/mlpol/ - My Little Politics

>>311559 →
If Spike gave her the side-mission "collect statuettes" since he never got a set of his own/he lost his, and promised a fucking huge payment for the complete set like a sick nasty gun or spellbook, LP's desire to collect them all would be less retarded
she would have a personal reason to collect the statues for the reward beyond any bullshit magic effect inherent in the statuettes. It could also serve as a reference to how Mr House in Fallout NV pays you 2000 caps each for every collectable Snowglobe you find. Which in turn was a reference to some old movie.

Man... FNV really did everything better than F3. Even the bullshit collectables to reward exploration. Many of the best umique weapons have reasons to be where they are (you won't find Big Boomer or the Gobi Campaign Rifle just sitting around at the bottom of a BugthEAsderp dungeon) and selling rare snowglobes for cash you can then spend on sick guns or cyber-implants makes more sense than picking up bobbleheads that magically make you smarter or stronger or luckier.

For much of this story I thought Kkat was going somewhere with these statuettes, planned to reveal you can turn the Gardens Of Equestria on by shoving the mane six's statuettes into six ports or having six good ponies hold their relevant Element Of Harmony Statuette while trying to turn the Gardens Of Equestria on.

Kkat has no idea when to exposit or how so he wants to do everything at once badly. He has no idea where his meandering clusterfuck of a story is headed or when his story will need to exposit about and set up something 3 paragraphs or 20 chapters down the line.

Here's how I would cut out much of the filler in this story
>be littlepip
>life is boring
>some karen shows up demanding a pipbuck repair and has no idea what's wrong with it
>test literally every pipbuck function to organically show the audience what it does without any infodump
>turns out she fucked something up in her inventory. fix it, dumping all the crap she carried in pipbuck digital hammerspace on the floor. She leaves with her stuff. Be bored. Boss is gone and he had the pipbuck removal keys so you need to lockpick shit open again. Paint own mural on the wall featuring the mane six. get punished by boss for painting without a license and "drawing those traitors to equestria"
>wtf.xml
>rant about how the mane six did their best for Equestria to someone who thinks they were all little bitches that failed "the goddesses Celestia and Luna"
>while forced to clean the wall after everyone leaves the building Velvet Remedy shows up
>LP's parents were vault security. Soldiers. Mom drinks to deal with the shit she saw and the loss of dad. LP misses dad, he was a based man who taught her to shoot
>Velvet was a celebrity but she got weird these past few months. She asks you to remove her pipbuck then kills the overmare for her Rarity statuette and vanishes into the wasteland.
>Velvet kept a diary on her pipbuck that auto-deletes old entries to make up for new ones. Read six months of diary bullshit about how the goddess Celestia speaks to Velvet in her dreams and told her where to go, because Celestia thinks Velvet is the chosen one
LP: This is probably where some novel protagonist would drop everything and go look for her. Like that's ever gonna happen! What a load of *flushes toilet*
>that night Celestia shows up in LP's dream and tells her to leave the vault looking for Velvet and protect her or suffer nightmares forever. Every night LP talks to Celestia for natural expository dialogue about the pre war world. Eventually it turns out "celestia" is actually The Goddess alicorn trixie fucking with Velvet and LP for being related to Rarity.
>LP's pipbuck diary note says to visit New Appleoosa after she escapes Ponyville, which is where the Black Book was hidden: in Twilight's tree library with extreme security systems. She will return to ponyville 30 levels after fleeing from it at level 1.
Goto NA, recruit Calamity in a cleverly written dialogue scene. LP also shows him a pic of Velvet on her pipboy. LP earns his respect when sticking up for the town to save its foals from Old Appleoosa, destroy its military capacity and steal its shit sneakily to avoid an all out gunfight because surviving that would be impossibly hard
>LP steals a book of dealings from the sherrif while looting guns. Its a diary that mentions alicorns and how hes suspicious of them. Foreshadowing.
>LP gets rewarded for saving poners and Derpy gives her pre-war Riot Armour with ceramic ballistic plates in a big emotional award ceremony then the party moves on to Rock Breaker Prison since Velvet was captured by slavers upon showing up here since the alicorn there to guide her to Maripony fucked up somehow
>velvet often fucked shit up for LP and others by trying to play the hero but her Magical Thinking and black and white worldview caused problems LP must solve with her nuanced understanding of the world (my take on LP would untwatify her. Replacing her entirely with a different OC would make things too easy)
>along the way LP recruits bomb expert Silver Bell who has a rocket launcher and wants vengeance on prison crime boss man and is the one with a plan.
>LP slaughter the baddies at the prison like they are told to by Griffons. Also they kill a dragon the boss was using like an attack dog. Griffons reward LP with Little Macintosh
>LP is invited to talk to Red Eye since she's killed so many of his slavers. His voice is autotuned like Machine Head from Invincible.
Red Eye: fuck the alicorns up to save your friends and stop fucking up my attempt to rebuild society and give ponies jobs. You know I let my slaves retire on govt benefits if they live to 40 right? I'm a hero. I have a city full of ponies and ziggers who LOVE ME. Here take my favorite zigger guard. She reads zigger. You're related to Rarity, right? Good, that means you can get close to Twilight's tower without being disintegrated by the security system that glitched out and set itself to the maximum setting when the nukes fell. Enjoy dealing with poison clouds and murderous hologeams. GET THE BLACK BOOK. Now, Isotope, my unicorn guard, teleport LP and pals to Tenpony Tower to get geared up for the fight of their lives!
>LP goes to Tenpony to buy sick guns and armour for her party in this city state, the continent's biggest trading hub. along the way LP talks to the radio hoe to ask how she knows so much about everything even LP.
>insert trashy lesbian shit here and a lot of infodumping. LP needs to understand the world's stakes. Everything Red Eye didn't cover, DJ Cuntmeister must cover.
Spike lives under Tenpony Tower with the Gardens Of Equestria world-healing megaspell. DJ Pon3 wants the weather towers activated and hooked into her spy machine to thunderbolt any criminal she sees. Red Eye wants the weather towers active to end the apocalypse and make farming easy again with rain on a schedule he decides. The Goddess wants The Black Book from Ponyville to conquer the world
>oh and the Pegasus Enclave serves The Goddess as its dedicated airborne mindslave division that loves kamikaze aloha snackbarring poners. Calamity broke free from sheer willpower.
>LP saves Velvet from Goddess mind control after an epic rival fight, then they return to ponyville where Red Eye and the Goddess's Alicorns are warring. One epic fight later LP kills Goddess and gets the black book. Twi's Treelibrary is harder to beat than Dead Money. LP fixes every weather tower and links them to her pipbuck. puts herself in charge with Red Eye and Homage working for her. uses the GOE to unnuke equestria.
The end.

>>311571
And it turns out whenever "Celestia" told LP to do something good that was the "Twilight" fragment of The Goddess's mind. The Goddess is a neurotic egotistical neat freak who loves overcomplicating her tactical manouvers yet thinks Equestria would be better if she could micromanage absolutely everything through force and get everypony in her Alicorn hive mind. unfortunately Alicorns cannot reproduce. She commits die upon learning this. Trixie and some bitchy third mare have most of the control over The Goddess. It's stupid that two twins count for pony number 3.

in Kkat's versions Alicorns can reproduce while crushing male pelvises in the process but they can only create females.

>>311576
The Master wanted only a mutant based society.
The Goddess isn't sane, not rationally sane. Diagnosed with fatal kkat-itus.
Because the solution is both brutal and elegant.
Super mutants are by all accounts extremely powerful and intelligent. Besides the whole lost memories bit sometimes.
The down fall is that mutants can't breed.
Humans can, and people can be turned into mutants.
They can funnel the sick or near dead to the mutants. Both populations would grow. The mutant population would be larger due to the fact they are really hard to kill.
>1 Super Army
>2 Research
>3 Security in Mutuant forces
>4 spys will be hard pressed to get anything useful
>5 Constant improvement as wisdom accrues.
<For an average wastelander you have a place that'll take care of you and you're family (they most definitely want more people) in security in exchange for you're body when you're almost dead
>That's a pretty good deal for a shithole.
And they'll take care of your descendants because it's also in their best interest.

