half an hour?!? with Velvet in the bed next to her, and then suddenly realizes that Rarity is some distant relative of Velvet's, and this ruins the fantasy for her. Before she can settle on a new victim for her sordid fantasies, she suddenly vomits. I swear to God, I am not exaggerating or making any of this up; literally all of this revolting autism is actually in the text.

Naturally, this is the point where Velvet wakes up. She gets LP a drink of water and then cleans up her puke. This, of course, is fairly humiliating for her, since vomiting in front of your crush is considered a faux pas in most circles, and being pitied by your crush is even worse. In spite of everything I hate about her, I almost (almost) want to feel sorry for Littlepoop here, but everything else that's wrong with this scene makes this very difficult.

>Velvet Remedy returned to give me water, to clean the wall and floor of my vomit, to bathe me and replace the sheets on my bed. I was in no state to enjoy any of it. But I could properly marvel that she took the time on somepony like me.
This right here is almost (almost) a "d'awww" moment. However, this line:
>But I could properly marvel that she took the time on somepony like me.
This line is just too much. For most of this story, LP has behaved as if she has an unreasonably high opinion of herself, so this just comes across as obnoxious self-pity. It's possible that whatever happened to her in the mysterious interim period between chapters has humbled her somewhat, and if that's the case then great; it's about time something smacked her down from her pedestal. But I still can't sympathize with her.

>>298922

Anyway, in the next subchapter, her fever breaks and she's more or less back to normal again. Hopefully we can finally learn what the fuck happened and how all the shit from Chapter Fourteen resolved.

>As I floated the canteen from the bedpost, the deep, resonating voice of SteelHooves carried in from the other room. “Sorry, but I just don’t buy it.”
What? So that guy's still alive? Did LP cure him before she got sick, or what? Sorry to keep returning to the Ch 14-15 issue, but this is seriously one of the most jarring scene changes in the entire text; it feels like I'm reading a book that has had several pages torn out of it, and I have to figure out what happened during the missing part of the story.

Seriously, there are so many unanswered questions here. How did they get out of the stable? Last time we saw them the doors had self-locked and they were sealed in. What happened to SteelHooves? Obviously he's not dead, but he was lying in the middle of a fucking field with serious wounds for a period of literal hours; it feels like whatever they did to revive him at the very least deserves a quick scene. And what the hell is wrong with Littlepoop? When did she get sick? How did she get sick? None of this makes any sense.

Anyway, the author either has no intention of explaining any of this shit, or he isn't planning to explain it just yet. SteelHooves, meanwhile, offers us this:

>“Your group is like the beginning of a bad joke,” SteelHooves elaborated. “A covert agent, a princess descended from pre-war aristocracy and an outcast from an advanced civilization trot into a saloon and try to tell ponies that they’re completely normal.”
An "outcast from an advanced civilization" presumably refers to Littlepoop, and I guess it's more or less accurate. Velvet's being a princess and Calamity's being a secret agent is news to me, though.

This next bit of their conversation is yet another of those weird little episodes where the author displays self-awareness about how ridiculous his ideas are, but chooses to simply point them out instead of correcting them. Here, I'll just quote it:

>That alicorn was at full strength, unimpaired, her magical shield shrugging off grenades. Then, a moment later, she was dead,” the low voice gave a grave accounting of our meeting battle like a schoolteacher reading test scores. “A single bullet hole, right through the brain. You want me to believe some innocent young mare just weeks out of a Stable did that? Do you even believe that?
This is referring to her takedown of the alicorn during the fight in which SteelHooves was wounded (and where he sustained the fatal injuries that he has mysteriously recovered from during the undefined time lapse between Chapters 14 and 15). And yes, as I've often pointed out, Littlepoop's ability to just magically hit anything she wants to with dead-on accuracy is obnoxious as fuck. It's unclear whether Roboponer knows about her PipBuck's abilities yet, but it seems like he ought to, since his suit apparently uses similar technology and she was talking about being a PipBuck technician earlier.

>“An innocent young mare,” SteelHooves repeated, “Just out of a Stable. With refined criminal skills that let her pick every lock and hack every computer, even when nopony else in two hundred years has managed the feat.”
I've been grousing about this for almost the entire book. These bizarre little flashes of self-awareness on the author's part come out of left field sometimes.

>I frowned. I had to admit, I’d wondered about the lack of other skilled lockpickers myself. But then, I also knew that I had honed my skill in precise telekinetic lockpicking over years as part of my attempt to conjure my cutie mark. My C.A.T. proved that my natural talents were focused towards mundane and arcane sciences, and my studies as a PipBuck technician and the tools of my trade gave me the education to manipulate terminals that few outsiders would have. But most of all, I knew that I hadn’t been anywhere near as good at either of these things when I left Stable Two as I had become since. I had been reading books and getting a lot of practice.
tl;dr, she is Mary of Sue, the Great One whom the scriptures foretold.

In all seriousness, I'm beginning to wonder if people in whatever forum he originally published this on were giving him shit about his character being a Mary Sue, and he felt the need to cook up some kind of in-world explanation for it. If he was just publishing this as he was writing it, it might explain his tendency to try to justify problems instead of revising and correcting them. I know this text was posted on FimFiction after it was already completed but wasn't published there initially, and I'm a little curious as to where and how this was originally released to the public.