>>311576
>>311578
Just to clear up a bit here - Kkat's alicorns are similar to the super mutants in that they can only create more of themselves by transforming others. The difference is that alicorns are exclusively biologically female, whereas the super mutants are sterile (and sometimes completely sexless, depending on the strain). It's implied that they increase their numbers through a mix of willing and unwilling conversion as the original super mutants did.

Alicorns could breed on their own in theory but not in practice, because their 'species' don't have any males. Basically they've got the same problem as the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (aside from serial incompetence and a collective mind that's ruled by an idiot). Trixie wants the black book of blood magic and necromancy and woo spooky because she thinks it will help her... turn some of her alicorns... into dudes? Apparently?

I'm not sure there's much point in looking for the logic here.

>>311585
>>311581
>a major plot point of the most popular Fallout fanfic, MLP fanfic, and crossover of all time is Trixie and Twilight's desire to get railed and impregnated by fat futa alicock
There are faggots on all the mainstream pony websites that will call this the greatest story they ever read. And in truth it is the closest they ever came to reading a real book.

>>311596
Idunno that sounds pretty based to me. Unity-mandated big futa cock alicorn gf

>>311596
>There are faggots on all the mainstream pony websites that will call this the greatest story they ever read. And in truth it is the closest they ever came to reading a real book.
>ever came to reading a real book.
Pathetic. they should 41%

Hey remember when Twilight saw Nightmare Moon teleport and then copied that spell effortlessly? She was so confident in her ability to utilize an untested spell she charged Nightmare Fucking Moon head-on and expected to teleport behind her like an anime edgelord. She was entirely confident in her ability to Sharingan copy that special move like Sasuke Uchiha back when the Copy Wheel Eye actually copied things instead of pulling god-level superpowers out of its ass. Teleportation, moving to another location instantaneously on the X, Y, and Z axis, potentially more axises if there are more than three dimensions to account for when teleporting. Twilight appeared exactly where she wanted to be in space even though space is constantly expanding and the place she wanted to be is on a planet that's presumably moving and spinning. Copying a spell that requires absolute mastery over space was, to her, easier than copying a song she heard once.

Hey remember when Twilight in season 1 used magic to turn Parasprites from food-eaters into not-food-eaters? Such a complex physical transformation would surely require an incalculable amount of complex mental calculations calculated in real time upon not just one creature but a colossal swarm of them. She changed them all from food-eaters to beings that can eat anything except food, and didn't even break a sweat. She wanted to make them not eat food and accidentally transformed them into a biologically unrecognizable creature beneath the skin capable of digesting inorganic matter with little or no nutritional value. And this winded her less than lifting a big container full of milk she'd milked from cows in AJ's barn she couldn't see. She created new organs, violated the principle of equivalent exchange, and it was easier than giving milk to a big starry bear she also lifted.

Either Twilight Sparkle is literally so smart she outsmarted herself without paying attention and accidentally rewrote something functional and overcomplicated into these creatures because she forgot sleeping spells are a thing, or reality itself is words that can be altered with magic. And altering those words is easier than lifting heavy objects.

Remember when Twilight easily flipped gravity for herself? Remember when Twilight teleported? Remember when Twilight nagicked a moustache into existence on a hairless lizard? That's how easy it should be to magically change a creature's fur colour or gender or physical location according to how effortless magic normally is unless the plot says otherwise. If magic can do absolutely anything, why is magically hitting a creature with a sex change spell hard for Twilight "i am a nerd who memorized countless books" Sparkle? Why would Zebras know how to make potions for healing and potions for giving people bat wings (bronybait because bat poners are a thing) but no potion for turning cock into clit?

Either magic can alter the "idea" of something to add adjectives and use semantic definitions to create physically impossible changes, meaning Twilight can magic a glass cup into a cup of water without needing to convert her own raw magic into liquid, or reality works on hard physics and magic overwrites this with incalculably precise physical permanent changes. So if Twilight filled a glass of water she would need to craft enough H20 molecules by forcing them together telekinetically. Either way, magic is absurdly overpowered.

By setting a FIM fic after an apocalypse that presumably wiped out much of ponykind's knowledge, you give characters an excuse to know only one or two spells or nothing at all. It seems less preposterous for LP to know Telekinesis and Blood Edge but not Teleport or Stop Time. It seems less absurd for Velvet to know the Heal spell and the Shield spell but not a speed-enhancing blessing buff or Homing Light Bullet spell. Kkat fucked that up.

Many bronies go with the headcanon that most Unicorns can only cast spells involving their talent and Twilight's magic talenr is what makes magic seem OP when she uses it. So presumably Rarity can cast Detect Gem and Make Gem Wall but would suck at casting Make Lava Wall. Maybe she can do more spells if you think her talent is "making things prettier". Perhaps she could cast healing spells since healing the disfigured makes them pretty. Could she cast Become Giant? No idea. Kkat goes with this headcanon at first, and then fucks it up by letting Velvet make barriers and heal others while Littlepip (whose talent is PipBuck, which is not like having Sword or Microphone or Gun as a talent, it is like having iPhone or Swiss Army Knife as a talent) gets OP telekinesis and can easily learn blood magic from the cursed dark book of evil.

Who says Darkness, Blood, and Soul are evil or dark things for a spell to fuck around with? Fire can torch orphanages or start campfires. Blood magic can gorily kill foes or prevent friends from bleeding out. Even something seemingly inherently negative like Pain Magic or Rot Magic or the Rape Tentacle Spell can be used to terrify villains who deserve worse and torture info out of them. A mind control or memory wipe spell can be used to cause immense harm, just like a nuclear bomb spell. Sex magic can be used for rape or repopulating a species. stat-lowering spells can rig horse races for profit and stat-buffing spells can be used to cheat at sports. So why is blood magic and futanari transformation magic and soul magic locked in this stupid cursed ZEBRA book?

To make things even dumber...

Twilight, Trixie, two unknown OCs with a telepathic twin bond, all four of these characters and their entire hive mind of willing and forced Alicorns from all sorts of eras over the 200 years "The Goddess" has spent "alive"...

Not one of them ever read a spellbook like Princess Molestia's Penetration Incantations: Magical Cock-Granters for Wannabe-Futa Spellcasters.

>>311603
>imblying she didn't already know the spell
Twilight forgets she has that as her problem solving solution.
>reversing it is the problem
>small giant magic bear be magic yo
<sex change spells, gonna chalk it up to magic and not yet a road they (the show staff) were willing to cross at the time.
>it's both, and yes it is absurdly powerful. World Endingly powerful at all times.
<So are Rocks.
<So is going to fucking fast you'll wind up in the past.
<they fuck up the past several multiple times, mostly in the comics.
<A Puddle could have ended the world.
>Most Unicorns only know a couple to their special talent or levitation of at most a few light things.
<Eh
>Also How the magic is done and its side effects.

Have you seen a pony with a sexual cutie mark? Again baseline show is pg-13.
It's a soft magic system, okay so another issue is that the tribes of ponies have innate biological preferences for actions and what they do and how they think.
All ponies think with their cutie mark.
Wingy pones have their head in the sky.
Horny pones are overthinkers, they get lost, and do unnecessary things 'cause why not.
Earth pones are down to Earth, they are grounded. Sometimes that takes them to increasingly dark places.
Oh and all pones are crazy and are always at the brink of taking over or destroying the world.
And that's normal Equestria. The information divide and access is wonky.

>Why don't the kkat alicorns just spend some time and solve it?
<That would take away time basking in being all powerful, or from mopping or whatever. Also kkat.

>>311609
I understand that it's Kkat's story and he can do whatever he wants with it. But on the list of problems the Alicorns could want to try and solve, trying to solve their own semi-infertility with The Black Book seems like a bizarrely specific choice. Couldn't Trixie just alchemically alter a fetus to be male when it's growing? Or use bullshit soft-magic logic to suck the masculinity out of a bunch of captive males before shoving it into an alicorn to give her le penor?