Anyway, SteelHooves is apparently of the opinion that someone as talented and amazing as Littlepoop must be an agent from the Ministry of Awesome or some similar black-ops organization apparently the Ministry of Awesome is a black-ops organization, because there's no way she could just be a regular-ass civilian. Calamity assures him this is not the case, and they go back and forth like this for awhile. The conversation is completely pointless, and does absolutely nothing to clarify any of the points that still need clarification, nor does it provide any other particularly useful information (it's mostly just a recap of events we've already seen). We finally get real confirmation that Velvet's ancestor Sweetie Belle was in fact one of the three founders of StableTec, which has never technically been clarified (though it's obvious enough at this point), so that's something I guess.

The scene ends on a strange note:

Calamity:
>“Did you know that when Littlepip sleeps, she has a cute little snore?”
Littlepoop (eavesdropping, speaking to herself):
>I do not sn… oh crap!
I'm not quite sure what this exclamation is supposed to imply.

>>298920
Up until now I saw her as the kind of dull-eyed "gamer" that slogs through the filler of Open World games while telling himself he's enjoying collecting all 998 pinecones and caring creatly about all 400 of the audio logs he's collecting in the name of getting the 120% completion achievement even though he still hasn't gotten past the introduction to the main plot yet. The kind of prick who treats DND like it's Skyrim, a game where you stealth-archer shoot and murderhobo and accept random quests from whoever you can't kill and steal without any thought for the story you're telling. The kind of guy who says he "plays games for the story" to justify playing on Hyper Easy mode even though it's really because it makes getting the game over and done with quicker. I saw her as the kind of faggot who would call Fallout 3 good just because it took 400 hours to fully complete.
But you're right, it goes deeper than that. Littlepip isn't just bored and boring, she's empty and fundamentally unfinished as a character.

>Littlepip clops for 30 minutes
Remember her sexual stamina for later. It's a plot point unfortunately.
Neon Genesis Evangelion or its remake had a scene where Shinji jacked it to Asuka's unconscious body in a hospital and then says "I'm so fucked up" and feels bad.
That scene was there because the author hated his fandom for embracing his work as an escapist fantasy when he wanted his story to say "escapism is bad and dads like Gendo are shit and guys like Shinji need to get out of their shells no matter how the world treats them because embracin' da world is gud uwu, also chicks like Rei and Asuka and the drunk one are fucking messes even though anime typically romanticizes these three character types"
The author wanted to make the audience uncomfortable and say "Hey, remember when you fucked your Asuka body pillow or jacked off to Asuka doujinshi porn manga comics? Fuck you for that".
It's why the remake had the New Rei who was every bit the soulless robotic tool Original Rei was supposed to represent as a "fuck you" to the Japanese ideal of beauty and perfection named Yamato Nadeshiko or something.
Anyway, while these choices were made by a smart director to make the audience uncomfortable with themselves and the story told on purpose, this right here is just the author trying to make you feel bad for Littlepoop while assuring you she is totally not an invincible goddess but is also totally justified in having her godly skill.
Ten bucks says LP will turn out to be Rainbow Dash's x100 great granddaughter or something.
LP deciding to masturbate to Velvet's sleeping form or hump her horn or whatever it would be disgusting but if she felt bad later it could be deep commentary on the coombrained bronies who call anything deep writing if it pleases their egos or dicks. If Velvet caught her cooming and got disgusted and started yelling at her it could make the target audience feel bad for all the times they nutted to waifus who would probably hate the idea of being used as fapping material by absolute strangers.
Or it could trigger a feral rage in the degenerate coomer bronies, the one that comes on whenever they feel their waifu show is "under attack" from any form of criticism. This work could be a masterpiece in subverting expectations smartly and making deep commentary by telling the tale of a bored hollow "badass" who gets all her skill from a wristwatch and never gets the girl.

>LP killed an alicorn
Shooting the stunned Alicorn in the face was the easy part. She had all the time in the world to line up her shot and deliver it as calmly as a surgeon administering anaesthetic.
The alicorn was not "at full strength and unimpaired" when the kill happened. The Alicorn fell for a trick any Alicorn in the hive mind should have learned about long ago. The Alicorn's final hours were spent trapped in somepony else's memories adter triggering a memory orb by holding it with magic which is only sometimes okay to do.
LP shooting a sitting duck is not the absurd part here. LP turning the deadly alicorn into a sitting duck is the absurd part. "you must be a badass commando oper8r or something" doesnt explain why the whole fucking world gets stupider and easier to dupe whenever Littlepip needs to outsmart somepony.

>muh lockpicking
Surely it's not a stretch to say a Wastelander might find himself overencumbered with sick loot and decide a sturdy wall safe in the middle of a random crumbling building would be a great place to stash and lock away some loot he thinks he can return to later without any monsters or new building occupants taking residence in the building or anything bad happening to him on his way to find a trader to sell some junk to.
That could explain some of why Littlepoop sometimes finds wildly inappropriate items in what seems to be a safe not opened once in 200 years. It could even explain why post-war drugs are sometimes found in pre-war places. But the author never thought of that.
"I was fucking bored and felt like getting good at lockpicking because it seemed like a skill that would impress bitches and get me laid and possibly save my life someday plus a fictional character I like was great at it" would work great as a justification for Littlepoop's status as The Master Of Unlocking. Plenty of people learn random shit for some or all of those justifications.
Alternatively Kkunt could go the extra mile and say Littlepip learned lockpicking from a friend or mentor character she misses from the vault. When LP asked how he learned lockpicking, "Don't ask" was her answer.
Or could just say "I worked 9 to 5 at a Pipbuck Repair shop. I did all the work and had to practice my lockpicking on the store's supplies of spare Pipbuck locks because it could be useful for my job".

>curious
I hear this work was originally posted chapter by chapter on Google Docs and shilled by Equestria Daily every chapter. Nepotism lol. I also hear EQD refused non-FOE FIM+Fallout content to promote this.

>i snore? Crap!
gay

>>298942
>she's empty and fundamentally unfinished as a character.
Yes.
>'Gamer'
It's supposed to be a vessel to house the interactions with a slight tint ment to resurface fond memories. By using the third party experiences it artificially increases its value of how good it is by setting up moments that would activate those memories. Mostly because it's a copy of the plot but with ponies and references that also dredge up those memories and hopes that the reader synthesizes a positive fabricated experience.
Does Kkat know that? I don't think so. It is more of a trip through memory lane that mashes things up in a simulacrum of a real meshed reality.
>>298923
>"Yes Lilpoop is an anomaly what is so weird about it?"
<"Look into her eyes! No soul, only clopping and a makeshift personality that's constantly falling apart."
>"But drug addiction... sometimes. Has internal conflicts. Maybe?"
<"..."
>"She snores!"

>>298946
That makes sense.
It would only take a few tweaks to make this a brilliant work of parody, a subtle intentional satire of its own concept.

Littlepip has three modes when it comes to doing things: Looty-shooty, doing what she's told, and trying to kill villains. Her plan for "fixing equestria" begins and ends at slaughtering everyone her civilian morality deems a villain and hoping this magically fixes things.

It's a good thing the author always goes along with what she wants and makes her right even when she shouldn't be. Covering yourself with a cum-soaked bedsheet to sneak past guards? Works perfectly! Killing all the baddies and exploring randomly until you find The World's Biggest Magical Undo Button right next to the smoldering wreckage of The World's Biggest Rubber Band Ball? That's perfect for undoing the apocalypse and instantly fixing everything ever so much that the next generation of ponies openly doubts that what their parents went through could ever happen (Even though Memory Orbs still exist but the author forgot about those)

Kkat could push Littlepip further over the edge with each kill while pointing out how killing desperate ponies trying to make ends meet and ensure they don't starve (Raiders) and desperate ponies who get paid to ensure SOMEBODY does constructive work in this hellish wasteland (Slavers) won't un-poison the land or un-choke the skies. With each kill, she could lose more of her excuse to kill.
>"I had to kill him and loot his pockets, Velvet! He was selling drugs on the street! And that's wrong!"
>"I had to kill him, Velvet! Sure, he was the only doctor for miles around besides you and he lived here for twenty years, but twenty two years ago he was one of many raider who killed the parents of a pony I met yesterday!"
>"We just risked our lives attacking this Slaver camp and slaughtered all the Slavers here. But it turns out the slaves we wanted to rescue were ex-raiders getting sent to a penal colony for raping fillies in Red-Eye's territory! So they had to die, Velvet!"

If baddies were easily able to manipulate Littlepip into committing atrocities just by pretending to be a good guy and throwing out a sob story, it would be the perfect commentary on the "I'll take any job" murderhobo-for-hire nature of most DND-style heroes. All of that bullshit with the Gem Prison and the DJ's "Fuck you, Littlepip, don't save Slavers/Raiders from Raiders/Slavers!" would have worked better if Gawd played nice but was secretly a villain playing Team LP like a violin to end up in charge of Talon Company and the gem prison before kicking LP out of her new prison.

How many innocents do action heroes injure or kill during their epic battles with villains? How many laws do they break? How many stories ended on happy music even though the next day should have been suffering/certain death/a bad ending for everyone involved/a mountain of paperwork to deal with? Littlepip is a SHIT action heroine. She's annoying and stupid. She's sometimes egotistical and sometimes obnoxiously mopey/emo. It's not her skills or experiences that make her a combat god, it's her factory-default mass-produced PipBuck and her uncanny ability to reduce the intelligence of everyone around her with her mary sue aura. Everypony back in her Stable had at least one PipBuck and could have been as great as Littlepip or greater if pushed. If the Overmare sent out a search team armed with PipBucks AND the best guns/armour Stable Security had to offer, they would be a strike team of combat gods in a world of poorly-armed scavengers. Littlepip hasn't earned her power and she has no idea what to do with it, but she can't give it up, just like she can't give up the drugs that enhance her power further.

No matter how "Exciting and Action-y" or tragic and gory Littlepip's fights become, and no matter how many Dead Pony Diaries or MGSV Cassette Tapes or Pagies or Terminal Entries or random pieces of garbage she collects, she will never bring back Equestria and it would take a Deus Ex Machina to do it for her.

Just picture Littlepip standing in the burning wreckage of Neo Canterlot, the Slaver capital of the world rebuilt by slave labour and Red Eye, after killing everypony she thought was evil. "We did it, Velvet!" She cries with glee, blood coating her face and gun as embers smolder around her, for the sound of ponies screaming in fear ceased by her hoof long ago. "We saved Equestria!"

She could fight Red-Eye expecting awesomeness, getting sadness instead. Like Old Snake VS Ocelot.