>>311613
>I understand that it's Kkat's story and he can do whatever he wants with it.
Technically yes, but actually no.
This specific story is an out, to force experience upon others. The only way the story works is by pretending to care and don't think to hard about it.
It's no longer the absolute freedom of reaility with free will. It's a meta construct that is ordered into exact order according to the mind(s) that will it to be.
Kkat needs a problem and never touches alternate solutions.
Fact of the matter the quickest way to emulate freedom or reality is failure, doesn't have to be much. All it has to be is a nod at most or even its own adventure.
What if tends to be in the relm of time travel, mental stories, or fanfiction, but technically that's all stories ever told.
>What if there was a person posting another post just as usual, but this time. This time something different than the usual happens.
The story can't be just reality, because it carries whispers of essential vigors of prime creation. It also carries the technical flaws that is imposed on it once the bringing about. The last place where transformation occurs is inside you.
"Why not? and even "Why?" give you the tools to repair all cesspit of stories.
Those quetion also breaks the story or can build it up. More often it allows for both.
>Why bother looking for the Black Book?

>>311564

>Calamity laid down next to me. He pulled out the pink gem and set it between us.
Calamity lay down next to me.

>“Thank ya fer this, Li’lpip. Ah got right messed up in the head after Bucklyn Cross. Ah hate what happened there, an it was sendin’ muh mind inta dark places. Ya gave me somethin’ t’ remind me that we are the good guys. We don’t always get it right. Hell, sometimes we mess it up real bad. But we keep tryin’ and there are folk better off thanks t’ us.”
Apparently, that bullshit with the dragon was meant to assuage Calamity's conscience over Bucklyn Cross somehow.

It doesn't make a whole fuckton of sense, but I think the basic idea is that Calamity is having a moral crisis over what the party did at Bucklyn Cross. He no longer believes they are "good guys," and he wants to reassure himself that actually they are.

Since the dragon was releasing poison smoke into the air and rendering Canterlot uninhabitable, he probably thinks that taking the dragon out counts as a good deed. This is probably debatable, since nopony lives in Canterlot except alicorns and ghouls, both of whom seem to be immune to the effects of the cloud anyway. But, it was technically an environmental hazard so...it was kind of a good thing to do? I guess?

At any rate, in terms of kkat's wacky moral algebra, this act seems to balance things out. Apparently killing a poison-smoke-breathing dragon negates murdering a clan of defeated Steel Rangers in order to rob them of their water crystal. So, Calamity can rest assured that he once again has his hooves placed squarely in the "good guy" camp. He can now resume looting and plundering and cutting a bloody swath across the wasteland alongside the rest of these maniacs, while still feeling morally superior about it.

Anyway, they discuss LP's plan a bit. It seems that LP is supposed to go into Splendid Valley alone. Calamity freaks out a bit when LP confesses that she knows nothing about what she is supposed to do in there, but then he reminds her that she probably left herself some notes on her PipBuck. However, her PipBuck is still broken, so she is going to have to fix it. Ironically, this is the first time in the entire story where she's needed to do the literal one thing that she is canonically good at, but suddenly she can't because she's sick or injured or something.

She asks to have SteelHooves brought in for some reason or another.

Page break. I don't entirely understand what she's doing at the beginning of this scene; she is either fixing SteelHooves' armor or using SteelHooves' armor to fix her PipBuck. At any rate, Littlepoop takes the opportunity to bring up the incident she saw in the memory orb, where SteelHooves killed Zecora in front of AJ on the night he was going to propose to her. It seems completely lost on her that this is probably a sensitive topic for SteelHooves, that she has absolutely nothing to offer him beyond platitudes and pointless apologies, that it's really none of her goddamn business in the first place, and that literally the best thing she could possibly do is to just not bring it up at all. She proceeds to autistically spew saccharine bullshit until he leaves the room without saying anything. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Littlepoop is having a nightmare. She once again finds herself inside the scawwy box, being tentacle-raped by the magical healing genie, or whatever the fuck happened to her in there. She is now confronted by various symbolic representations of her various misdeeds.

>You cut a bloody swath through them. How many ponies are dead tonight because of you, Littlepip? Velvet Remedy’s voice echoed accusingly, provoking a sickening déjà vu. How many ponies have you slaughtered?
>The blood was the blood of Arbu.
>It sure didn’t take you long to become a mass murderer, did it, Littlepip?
What I find so aggravating about this story's take on morality is not LP's shitty behavior so much as how consistently she learns the wrong lesson.

I want to make this clear: I don't personally care that much what beliefs a fictional character holds, or how she treats other fictional characters in a fictional world. My condemnation of LP's behavior in this story is not a condemnation of her moral character so much as a condemnation of the way that kkat wrote her, and the way that kkat understands (or fails to understand) the moral problems he's trying to write about. Don't get me wrong, I dislike LP personally as well, but that's not why I'm harping on this.

Here is the character the author wants us to see:

>Littlepoop is a fundamentally good pony driven by a strong sense of justice, who genuinely wants to make the world a better place. However, in the wasteland, the line between right and wrong is often blurred. LP therefore constantly doubts herself: is she truly doing good? Or is she simply corrupted kindness?

Now, here is the character he actually wrote:

>Littlepoop is an amoral, self-absorbed narcissist. On some demented level she probably does have a genuine desire to make the world a better place, but at the same time she is quite literally incapable of imagining a world that she is not at the absolute center of. Therefore, her sense of "justice" is really more of a messiah complex. From her point of view, every decision she makes is a binary choice between good and evil that affects the fate of the entire world. Thus, she has to save every pony in danger and involve herself in every fight and right every wrong she sees, because the possibility that someone else might do it just never occurs to her. In all likelihood, she can't even conceive of the world existing without her in it, since reality to her is rooted entirely in her own perception of it. Her self-doubt is rooted in a belief that only her actions can affect the world, so if she makes the wrong choice, everyone will suffer. If she doesn't save the wee turtles, who will?

Running out of space, will continue.

>>311613
>I understand that it's Kkat's story and he can do whatever he wants with it
Cringe Libertarian Talking point. This is why the world is the way it is now.
>Checks Flag
Yea that checks out.

>>311628
If Kkat didn't write his story this way we wouldn't know he's a faggot. Checkmate atheist.

>>311636
>Faggotry apologism
Oswald Moseley would be ashamed

>>311622

As much as I like to shit on kkat, and as much as I fully intend to continue shitting on him until this train wreck of a story has ended, you can't entirely blame him for the way his character turned out. We live in the age of the individual, and this kind of narcissism is not only common in modern protagonists, but is actually the prevalent viewpoint.

For whatever reason I was watching the old Tobey Maguire Spider Man movies the other day, and it occurred to me that Sam Raimi's take on heroism isn't fundamentally that different from kkat's. Peter Parker is a good-natured, introverted normie who is generally ignored by those around him and who sees himself as a person of little consequence. Then, through a chain of random events, he is suddenly thrust into a position where his action or inaction has a significant macro effect on the world around him.

The moral choice for Parker is rooted in deciding what to do with his powers, with the "right" choice being to use them for some kind of vaguely-defined "greater good," and the "wrong" choice being to either not use them at all, or to use them selfishly. The plot of the second movie revolves heavily around this: he finds that the more time he spends fighting crime as Spider Man, the more his personal relationships deteriorate and the more his irl finances and career prospects suffer. He's tempted to give it up, but he ultimately realizes that he has a duty to perform, even if it means he has to live on a budget and disappoint his grandma every now and then. So, he continues to shot web.

Superficially, you could interpret this story as a condemnation of self-absorption and individualism, since the overall message is that a person should live for others instead of himself. However, I would argue that it's still rooted fundamentally in an individualistic interpretation of the world. It places "individualism" and "altruism" at opposite ends of some arbitrary spectrum, but "altruism" is really just prioritizing the needs of a stranger over your own needs. In other words, instead of choosing to worry about your own selfish needs, you're worrying about the selfish needs of someone else. Moreover, a cynic like me would say that the altruist is getting something out of the deal as well: by valiantly sacrificing himself for others, he earns the adulation of the masses, as well as the satisfaction of feeling morally superior to all of them.

Individualism is still fundamentally the ideal here; it's just been upscaled to include more people. Concepts like altruism or egalitarianism can basically be thought of as individualism for the masses; if one person being able to live however they want is good, then six million people living however they want is even better. It places the human ego at the center of everything and emphasizes material happiness as the ultimate goal: the best possible world is one in which every human is happy and wants for nothing.

Spider Man works fine as an example, but this idea is central to the modern superhero myth in general. Most of our pop culture stories begin from this viewpoint, even the ones that try to deconstruct some of these ideas. The modern hero is always a selfless martyr who fights for the good of all; the villain is always some ghoulish entity who seeks to enslave or oppress. This strongly contrasts with classical heroism, which usually focuses on a solitary hero undergoing trials in order to achieve an abstract transcendental goal. This goal usually has little or nothing to do with the well being of the overall human mass. Compare Spider Man to a classical hero like Hercules or Odysseus and you'll see what I mean.

"Good" in a modern story is usually either some vaguely-defined ideal like "freedom" or the preservation of the status quo: the "good guys" are rebels trying to overthrow an oppressive dictator, or else they're normal citizens who suddenly need to repel some kind of invader. "Evil" is an even more vaguely-defined concept: some Green Goblin type character is flying around on a hoverboard throwing fireballs at people for some silly reason, and Spider Man has to make him stop doing that.

I've said before that FoE is less interesting as a literary work than as a psychological profile of its author, and this is basically why. A story like Spooderman goes through numerous writers, script editors, line editors, production committees, and so forth and so on, so even if it lacks substance the end result is still going to be a polished, functional, basically well-written story. Something like FoE doesn't have the benefit of that: apart from probably having gone through a couple of pre-readers and maybe a paid editor to correct some of the grammatical mistakes, what we've been reading is pretty much pure, unfiltered autism, straight from kkat's demented mind to yours.

As such, all of the contradictions, hypocrisies and flaws present in kkat's worldview have little or nothing to camouflage them. It's really not kkat's worldview, either; kkat is mostly just regurgitating ideas he's absorbed from movies, games, pop novels, and whatever other sort of pop culture he's consumed. This isn't necessarily a denigration of him, either; the overwhelming majority of people are like this. Up until very recently I also derived most of my worldview from pop culture and the internet. This is why I try to recommend reading books, particularly old, hard-to-read books, to as many people on this site as I can. It's also why I find this kind of critical analysis of stories to be useful. Once you stop simply absorbing whatever culture is at hand and start expanding your palette and thinking critically, you start to realize all sorts of interesting things.

Anyway, whatever; I'm way the fuck off-topic here. In my next post, we will resume with Littlepoop's nightmare, and why it's symbolic of kkat sucking thousands upon thousands of nigger dicks. Stay tuned.

>>311585
>>311596
>>311597
I feel like I should make a small disclaimer about the OP pic. I was trying to find something appropriate and didn't have anything in my own collection that fit, so I googled "Littlepip decapitated" and this was the best of the results. After I posted it I realized that my interpretation of the image might be different than that of the person who drew it and the audience it was drawn for.

To me, Littlepoop getting raped by a biological male on a guillotine just before the blade comes down represents one of the few possible ways this story could actually have a satisfying ending. However, now that I look more closely, I think this image was probably just drawn by some weirdo who actually enjoyed the story and is probably aroused by this kind of thing.

I just want to say for the record that while I 100% endorse the idea of raping and then decapitating the protagonist of this terrible, terrible novel, I do not endorse whatever bizarre fetish this image represents. Also, according to the derpibooru tags, the other two OCs are named Rainbow Heart and Cloudburst; I have no idea who they are or what they're from, and there's a pretty good chance I don't want to know. Also, upon closer inspection, I'm fairly certain the stallion in this image is probably not a stallion.

>>311638

Anyway, where the fuck were we? Oh yeah, Littlepoop was wrestling with her inner demons for the 4,878th time.

She keeps hearing groaning and whispers and sawblades running and all sorts of other scary nonsense, and then some zebra glyphs appear and start talking to her.

>Let us help you, the glyphs whispered. You have no power. You have no purpose. Let us give you purpose.
>“I have a purpose!” I shouted at the raider-Littlepip in the mirror.
>I’m not the Wasteland Savior, Homage, I heard myself saying. You are. You and them. I’m just the one who clears the way.
>You could be the savoir, the glyphs whispered, floating in the air around the mirror. I realized I could almost understand them.
First of all, it's "savior," not "savoir." Second of all, this is actually the part I was reading that sent me off on that tangent in my previous post. As usual, both LP and the author are missing the point by a wide margin.

Here in nightmare-land, LP is being forced to confront her rather over-the-top handling of the Arbu situation; however, instead of an actual reckoning, kkat is using this scene to have a bunch of magic glyphs, which I assume are meant to represent the zebra necronomicon, tempt her with the prospect of phenomenal cosmic power.

Ordinarily, this would be the "Christ is tempted by Satan," "come to the dark side Luke," "Frodo and the Ring" part of the story. The pure, untainted protagonist is visited by a demon or a magician or something that offers her the power to accomplish her noble goals; however, the price is her soul. In this case, LP is offered the chance to use the zebra necronomicon for good. LP is tempted by the book's offer, but ultimately realizes that accomplishing good through evil means would probably produce evil in the long run, so she rejects the temptation, choosing to rely on her own strength even if it means rejecting powerful magic that could help her.

There are three major things wrong with this scenario. The first is that LP hardly qualifies as a pure, untainted heroine with noble goals or any goals. When you consider that not too long ago, she went and gunned down a bunch of already-defeated Steel Rangers because they refused to let her rob them, and then turned around and slaughtered the very ponies she was committing the robbery for, simply because she disapproved of their dietary habits, it's not as if dipping her hooves into black magic would really be crossing that much of a line.

Second, it's still not that clear what this book is or what it does or even what is supposed to be so evil about it. Concepts like the One Ring or the Dark Side of the Force are pretty clearly established in their respective stories; by the time the hero is tempted by these powers, it's clear enough what they represent, and what will probably happen should the hero attempt to use them, regardless of his intentions.

This zebra book, on the other hand, has been a central part of the story, but thus far it hasn't really been clarified what its purpose is or what it's capable of. It's a borderline MacGuffin; we've seen different factions fight over it, but it's not really clear why they want it. The only time we've seen it actually used was when Rarity used it to create her silly statue collection, an act which didn't seem to have any negative repercussions whatsoever, or to even serve any purpose at all. What exactly is the big deal about this book, anyway?

Third, it's not clear what she would even be able to accomplish if she did give in to temptation here. Not only because the role of the book hasn't been clearly established, but because Littlepoop's goals haven't been clearly established either. What would she even do with whatever power this book has to offer? Kill Red Eye and take his place? Turn the Goddess into a pumpkin? Collect all 42 of the Mane 6 statues so she could trade in the UPCs for a free Princess Celestia decoder ring? We're literally in the last quarter of the book here and the protagonist still doesn't have a tangible goal.

Anyway, believe it or not, it somehow manages to get even stupider from here. While the black book is simultaneously tempting Littlepoop with untold-of-power and threatening to cut her in half with a buzzsaw (not even exaggerating here), the fucking Mane 6 suddenly appear out of nowhere. They tell her that the black book likes to threaten you when you're weak and alone, but because LP put the six statues together, she's not alone anymore. She has somehow managed to summon their collective power, and now the six of them can form like Voltron and...actually, wait, scratch that. I have literally no idea what the fuck is going on here.

>I was confused yet comforted. I didn’t know how, but they were with me. And with them, I had the strength to refuse and fight.
Refuse what? Fight what? What are these ponies going to help you do exactly?

>“Hey Pinkie, this is a great party, but I’ve got something that will make it even better,” Pinkie Pie said dourly, her expression cross. She was staring at the floating runes, but I didn’t think she was seeing quite what the rest of us were. “You’ve got to try these. Just take one. They’ll blow your mind.” Her hoof stomped.
LITERALLY WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON RIGHT NOW?!?

Anyway, the rest of this is just as ridiculous. Red Eye appears suddenly and tells her that she's becoming more and more like him, because blah blah blah she's a monster. Then, Trixie appears and calls her "corrupted kindness" for the umpteenth time. The Mane 6 meanwhile reassure her that she is not a monster, and that she is, in fact, the most heroic hero that ever did heroism. She's the one who brought her present group of friends together, and presumably there's some direct connection between her group and the Mane 6 because blah blah Elements of Harmony blah Friendship is Magic. Then, she wakes up.