Take it a step further! Say the sex and drugs and guns and rape happened because some human asshole introduced sex an drugs and rock and roll to ponyland before being killed by a monster he created (a junkie who killed and robbed him). He couldn't appreciate the sweet innocent pony shows so he introduced them to the human vices he considered "fun", only for that to ruin Equestria and swallow him whole. Then it went on to swallow more innocents, because vice is bad and pony virtues are good or something. Just like in that Christmas movie where a human gets the elves to listen to non-Christmasish music on the radio, immediately turning them violent. Or in that propaganda movie where a good guy and slut get sucked into the TV and end up in his favourite old-world American sitcom where everything's perfect but once imperfect things like female masturbation and "sexual liberation" are introduced the perfect facade crumbles, white men can't play basketball right any more, and white men get iron marks on their suits.

When I saw The Pink Cloud in this story, an environmental hazard that fuses things together, I thought this story was doing meta commentary on itself and it would end in a mockery of its own premise. That or the "It was all the CMCs playing DND" thing. Especially when all exposure to Pink Cloud does to LP is fuse her Pip-Buck to her limb even though this changes nothing and doesn't hurt her and she never took the damn thing off anyway.

>>298920
>Littlepoop has nothing she actually cares about, so she throws all of her energy into the maudlin false-empathy she displays for the ponies whose voices she hears in the recordings she collects. She convinces herself that these centuries-dead ponies to whom she has no direct connection are lost souls crying out for justice that only she can provide. So, she goes around beating up every slaver and firebombing every raider camp and looting every stable, because "justice." Ironically, all of this only serves to depress her further, because the more of this shit she does, the more she realizes that even this is a pointless goal; the past can never be changed, she still has nothing to live for in the present, and even if she succeeds in "fixing" the wasteland, she will still be the same boring, empty, purposeless twat she was to begin with. So, she keeps going, not because of some deep-rooted inner drive to do good, but simply because she has no better use for her time. She ruthlessly murders anypony her tacked-on boilerplate sense of morality tells her is "bad," and then wanders around the wasteland collecting random junk, because she's bored and empty and she can't think of anything better to do.

>Ironically, once again, the author has actually managed to make a much deeper statement than he ever intended or even realized he was making. Littlepoop is pretty much the quintessential modern millennial; in fact she is probably a subconscious self-insert for the author. Bored and rootless, depressed and directionless, completely lacking any serious sense of purpose, no strong ties to family or community, no meaningful friendships.
This is probably the most incisive breakdown of Littlepip I've seen in a while. Looking at her this way is pretty depressing - particularly with the knowledge of where the story eventually ends up going, and the fact that Kkat holds Pip in high esteem as a moral agent. The fact that Pip (and by extension Kkat) is actually subconsciously aware of just how vapid a person she is would be funny if it weren't also sad.

>All of this would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that we were just dropped into this scene with absolutely no preamble. As I said, nothing in the previous chapter was in any way resolved, we don't know where she is or how she got there, and we don't know what's wrong with her or what made her sick.
Skipping over the climaxes of major plotlines is a recurring pattern in this story, and it never stops.

>Naturally, this is the point where Velvet wakes up. She gets LP a drink of water and then cleans up her puke. This, of course, is fairly humiliating for her, since vomiting in front of your crush is considered a faux pas in most circles, and being pitied by your crush is even worse. In spite of everything I hate about her, I almost (almost) want to feel sorry for Littlepoop here, but everything else that's wrong with this scene makes this very difficult.
Case in point. Littlepip rubs one (or several) out next to a friend without her knowledge or consent, and we're supposed to feel sorry for how sick and pathetic she feels. You know, rather than contempt at the fact that she has no concept of decency or personal space, even with regard to the person she supposedly has romantic feelings for. This moment was probably intended as "see she's not a sue, she has moments of moral weakness!", but that's dubious as hell considering that she borderline molests Velvet here.

>An "outcast from an advanced civilization" presumably refers to Littlepoop, and I guess it's more or less accurate. Velvet's being a princess and Calamity's being a secret agent is news to me, though.
As clarified by the discussion of Pip's skills, he's referring to Pip, Velvet and Calamity respectively. This is one of the first indications that there's more to Calamity than meets the eye, which would be interesting it if wasn't immediately ignored and swept up in more wank about how incredibly skilled and powerful Pip is.

>I do not sn… oh crap!
Presumably this was supposed to have quotation marks somewhere.

This scene is trying to make Littlepip look pathetic and vunlerable and imperfect. So why does Steelcunt suck her cock so goddamn hard with all this "your skills are in the top percentage and it makes no sense for a civilian to have them" talk?
Also how the fuck did Steelcunt survive? The Spell thingy they were trying to find just helped him get his suit unlocked so it could be repaired by a licensed PipBuck Repair Technician. Because as we all know... the skills mastered in civilian phone repair translate perfectly to the skills needed to repair military-grade 200-year-old pneumatic-assisted steel-plated murder suits enhanced further by magical healing systems and videogame HUD bullshit.
Did Pip heal him offscreen? Did he down some magocal healing elixir of life offscreen? Or is this the power of Ultra Plot Armour?