>>311637
Would you prefer a world where faggots cannot expose themselves by writing faggoted novels?
A novel isn't like a show.
A comic book, a novel, these things need to be bought en masse and sold at stores or ordered online.
Stores in the real world are subject to laws and restrictions. Porn might be hidden behind the counter. Porn might be hidden in specialty stores that have to block their windows.
A television show, a movie, these things are broadcast over the airwaves and internet to any house with a satellite dish, cable, netflix account, or computer. They are replayed in theatres across the globe. Voice actors, animators, live-action actors, maybe even child actors, camera faggots, countless people are necessary to make a faggoted show real. Anyone can see these things without needing to present any form of ID.
There are schools out there where the kids sing Don't Stop Believing because they sang that song on Glee, which every child had to watch along with their disgustingly lefty parents. These kids watched twenty-something actors and actresses pretending to be underaged teenagers as they impregnated each other and got abortions and were gay and said fuck, and that's fucking disgusting.
You have to go out of your way to read a faggoted manga like "Onii-Chan's Futa Matsuri: In Another World Getting Molested" or a faggoted book like "A Cat Lady's Manifesto: Why I Want Little Boys Shot To Death" or a faggoted fanfic like Harry Potter and The Methods Of Rationality. These stories won't necessarily hurt anyone who wasn't already fucked up enough to seek them out and not recoil from them in disgust or have fun tearing them to shreds in public.
But degenerate television and degenerate movies are actively harmful, because they are celebrated by today's shallow celebrity-obsessed culture. Women will want to see a movie about cuck fetishry and BDSM if it stars a man they want to fuck and averagely appealing woman they can project on. Normies would have their minds corrupted irreparably if they watched Netflix's Cuties 2: The Movie starring Chris Hemsworth and fifty child actresses.

>>311642
Would it improve the story if the statuettes and the Party Time Mint-Als crack mints were removed from this story entirely and Pinkie drifted away from her friends because she was the one who found the Black Book and got future-seeing reality-warping powers by having her Pinkie Pie powers enhanced by the book's eldritch spooky otherworldly bullshit?

>>311642
>Homage: "Congratulations."
>Calamity: "Congratulations."
>Velvet: "Congratulations."
Littlepip: "Thank you all."

>>311642

Page break. Littlepoop wakes up from her nightmare, and finds that her fever has magically disappeared. Mighty convenient, that. Her friends are gone, but Xenith's daughter Xephyr is in the room.

>“Xenith is my mother, isn’t she?” Xephyr asked. I froze, unsure how to answer. Xenith had asked me not to, and I wanted to do right by her. But if Xephyr already suspected…
Did she not know this? I don't remember this detail being covered one way or the other, but I'd assume Xephyr would have recognized her mother.

I went back a little ways, and I was able to find this:

>“Although… at the time we had left, Xenith had still not admitted to Xephyr that she was her mother. Was that just Xenith being a zebra? Or was it a warning sign, something else I had been missing?”
This appears in the chapter we just read, right in the middle of one of those long, rambling stream-of-consciousness sections of text where LP is just mumbling to herself for pages and pages about anything and everything. My eyes tend to glaze over during these parts, so my guess is that I just missed this. Unfortunately, kkat tends to drop a lot of relatively significant details into the story this way, which is probably why I don't remember half of the shit I'm apparently supposed to remember.

Anyway, Xephyr gives Littlepoop a sponge bath. To kkat's credit, he manages to get through this scene without making a single bawdy joke. A couple of minor details of Xephyr and Xenith's backstories are given. We learn that Xenith's husband was abusive actually, I think we might have known that already, and that apparently Xenith's weird submissive attitude is due to that, rather than being some ingrained aspect of zebra culture. Either that or it's a mixture of both. In any case, we are given the name of Xephyr's father:

>“My father,” the young zebra said bitterly, “Was Qarl Death-Hoof, leader of our parent’s tribe until that slaver griffin killed him.”
Unless only one parent was a member, it should be "our parents' tribe," not "our parent's tribe." Also, what does she mean by "our?" To my knowledge Xephyr doesn't have any siblings.

>Stern. I was sure of it.
How does LP know that it was Stern who killed Qarl Death-Hoof? It could have been literally any griffin slaver who did it. Once again, LP is simply connecting dots that don't automatically connect. Also, who the fuck even cares which griffin it was? Is that information in any way relevant to anything that Xephyr is talking about? Pointing out some silly detail like this at a time like this is pure autismo behavior. If someone told you their grandmother had been hit by a truck, would the first question on your mind be about what sort of truck it was?

Anyway, blah blah blah. The throwaway character named "Xephyr" has ambivalent feelings about her parents. Good to know. Time to move on.

Page break. LP doesn't want to go back to sleep, so she goes to see Velvet. Velvet is being housed in what used to be a bathroom.

>The old tub, waterstained in brown with traces of pink, was the only intact object in the room full of debris and shattered porcelain
What is this sentence trying to convey? Look closely at what it says: this tub was the only intact object in the room full of debris and shattered porcelain. So...you're saying that there are other intact objects in the room, but those objects are not filled with debris and shattered porcelain? Is that really what you wanted to say here, you cross-dressing man-skeezer? For fuck's sake, learn to proofread. This sentence doesn't even end with a goddamn period; it just makes a single ridiculous statement and then trails off into the ether.

Anyway, whatever. LP goes into Velvet's room, which apparently contains multiple intact bathtubs, only one of which is filled with debris and porcelain. Velvet and Calamity are yakking back and forth about how they each wish the other would stop risking their life all the time. LP realizes that she is probably intruding on a private intimate conversation, so naturally she stands in the shadows and eavesdrops.

>“Ah… I don’t think Ah could take this anymore without ya,” Calamity told her. “Ah’m strugglin’ here, Velvet. It feels like all muh friends are fallin’ apart, and Ah’m tryin’ t’ be the strong one. But Ah ain’t doin’ so good.”
The way these characters speak to each other, they sound like old, broken animatronic robots in some long-forgotten Epcot Center exhibit. Oddly enough it kind of fits the atompunk aesthetic of the universe, but somehow I don't think it was what kkat was going for when he wrote this scene.

>I could hear Calamity’s throat hitch. “We were bullies, Velve. Nothin’ better than bullies. We went in demandin’ somethin’ that we knew they wouldn’t want to give, an’ it all ended in blood. Those young knights didn’t deserve t’ die.” My friend was crying now. I felt a lump in my throat. My heart twisted in knots. “Ah shoulda stopped us. Ah knew better. An’ that makes it muh fault.”
This is probably the first thing anyone's said in this story in ages that I can actually agree with. The emotion is pretty hammed up, but at least someone actually recognizes how fucked-up and pointless the attack on Bucklyn Cross was. Wish he'd focus his rage on Littlepoop, instead of just crying about it like a fucking faggot.

Anyway, the rest of this is just more disjointed babbling. The business about Velvet and the Fluttershy orb comes up again. It's hinted at that Calamity and Velvet both know that LP knows something about Flutters, but neither of them knows what it is. Again, the connection between Velvet and Fluttershy is tenuously established at best, and it's hard to really feel anything here. The conversation mostly just feels like it's lurching randomly from topic to topic. Nothing else happens, really.

>>311646

Eventually, LP gets bored with eavesdropping and decides to go outside. Then, Derpy appears.

>Now I knew who Calamity had rented the Steel Ranger armor from. And which griffin he’d been signaling. Xenith had given Glyphmark a buck to the town’s economy, and Ditzy Doo had taken only days to start trade with them. That was… amazingly fast for word to have gotten out. I suspected a little of Homage’s hoofwork.
Does any of this information matter?

It just gets sillier from here. Silver Bell, the little deranged filly from way the fuck back, is for some reason accompanying Derpy on her deliveries. Wasn't she supposed to be in therapy or some shit? I thought somebody said something about sending her off to Manehattan to see a counselor or something. Oh, who the hell can even remember?

Anyway, it seems that Silver Bell has drawn a picture of LP (whom she has met exactly once) and Homage (whom she has never met at all to my recollection), as a "present" for LP. Most probably, Derpy wanted to thank LP and Homage for the fucking muffin basket they sent her, but didn't want to put any effort into it, so she told her kid to draw a cutesy crayon picture of the two of them having degenerate lesbo sex so she could send that in lieu of an actual thank-you note. Boomers in the suburbs do the same shit with Christmas cards. Naturally, Littlepoop falls for the ploy hook line and sinker and begins to cry. Cue the bittersweet violin music.