>>299060
>Case in point. Littlepip rubs one (or several) out next to a friend without her knowledge or consent, and we're supposed to feel sorry for how sick and pathetic she feels. You know, rather than contempt at the fact that she has no concept of decency or personal space, even with regard to the person she supposedly has romantic feelings for. This moment was probably intended as "see she's not a sue, she has moments of moral weakness!", but that's dubious as hell considering that she borderline molests Velvet here.
This kind of thing seems more appropriate for a character like Floor Bored. Having no social skills or sense of propriety is a part of her character, and it could actually make her sympathetic since she might be making an honest attempt at intimacy without realizing how inappropriate it is. With Littlepoop though the act is just mildly nauseating.

>>298946
>"Yes Lilpoop is an anomaly what is so weird about it?"
<"Look into her eyes! No soul, only clopping and a makeshift personality that's constantly falling apart."
>"But drug addiction... sometimes. Has internal conflicts. Maybe?"
<"..."
>"She snores!"
This should be printed on the dustjacket of all future copies of Fallout: Equestria.

>>298942
>I hear this work was originally posted chapter by chapter on Google Docs and shilled by Equestria Daily every chapter. Nepotism lol. I also hear EQD refused non-FOE FIM+Fallout content to promote this.
That sounds about right. Equestria Daily seems to be the pony fandom equivalent of a publication like Vice or Buzzfeed, so I'm not even remotely surprised to learn they had a hand in popularizing this faggotry.

Also, it was the bit about the safes specifically that had me wondering if kkat had written in that dialogue specifically to address criticism he was receiving. Here, I'll quote it again:

>“An innocent young mare,” SteelHooves repeated, “Just out of a Stable. With refined criminal skills that let her pick every lock and hack every computer, even when nopony else in two hundred years has managed the feat.”
It's highly improbable that the locks on these safes are so sturdy that literally nopony has been able to figure them out for 200 years; that's completely silly. I don't claim to be an expert in locks or safe-cracking, but you know the old saying about 1000 monkeys and 1000 typewriters. Given a reasonably large population base with access to tools and enough time to experiment, it stands to reason that somepony would have figured out how to crack these safes eventually.

Kkat hasn't described the safes any better than he's described any of the other common elements in this world, but I'm not imagining bank-vault level security here. I'm picturing something closer to pic related. Also, if these things can be broken into using a bobby pin, it's definitely not high-level security. Also, at one point Littlepoop discovers a magazine on lockpicking, and uses the knowledge she gains from that to crack a more difficult safe. Even if it was a pre-war publication, it's still common knowledge that's floating around out there. Magazines are printed in high volume, so it stands to reason that there should be copies of this all over the place. Asking how or why she came to be so good at lockpicking is a reasonable question, but I can't imagine she's the only pony in the wasteland who ever figured it out, particularly when it doesn't even seem to be that hard to do in the first place.

The computer hacking is a little more of a unique skill. The technology is old, and I imagine hacking was not a common skill even when the tech was current, so I imagine there aren't too many ponies in the wasteland who know how to do it. Like the safes, the terminals are all over the place, but unlike the safes, they don't contain anything particularly valuable. Scavenging seems to be the chosen means of survival for most of the ponies in the wasteland, so it stands to reason they would be curious to crack open the locked metal boxes they keep finding scattered all over the place. The terminals, however, would be pretty useless, unless you're the sort of weird klepto who likes digging through 200 year old emails written by dead people. Ponies, whatever.

In any event, though, they are both skills that would probably be easy enough for most reasonably-intelligent unicorns to pick up if they had the time and inclination; neither one really singles out Littlepoop as any kind of prodigy.

>Shooting the stunned Alicorn in the face was the easy part. She had all the time in the world to line up her shot and deliver it as calmly as a surgeon administering anaesthetic.
>The alicorn was not "at full strength and unimpaired" when the kill happened. The Alicorn fell for a trick any Alicorn in the hive mind should have learned about long ago. The Alicorn's final hours were spent trapped in somepony else's memories adter triggering a memory orb by holding it with magic which is only sometimes okay to do.
>LP shooting a sitting duck is not the absurd part here. LP turning the deadly alicorn into a sitting duck is the absurd part. "you must be a badass commando oper8r or something" doesnt explain why the whole fucking world gets stupider and easier to dupe whenever Littlepip needs to outsmart somepony.
These are all good points.

>>298923

There is a page break, and when the scene opens again Littlepoop is apparently over her mysterious ailment. We still don't know what disease she had or how she caught it, and I suspect the author has no intention of ever telling us (or more likely he just assumes we already know). We also still don't know what became of SteelHooves. It's obvious enough that he must have been healed somehow, but there are a lot of unanswered questions as to how exactly it happened. Again, I suspect the author simply feels that this does not require explanation, because once again he is just assuming that we can see whatever is in his head. In any event, who cares; Littlepoop isn't sick anymore, and SteelHooves is still alive for some reason. Moving on.

As Littlepoop is getting ready to hit the road, SteelHooves approaches her and informs her that he will be joining them:

>“I will be accompanying you to Tenpony Tower. After risking yourselves to save my life, escorting you safely to your destination is the least I can do.”
"After sustaining severe injuries in a battle I engaged in specifically to save you guys, I was lying in the throes of death. You left me there, completely exposed and in excruciating pain, for literal hours while you went goofing around in some abandoned stable, listening to old cassette tapes and watching memory orbs and cooking drugs and taking naps. Presumably, at some point, you eventually left the stable, wandered back to where I was, and presumably administered whatever treatment I required. I'm a little fuzzy on the details there for **some reason**. By some miracle I was still alive when you eventually wandered back, and for reasons that science could not possibly explain I have somehow made a complete recovery. I am apparently fine now, despite the fact that several of my vital organs were crushed and I was bleeding internally for, again, literal fucking hours while you faggots went dungeon-crawling. Apparently, either sepsis isn't a thing in Equestria, or else these potions literally do cure everything. Anyway, I really appreciate you guys apparently saving me when you finally got around to it, so I figured the absolute least I could do is risk life and limb for you again."

Wow, what a stand-up guy.

Also, I notice this group's destination seems to change around quite a bit. Tenpony Tower has been mentioned a few times before, and from what I gather it's the place where the DJ broadcasts from. I'm still not 100% clear on why they are doing this it's been explained by others in the thread that this is just another Fallout reference the author is assuming the reader will get, but as far as in-world logic goes LP's reasons for seeking the DJ are spotty at best, and moreover, they never seemed to actually settle on it as a destination. It seems like about half the time LP is talking about going to Tenpony Tower, and the rest of the time she seems to be following through with her original plan of going to Fillydelphia to bust up another slaver ring. They were in Manehattan earlier, and it was mentioned that Manehattan was on the way to Fillydelphia, so I assumed they had settled on Fillydelphia. However, now it seems like they're going to the tower again.

Part of the problem is that we don't know where any of these locations are in relation to each other. Is Tenpony Tower also on the way to Fillydelphia? If so, it would make sense as their next destination; however, this has never been clarified. I've been working under the assumption that the Tower was off in some other part of the world, and going there would be a complete detour. Shit like this is why a lot of fantasy authors will include a map of their setting in the back of the book. Fictional geography can be tough sometimes; your characters live in this world and presumably know where everything is located, but the reader does not. Even just a quickie MS-Paint map that shows approximately where everything is would make this story a lot easier to understand.

Anyway, for some unexplained reason, LP is ambivalent about accepting his offer.

>I frowned, looking about the room while I thought. The shack had three rooms, the bedroom, the main room, and a workroom in the back. Upon seeing the whole of it, I realized that SteelHooves had given me his own bed to sleep upon, and that everypony had slept on the floors save for me. It made me feel grateful and guilty.
Wow. So not only did this guy just lie there patiently, slowly bleeding to death while he waited for LP and her crew to finish screwing around in the stable, but he even gave Littlepoop his own bed to sleep in while she recovered from the flu or whatever the fuck she had. I can't imagine what about Littlepoop could possibly inspire this level of devotion on this soldier's part; literally everything bad that's happened to him recently is directly her fault. If he hadn't risked his life to save her from the alicorn trio, he could just be having a normal day right now, and so far she's mostly being a cunt to him. If I were in SteelHooves' position, I'd slip a timed explosive into her saddlebag when she wasn't looking and then send her on her merry way.

Anyway, she tells him to ask the others about it. He tells her that he already did, and they told him that she was their leader.

>What? Why? I was really the least qualified to be in charge. Because the radio kept saying so? I added that to the list of things to talk to DJ Pon3 about when we arrive to Tenpony Tower.
False modesty does not suit you, LP.

Anyway, this goes on for awhile. We get confirmation that SteelHooves is indeed the same pony who was dating Applejack in the memory orb earlier (he has some mementos of her around his house). How he has managed to live for more than 200 years is still a mystery, but I'm assuming it has something to do with his suit. Littlepoop tries to bring it up, but he plays it like he doesn't know what she's talking about.

>>299111

On a completely unrelated note, my brain has started reading all of SteelHooves' lines in the voice of the Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas Past from the Future, and it's one of the few things that's making this story bearable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a1LV1IeG8U

>DJ Pon3’s voice erupted from the back room. “Got your ears up, faithful listeners? Cuz I’ve been talkin’ and some of you ain’t been listenin’. For years now, I’ve been reminding you that ghouls and zombies ain’t the same thing. Ghouls are ponies who have had the misfortune of soaking up a major dose of magical radiation and not dying. That stuff twists and rots their bodies, but unlike zombies, their minds are still like those of any other pony, and they deserve t’ be treated as such.
This information would actually have been helpful like ten chapters ago; here it just feels completely out of left field.

This next bit could either be foreshadowing the plot of the next episode, or it could just be more random autism the author is bringing up that will never be mentioned again, or it could be something that seems like random autism that will never be mentioned again, but will actually be important in another seventy or eighty chapters when some obscure detail mentioned by the DJ here becomes mission-critical. You honestly never know with this cross-dressing faggot author, and I'm getting tired of trying to read his mind all the time. Anyway, in case it's important, here's this ridiculous bullshit:

>“Well, some of you ponies up in Tenpony Tower didn’t get the message. And when Sheriff Rottingtail kept pressin’ for him and his ghouls t’ be allowed inside, just cuz they were sick of being hounded by manticores an’ slaughtered by bloodwings, Chief Grim Star, the head of Tenpony security, responded by hiring a bunch of mercenaries to scour the tenements along the Celestia Line and wipe them all out.
>“In an interview, when asked how he had managed to be such a supreme douche bag, Chief Grim Star had this to say:”
>Another voice, gruff and irritated, came through the radio’s speakers. “Fuck off. I did what was right by those I swore to protect.”
>DJ Pon3’s voice returned. “Just warms the heart to know that there are ponies steadfastly defending prejudice and bigotry, doesn’t it? Thank you, Chief Grim Star and may Celestia bless you with a kiss from the sun.” The last certainly sounded like it was said through gritted teeth.
Hurr durr social commentary.