Meanwhile, Derpy asks Littlepoop (via chalkboard; you may or may not remember that Derpy can't speak) whether or not Silver's horn will grow back (you may or may not remember that Silver's horn is broken for some reason). Well, as luck would have it, Velvet Remedy suddenly appears out of nowhere and tells her that she has a spell that will make unicorn horns grow back. Mighty convenient, that. Anyway, Velvet does her thing, and Silver Bell's horn grows back, and everypony goes out for frosty chocolate milkshakes. Then, Velvet's bird appears.

>The majestic balefire phoenix began to sing to Silver Bell. Her song was rich, sadly nostalgic and overwhelmingly beautiful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

Page break. Once again, time has skipped forward by some mysterious increment. The party is now back on the Fart Commander, flying off to Splendid Valley I think. I don't remember why they need to go there exactly, but I think it has something to do with the Goddess.

They talk about Silver Bell's horn for awhile, and then talk about how the Everfree Forest is apparently still on fire. Then, they see some raiders shooting at each other.

The sensible thing to do in this situation, of course, would be absolutely nothing, seeing as how it has literally fuck-all to do with them. So naturally, they decide to take time out from whatever mission they are supposed to be on and intervene. However, there is a problem: since the combatants on both sides are all raiders, they can't figure out who to shoot. We certainly wouldn't want them to make a mistake and brutally slaughter a good guy instead of a bad guy! So, Velvet decides to call out and ask what they are fighting about. Yes, this autism is actually in the text.

They all exchange some pleasant banter, shoot at each other a little, and eventually we are told that some of the raiders destroyed a place called "The Republic," which I'm assuming is some kind of representative-government-themed gay dance club that kkat frequents. There is some more pointless banter, and eventually the original confusion is cleared up: it seems that only one side of the fight consists of actual raiders. The other side consists of Good Guys™ who are simply dressed as raiders. Well, I'm certainly glad we got that little mystery cleared up! Imagine the egg on Littlepoop's face if she accidentally slaughtered a bunch of total strangers who were good, when she meant to slaughter the evil strangers.

Anyway, another silly, pointless battle ensues. SteelHooves fires some missiles at the raiders, the raiders fling some grenades at them, Littlepoop grabs the grenades with her telekinesis and throws them back. At one point, something rather strange happens: LP seems to (somehow) figure out some new spell out of basically nowhere, but decides not to use it because it's too powerful or something. I think the implication is that the zebra necronomicon is teaching her magic and trying to turn her to the somewhat-darker side, but honestly who the fuck even knows?

Page break. Having once again pointlessly killed a bunch of complete strangers who were not harassing them in any way, the group now pointlessly lands their vessel and pointlessly introduces themselves to the group of strangers they decided not to kill. Naturally, these faggots have heard tell of the Wasteland Heroine, that wonderful amazon-poner who travels around the countryside, slaughtering baddy-bad-bad guys wherever she finds them. Needless to say, they are humbled to stand in the august presence of such a mighty hero.

Actually, it seems I may have gotten this part wrong. The raider-not-raider ponies are, of course, standing around yapping about how great Littlepoop is (because really, what else would anyone be talking about?). However, it seems they don't actually realize that the pony who just swooped in out of nowhere and murdered a bunch of ponies for literally no reason at all is actually the mighty heroine herself. So, even though they all clearly idolize her, it turns out they don't recognize Littlepoop because she's wearing different barding. Yes, this autism is actually in the text.

Anyway, they all stand around gushing about how wonderful LP is, and of course LP falls into her default false-humility loop. Then, we learn that apparently a bunch of fillies and colts were kidnapped from this Republic gaybar that got destroyed. Of course, LP can't just let this slide, so it looks like the gang is off on yet another pointless side mission. Yipee.

>>311640
There was actually someone last thread I believe who posted more art of those 2 and was also the rainbow one raping LP's decapitated body and I think he was also decapitated while the changling watched. Definitely a fetish thing with how specific it is and I recall someone on /mlp/ being grossed out by some.other gore smut of a person commissioning their OC to have their head drilled into the back of it and being raped through his skull cavity. I mean sure people into clop probably got other fucked up stuff and I don't have any right to waggle fingers but knowing Fallout Equestria fans I feel like it's something they could get their rocks off to.

>>311647

Page break.

>The cottage that they had built their compound around really was a bit removed from the rest of town. It was surrounded by a large fence of rust and razor-wire, and sharpened poles impaling the heads of rabbits, squirrels and other small animals. Sickly, poisoned trees twisted up from the barren ground, providing support for snipers nests. Dead birds hung from their branches, strung together like windchimes. A small river slogged through the property coming out of the Everfree Forest, the water grey with ash. Inside the fence were kennels, some of which were used for the angry, malnourished guard dogs that roamed about inside. As for the other kennels… through my binoculars, I could see the mangled body of a pony in one of them.
>“…Fluttershy’s cottage,” SteelHooves confirmed.
Seriously, how do you even write this crap with a straight face?

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention this, but it seems they are back in Ponyville again. Anyway, whatever; it looks like they've got to kill another pack of random generic bad guys in order to save another pack of random generic NPCs, because apparently this story wasn't long and convoluted enough. I'm assuming this is probably another ripoff of some who-gives-a-fuck DLC from Fallout Whatever; if someone knows which one we can go ahead and enter it into the official record of who-the-fuck-even-cares.

*sigh*

Let's just get this over with.

They fly their gigantic, ridiculously obtrusive metal airbus directly over what used to be Fluttershy's cottage in order to scope out the raiders who are on patrol down there. The raiders don't even notice them, because all the enemies in this story are fucking retards. Incidentally, Velvet Remedy, who is supposed to be insanely obsessed with Fluttershy, has absolutely nothing to say about a bunch of baddy-bad-bad-bads defiling her idol's cottage with their naughty presence. Anyway, they yammer about their battle plans for awhile, and then Velvet and one of the raider-not-raiders yes, for some reason the party decided to bring these three idiots they just met along with them get into an argument over whether or not Velvet should be allowed to go into the battle. This naturally offends her, and the conversation devolves into a moronic meta-discussion about RPG tactics that I won't even dignify with commentary.

Page break. I guess they land the airbus; either that or Calamity just flies it right up alongside the cottage because fuck subtlety. Either way the raiders probably still don't notice them. Littlepoop jumps through the second story window and lands in Fluttershy's bedroom. The raiders have desecrated it in the usual way: blood, skulls, entrails, feces, yada yada yada. OMG such horror. Velvet apparently doesn't think it's quite disgusting enough, so she pukes on the floor. Then, they overhear voices, and creep to the balcony to see what's going on downstairs.

Okay, this next part's actually pretty fucking funny. It seems that this particular group of raiders felt that the usual level of edge their tribe employs wasn't quite edgy enough, so they decided to knock it up a notch. Bam! Fluttershy's living room has now been converted into some kind of caged death-match arena, where the raiders are making the kidnapped foals fight to the death for lulz. Winner gets to keep their parents' dead bodies. I have to say: as much as I loathe this spooge-swallowing schlong-goblin of an author with every fiber of my being, I have to say he consistently delivers bag after bag of very hearty keks. Seriously, if you're not following along with the text, you really ought to dive in and actually read some of these scenes; my commentary doesn't even do it justice. You really have to read this shit to believe it.

>“How dare you!” Velvet Remedy screamed, swiveling her combat shotgun towards the second raider as the first fell. “The wasteland isn’t hard enough? Sick enough? Without you monsters making it worse?”
greta_thunberg_meme.jpg

>“And in Fluttershy’s house?!” Velvet Remedy tossed her shield up over the children as she marched down the stairs, her expression full of unbridled fury. I watched, frozen.
Hah! She did notice it was Fluttershy's house. I guess that's scrambled eggs all over my face. Meanwhile, it seems that Littlepoop is staying out of this fight; she's just standing on the sidelines watching Frozen.

Anyway, the usual ridiculousness ensues. Velvet Remedy goes apeshit with the shotgun and slaughters the entire raider compound by herself, because something whatever Fluttershy, and children, and oh-the-horror-of-it-all.

>At least she was saving children, not scarring them.
Yeah, I'm sure the kids will be just fine after this.

Page break. With the icky doo-doo raiders all dead, there is nothing left to do except pack up all the foals they just saved and ship them the fuck out of the story, since as usual they serve absolutely no purpose beyond giving the heroes a bunch of NPCs to rescue. They put them on wagons and send them off to New Appleoosa, because that's a place to send them I guess. The three raider-not-raiders are entrusted with guarding them, since kkat no longer needs them for anything either. One of them tells Littlepoop she's cute and kisses her before leaving.

>I could almost feel a warmth radiating off of SteelHooves. He had done Applejack proud, and he knew it. I hoped he was finally beginning to really heal.
Did SteelHooves even fucking do anything?

Anyway, this absolutely silly episode ends in absolute silliness. Once the maimed NPC children and their NPC escorts have vanished into the sunset, never to be heard from again, Velvet breaks down into a regulation fit of hysterics. She sobs and moans and rends her clothing, crying her precious wittle eyeballs out because the meanie baddy-waddy raiders pooped on Fluttershy's bed and made a bunch of children kung-fu-fight each other. O the horror! When will the killing end?

>>311650
Can you believe there are faggots who will call this the coolest moment for Velvet ever, AND faggots who will instead argue that Velvet setting aside her no-kill rule for a bit is actually super tragic?
Even though for much of this story she hasn't had a real no-kill rule and I'm pretty sure she utilizes a lethal needle-firing gun most of the time?

>>311650

With that completely silly 3,671 word side quest out of the way, the party can now resume their journey to Splendid Valley. Once there, they will undoubtedly kill more bad guys, have lunch, brood angstily, kill some more bad guys, and then go home. Seriously though; I have quite literally forgotten where Splendid Valley is and why they are going there.

They fly around the edge of the valley until they find what used to be one of Red Eye's military camps, but has since been converted into a pile of dead bodies. Apparently, this was all part of Littlepoop's demented plan to do...whatever the fuck she's trying to do exactly. Steal the Declaration of Independence, I guess.

Anyway, they poke around the camp and discover that it was the work of alicorns. So, it would seem that the Goddess and Red Eye are enemies now. Wait, were they not enemies before? I don't even remember. It's like the important parts of this story are little islands in a vast sea of autism, and it takes so long to journey from island to island that by the time you've arrived at one of them you've completely forgotten the others.

Welp, whatever; Xenith for some reason or other seems to know the entire plan, because apparently the Goddess can't read zebra minds. I'm not even going to bother asking why, or whether or not it was ever actually explained. Littlepoop needs to ask her what to do next, but she can't find her. Actually, did she even come with them? I don't remember her name even being mentioned during the Adventure of the Battling Orphans. Wait a minute; there she is! She suddenly pops up out of nowhere and begins dispensing cryptic instructions. It seems that the alicorns are off fighting a hydra, and even though Littlepoop is a complete autist and wants to go watch the fight, she knows she has a job to do.

>Now it was time for me to put on the blindfold.
Whatever it is she has to do next, it apparently involves a piñata.

Page break. Littlepoop, being the absolute autist that she is, can't resist defying her own instructions and taking off the blindfold to watch some of the hydra fight. She sees that she is alone in the airbus. Then, suddenly, Trixie starts talking in her head again:

>{{WELCOME BACK, MY GUESTS!}} the chorus of voices drowned out my thoughts. {{MY CHILDREN WILL GUIDE YOU, THAT YOU MAY BASK IN THE PRESENCE OF THE GREAT AND POWERFUL GODDESS!}}
Apparently, Trixie doesn't care that Littlepoop took like forty forevers to do whatever the fuck she was supposed to do for her, and also that she went to Zebratown, killed a bunch of her alicorns for basically no reason, and liberated a bunch of zebras she had kidnapped (still actually curious why Trixie even kidnapped the zebras to begin with).

Anyway, Calamity lands the Poop Machine and tells LP that she's on her own from here, because apparently that's how she wrote it in her retarded plan. He tells her that when she's finished lezzing out with Trixie or whatever she's supposed to do, she can use the magical helicopter-bicycle thingie (that is here for some reason) to get home. Then, he leaves. Incidentally, this was another one of those scenes where I wasn't entirely sure what was supposed to be happening most of the time. At some points LP seemed to be wearing a blindfold, and at other points she seemed to have it off.

Page break. LP is picked up by some alicorns and brought before Trixie. LP tells her about the contents of the orbs she found in the warehouse in Canterlot, which I guess is one of the things Trixie wanted her to investigate. Trixie seems surprised that all Red Eye is interested in is something as mundane as controlling the weather. An idiotic conversation ensues that goes absolutely nowhere: LP keeps accidentally thinking about stuff she shouldn't be thinking about, and the Goddess keeps reading her mind. Then, LP decides to tell her all about the stuff she saw in the orbs for whatever dumb reason.

Page break. She keeps yammering autistically to the Goddess about the shit she saw in Canterlot. As a distraction this is dumb as hell, particularly since she keeps thinking about how it's a distraction and the Goddess can read her mind; on the other hand, the Goddess is as dumb as or dumber than every other villain in this story, so it doesn't seem to matter that much.

Case in point: at one point, a pre-determined "signal" goes off, that was apparently part of the plan. A message suddenly pops up on her EFS informing her that Xenith has planted a balefire bomb underneath the building, and she has a whopping 38 minutes to get the fudge out. I'm not even going to bother asking where or how LP managed to get hold of a balefire bomb for the time being, because for the moment there are bigger fish to fry.

Since Trixie can read her mind and should thus instantly know everything LP knows the instant she learns it, it would stand to reason that 38 minutes would be plenty of time for Trixie to send out a herd of alicorns to find the bomb, and then dismantle it and/or carry it away. So this whole plan is silly, right? Well, in reality-land it would be; however, we're in kkat land, where the rules are made up and biological sex doesn't matter. She literally stands there sperging to herself for a full minute, and Trixie doesn't even notice.

What makes this even dumber is that LP doesn't know the details of her own plan, so she's caught off guard by the randomness of her own instructions. She basically squanders whatever element of surprise she might have gained by erasing her memory; instead of just trusting the plan and doing what she told herself to do, she insists on second-guessing herself at every turn.

Anyway, as she stands there, mouth agape, staring vacantly into space the way a cow stares at an oncoming train, she slowly slides together the pieces of the autistic plan she went to great lengths to conceal from herself. We'll cover the details in the next post, because I'm nearly out of space.

>>311658

This here is the part that really burns my biscuits:

>Of course I had needed to be unnaturally persuasive. What could have been more difficult, more worthy of resorting to Party-Time Mint-als, than talking Red Eye into giving me the bomb? No wonder he started pulling out after that. He was taking the bomb to the camp. Tenpony Tower hadn’t been under a megaspell threat in over a week! I’d made Homage safe before I’d even left.
LP knows that during one of the "missing" periods in her memories, she apparently popped a crack mint. She's mentioned this repeatedly off and on since the memory-loss occurred, and it's been bothering her because yada yada yada her "addiction." She's been worried she did something stupid or dangerous while high on mints that she can't remember, as opposed to the stupid and dangerous stuff she normally does while completely sober and lucid.

So here is basically what happened:

LP took a crack mint and it gave her ridiculous powers of persuasion the way the mints usually do. She used these powers to somehow talk Red Eye into giving her his balefire bomb in exchange for, apparently, nothing. Red Eye, probably to keep his underlings from learning that he'd even made such a ridiculous move in the first place, needed to maintain the illusion that there was still a bomb in Tenpony Tower, so he kept his army camped outside. However, he quietly removed the bomb from the tower and detached one of his regiments from the main force in order to transport it here, so that Xenith could later pick it up, (somehow) sneak it inside Maripony, and set it up without the alicorns or Trixie being any the wiser. What's aggravating about this is that, much like all of the "Chekhov's Gun" moments throughout the story, kkat probably thinks he's being extremely clever here, when in reality he's just being even more of an autist than usual.