>I shook my head. On the one hoof, I actually felt relief to hear a news report that wasn’t about me. But on the other, I had experience with both ghoul-ponies like Ditzy Doo and actual zombie-ponies. I knew the difference. And the idea of somepony endorsing wholesale slaughter of innocent ghouls because they couldn’t be bothered to discern between them made me hurt and tinged my vision with red.
In other news, Littlepoop once again has sand in her vagina over some bullshit that has literally fuck-all to do with her. Who is she going to brutally murder in the name of justice this time? Stay tuned and find out.

Meanwhile, SteelHooves reads the expression on her face, and misinterprets her reaction to the DJ's comments. He assumes she is anti-ghoul, and is upset with the DJ for being pro-ghoul. Obviously, nothing could be further from the truth. She has this to say in response:

>“One of the wisest, kindest ponies I’ve met in this blasted hellscape is a ghoul-pony!” I spat at him. “Her name is Ditzy Doo, and she’s easily worth any three Steel Rangers put together. Not for fighting skills or fancy weapons, but for the quality of her character.” I stomped a forehoof hard enough to sprain it. “DJ Pon3 is right. And if you don’t get that, then you have no place traveling with us.”
"Yeah, don't trigger me you racist shitlord. It doesn't even matter that you mortally wounded yourself just to save me from alicorns who would have easily killed me if you hadn't been there, and then gave me your bed to sleep off my crack hangover or yeast infection or whatever the fuck was wrong with me for the first three sections of this chapter, even after I left you to die alone while I went dungeon exploring. The only thing that matters right now is that you're being prejudiced, and my off-the-shelf consumer-grade one-size-fits-all values system I ripped off the back of a cereal box and stapled to my sleeve to make up for my complete lack of actual convictions says prejudice is bad."

If nothing else, this story is proving to be an amusing psychological profile of its author.

Anyway, even though technically Littlepoop never said yea or nay to his coming along, it looks like SteelHooves has joined the party. Page break.

>I gazed at the leftover parts strewn across the workbench in Calamity’s wake. Now that I had all the parts to build my poisoned dart gun, I should use this opportunity to put it together.
Jesus Christ, is she still talking about building that stupid dart gun? At this point I'd like to see it get built just to eliminate it as a topic of discussion. The actual finished gun she can shove up her ass for all I care.

>The conversation from the night before still cast its shadow in my mind. I knew what Calamity and the Steel Ranger had talked about, and just how convincingly SteelHooves had woven doubts. Calamity knew I’d been eavesdropping. But neither of us had said anything.
It seems like the author is attempting to build some sort of tension between Calamity and Littlepoop. My guess is that he wants to have Calamity start doubting Littlepoop's intentions or identity or something, and this gradual mistrust on his part will eventually intersect with Littlepoop's jealousy over his relationship with Velvet. At some crucial moment in the plot, the tinder will explode and create an actual rift between them. At least that's what a competent writer would do; like I said, it's impossible to guess what this loony trap actually has in mind.

>>299114

Calamity notes that LP appears to have accepted SteelCock's offer to join them on their murderous rampage quest, and asks her what she thinks of him so far.

>I shrugged. I still wasn’t sure what to make of the Steel Ranger. I’d seen the shadows of both good and bad in him, but it was too soon to do anything more than to hop, skip and jump to conclusions.
Oh, blow me, you self-important cunt. You haven't seen the shadows of jack and shit; how could you have? You've barely exchanged three words with the guy.

In the previous chapter he was grievously wounded and most of the brief conversation centered around his injuries and how to cure them. We still don't know what took place after the chapter ended, but at the beginning of the current one LP is grievously ill. For that matter, we don't even know how she was able to ply her trade as a technician and repair his computer-powered-medical-thingy if she was delirious from fever. The more I think about it, this is actually a pretty serious plot hole; logically, this guy shouldn't even be alive right now, and that's not even taking into consideration the fact that he was bleeding internally for several hours before they even tried to save him. At any rate, the two of them haven't had enough interaction for LP to form any meaningful impression of him one way or the other. All that "shadows of good and bad" malarkey amounts to is this:

>good
he saved my life and let me sleep in his bed, even though I've done basically fuck-all for him

>bad
he said something politically-incorrect about ghouls and that makes him an icky-pants racist

Anyway, for some reason Calamity doesn't seem to trust SteelHooves either. Unless they're simply adhering to a general "don't trust strangers in the wasteland" mantra, I don't really see why either of them would be naturally suspicious of SteelHooves. He's done nothing that would suggest malicious intent, he saved their lives earlier, and he's letting them rest up in his house. He easily outguns all three of them, and if he wanted them dead he could have killed them by now, particularly since Littlepoop was borderline-unconscious with fever for the last several days and Velvet is basically useless in a fight. Moreover, he's going out of his way to help them despite the fact that they've caused him nothing but trouble so far. Seems pretty trustworthy to me; far more than Gawd, actually, to whom Littlepoop just handed over the keys to Shattered Hoof without a thought.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that neither of them trusts SteelHooves for whatever reason, but they agree that the ridiculous amount of firepower he seems to have will probably come in handy the next time they have to fight an alicorn.

>I nodded, having begun to worry about the next time we encountered those creatures. If my suspicions were right…
Also, while we're on the subject, Littlepoop, you can take your suspicions and blow them out your ass. You left the stable like three weeks ago tops, and since then you've done nothing but kill indiscriminately and sift through collections of moldy old tapes. You know literally fuck-all about this world or what's going on within it, and your assessment of virtually any situation is worthless; stop acting like you're some kind of battle-hardened combat specialist.

This line from Calamity might have something to do with his distrust of SteelHooves, at any rate:

>“Well, let’s jus’ say that the Steel Rangers ain’t exactly got a reputation as champions o’ the common pony.”
I'm not sure whether to read this as ominous foreshadowing, or if this is just another piece of Fallout lore that the author is assuming the reader will already know. In any case, for the time being he doesn't elaborate, and Littlepoop doesn't question him.

The scene ends with an insincere attempt at emotion. Calamity's mention of "reputations" calls to mind the conversation she overheard the previous night, which once again causes her to worry that he might now be doubting her. It appears that her primary fear at this point is being abandoned by Calamity and Velvet, and I suppose I don't blame her; if I were a dull, miserable little shit like Littlepoop, I wouldn't want to be left alone with myself either. Anyway, Calamity sees this in her expression, and reassures her that he trusts her. He gives a schmaltzy speech about how he knows she has a good heart:

>“Ah’ve seen yer heart, Li’lpip. Y’all genuinely want t’ help folk, an’ ya put yer own life at risk t’ do so, even when some of ‘em don’t deserve it. I ain’t gonna start questionin’ what I know ‘bout ya just cuz somepony who don’t know what he’s yappin’ ‘bout can get it twisted all up.”
This would probably not be my interpretation of her role in events thus far, but I'll leave that alone for the time being. What's more curious here is he seems to take it as a given that she is aware of what he and SteelHooves discussed, even though it was a private conversation that she only overheard by chance.

Anyway, after he says this Littlepoop gets all teary-eyed and hugs him. D'awww not really.

Page break. As the next scene opens, the party is (still) getting ready to leave. I forget whether I mentioned this or not, but SteelHooves has a memory orb on one of his shelves along with some mementos of Applejack. He notices Littlepoop staring at it, and tells her she can look into it if she wants. She does, and the scene dissolves into memory-land again.

>>299114
I bet a proofreader told him he struggled to understand the Ghoul/Zombie stuff since the mindless feral ghouls were called Feral Ghouls in Fallout 3. So in the chapter he's writing now he adds some clarification because not even he wants to go back through this trash, even to add a paragraph explaining shit.
Is Kkat trying to reference the Fallout 3 "fuk da rich and racists" mission with this radio broadcast?
In Fallout 3, Tenpenny Tower exists and is full of mostly-white Haves. The nearby Have-Nots are ghouls living in filth who demand to be let into the tower. I think a rich asshole tells you to slaughter all those ghouls? And randomly blow up the town of Megaton which is made of scrap and scrap walls built around an unexploded nuke for no reason. There is one Atom Cultist fag in Megaton praising the bomb because bugthEAsderp think wacky=good writing. But if you do as the leader of the ghouls say and let them into the tower, the rich let these ghouls in without a fight. And then they slaughter all the rich and take over Tenpenny Tower for themselves. Even the nice rich people. The omniscient radio voice of DJ 3 Dog calls you a cunt if you don't let the ghouls take over. And if you get revenge by slaughtering the ghouls after they eat the rich DJ 3 Dog still calls you a cunt.
Kkat's attempt to fix this clumsy social commentary isn't much better. If you play the games you know it is right to ignore the ghouls or take them all out no matter what the radio nigger says about racism.
Also it's really fucking dumb that when Steeltoe (PAIN! STEEL! PAIN! STEEL!) Has this zigger moment where he assumes Littlepip is racist against Ghouls, it prompts her to think she saw his dark side or whatever.
If anything she should think "Pros: He is fucking strong and loyal and honourable. Cons: I know nothing of the Steel Rangers or their role in the world, he jumps to conclusions way too quickly, and he cannot avoid friendly fire when using explosives".

>>299117
I noticed another detail to that could have made a good joke. Steel let her sleep on his bed and she decided in s horny fever state to furiously masturbate and vomit on it. Almost wish the story dwelled on them prepping to leave just so there could be a scene where he is cleaning up and noticed that little gift she left.

Also for the Steel Rangers not being known as heroes to the common folk that is a Fallout reference thing. The Brotherhood of Steel aren't the nicest people around and their sole concern is hoarding advanced technology to ensure no one else besides them has it since they don't trust anyone else to have it and not repeat the same mistakes of the past that doomed the world.

Of course that gets thrown out the window in Fallout 3 where they are super good guy Power Rangers who want to save the world. At least it's kind of retconed in Fallout 4 where they say the Chapter leader of the group in 3 was a bit of a renegade and took their group to DC to help with the Project Purity and didn't mind helping people.

I barely know anything about the Steel Rangers in Fallout Equestria though so not sure what their role is unless it's to hoard magical artifacts and devices for the same reason as the BoS with hunting alicorns as a side hustle.

>>296834
>big final boss that causes everything bad to ever happen

not really no, the eater is more of an opportunist, and shooting it actually isnt how its defeated. the most you could say is that the eater helped amare get some of his abilities but what that entails and how that works is left to the reader to theorize. if you're talking about amare, he was defeated by his own hubris, insisting to his evil egotistical boss that he would be nothing without him.