I'd be immensely surprised if kkat knew about my critique of his work, or that he'd trouble himself to read all of it if he did. However, I can easily imagine him lurking these threads and giggling like a schoolgirl every time he sees me post something like this:

>>311564
>incidentally, how is that situation coming along, anyway? bomb still tick, tick, ticking away?
"Tee hee!" he would probably say, "Little does he know I've already taken care of that bomb! This Glim Glam thinks he's so smart, but I'm already two steps ahead of him!"

However, there are two very significant problems with how he chose to handle this. The first is that, obviously, the method he used to dispose of the bomb was idiotic. LP just "convinced" Red Eye to give this bomb to her? Okay, how? What did she say to him? How did she convince him? What argument could she have possibly used that would convince him to do something so idiotic? We aren't told, because kkat doesn't know. If he sat under the bodhi tree and meditated on the subject for the rest of his life, his beady little brain would not be able to produce an actual, sound argument that would convince Red Eye to take an action so blatantly and obviously against his own interests. So, how does he have LP accomplish such a feat? The "party-time mint-als."

These mints have been an unbelievably stupid addition to this story from the very first moment they were introduced. Not only because of the contrived, poorly-handled "addiction" subplot that kkat has halfheartedly grafted onto LP's character arc, but because the very nature and purpose of this drug was poorly conceived.

The first time the mint-als are introduced, LP needs to convince the foreman of the New Appleoosa train caravan to let her ride along, so that she can invade the city the caravan trades with and destroy their primary source of income. On top of that, she needs the foreman to wait around until she's finished murdering everyone so she can once again use the train as her ride home. Obviously, this would be a stupid thing for the foreman to agree to. So, Calamity trots off and returns with a tin of party-time mint-als, which give her some kind of brain-boost that makes her more charismatic and persuasive. We are not told what she says to the foreman exactly; we are simply told that she convinces him to do what she wants...somehow. The same thing happens here: LP takes a mint, becomes more charismatic, and somehow convinces Red Eye to hand over the single most important piece of leverage he has over her, in exchange for fucking nothing. Once again, we are kept in the dark as to what specifically she says to him.

As usual, part of the problem is that kkat has not bothered to tell us much about what these mints are, how they work, or what specifically they do; we are just told that they make her more "persuasive." My interpretation of this is that they are a chemical stimulant similar to cocaine; they speed up her brain function and make her more charismatic and extroverted. That alone should not be enough to convince someone to do something blatantly detrimental to their own interests just to help you; there should be reasonable limits that the author should have to obey. For example, if a drug like this existed in the real world, it might make you charismatic enough to sell someone a car they wouldn't normally buy, but you probably couldn't talk them into sawing off their own foot for no reason.

On the other hand, if the mint-als were some kind of magic agent that gave unicorns some kind of mind-control or hypnosis ability, it would change the algebra somewhat. Red Eye probably wouldn't just hand over a balefire bomb to his adversary because she was a little more charismatic than usual, but if she put him under a mind-control spell she could make him do whatever she wanted. I'd hate to think what something like a mind-control spell would be like in the hands of a writer like kkat, but at the very least it would be a better explanation than "I did a line of Tic-Tacs in the bathroom and now I've got +10 charisma."

>>311658
Doesn't it defeat the whole purpose of Littlepoop erasing her own memory to stop The Goddess from reading her mind and learning her plan if she's going to second guess herself constantly AND eventually just going to give herself a message that screams
>BOMB HAS BEEN PLANTED

Overthinking everything like this doesn't make LP or Kkat seem smart.

If the Zigger is the only one who can't have her memory read, why not make the plan rely on her? How complex did this plan need to be?

Why not tell Ziggy to pop a StealthBoy with a nuke in her pocket and sneak off to plant it using the "uber 1337 69 going commando skillz" she picked up when spending almost her whole life as a slave? Then LP could erase her own memories of this order. When the >BOMB HAS BEEN PLANTED Zigger could try to get LP out of there without arousing much suspicion.

LP's narration implied each friend had their own portion of the plan but a mind-reader could read each one's mind to figure out what they did and piece everything they still remembered together.

This is kind of fucking gay.

You know what would have made this plan better? If Steelhooves, Calamity, or best of all the Zigger seemingly died at some point in the adventure only to sneak around and carry out that basic nuke-planting plan from the shadows while LP erased the fact that she planned this from her own memory. It's the classic emotionally manipulative fakeout death we've seen a thousand times before where the seemingly dead character comes back in a triumphant moment to scream "JUST AS PLANNED". Except instead of the character faking his own death for the plan, LP came up with the plan and erased everyone's memory (except for the one feigning death) after telling everyone the plan. It takes the audience on an obvious emotional rollercoaster, lies to them, toys with their emotions, then pretends this was smart. I find it hard to believe Kkat of all people has never seen this cliche before. Is this supposed to be his twist on it?

>>311701
Kkat seems to have done a couple things here. They have Littlepip performing acts in a meta sense, like the story is a video game, by passing the proper "stat check". Mintals allow her to boost past this charisma threshold. I think Kkat considered this a sensible, or "good enough" approach. "Littlepip has enough stat points, so of course they convince the pony." But they failed to take into account how actual characters, both in fiction, and the games this story is based off of, would operate. Not only that, but I fear they might be taking another, worse meta approach. In the games, you are able to talk down the major antagonists by poking holes in their logic or core beliefs, among other things. This had lead to a wide array of fandom in-jokes that exaggerate the situation through memes: "Ur bad. Pls stop." to which the antagonist responds "Oh, ok". Kkat very well might have handwaved how ridiculous Red Eye acted by intending it to be a reference to these kind of memes and "that's just how Fallout works! :) The protagonist does all sorts of silly things like that and can talk their way through anything!" Without considering how an actual character or even the games themselves truly work.

Frightening, if that's the case.

>>311701
>Okay, how? What did she say to him? How did she convince him? What argument could she have possibly used that would convince him to do something so idiotic?
Read a completely canon and true account that answers this here:
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/117590/3/fallout-equestria-broken-bonds-the-cloptacular/an-exchange-to-remember-red-eye-x-littlepip

>>311701
>LP just "convinced" Red Eye to give this bomb to her? Okay, how? What did she say to him? How did she convince him? What argument could she have possibly used that would convince him to do something so idiotic? We aren't told, because kkat doesn't know.
Presumably we're supposed to simply infer what went down; I imagine Littlepip's argument was something along these lines:
"You're using this nuclear weapon to threaten me into killing the Goddess for you, but the Goddess is a big bad eveil meanie that I was probably always going to kill anyway. Give me your nuke and I'll use it on her, I have this super clever plan that's guaranteed to work!"

This is the sort of blunt, childish line of argumentation you'd expect from a nu-Fallout speech check. Mint-als boost Littlepip's charisma, which includes her odds of passing speech checks. It all more or less fits together if you view it stricly through the lens of a gamer who sees every challenge as a series of rolls that can be passed if you just weight the dice in your favor enough.

With some groundwork and the ability to actually write a charismatic character, this scenario might have been the foundation for something passable. A great big three-way circle of backstabbing and false allianced between Littlepip, Red Eye and the Goddess. But villains demonstrating even the faintest shred of intelligence or basic competence? In this story? Yeah, nah.

As you point out, the problem is that all the important events take place outside the reader's perception. They're not demonstrated or even explained in any detail after the fact, even when they're improbable or straight up ridiculous. This ties in to the ongoing problem of dramatic scenes abruptly ending, only for the next scene to see the main characters automatically victorious an indeterminate time later. Kkat's gotten into a habit of assuming that the reader takes Littlepip's success as a given and doesn't actually need to see her succeed at all. She wins automatically just by virtue (heh) of being herself.

>>311709
It bugs me that Kkat didn't even do the dialogue checks right. AS AN AUTHOR, NO LUCK OR DICE ROLLS ARE INVOLVED. The author decides EVERYTHING that happens, and dialogue should be written accordingly!

F1/2, you see dialogue options your character can say. Your stats influence what you can choose from.
If your character knows nothing of science the "Why not use crop rotation on this soil, farmer?" option won't appear.
If your character's stupid, smart dialogue options won't appear. If he's completely retarded, retard dialogue will be his only options.
A perk slot can be spent on making dialogue easier by adding "This is the right answer" and "This will piss him off" dialogue hints.

F3 turned skill checks into dice rolls. Because every dice roll has to conceivably end in success or failure, they're typically appeals to authority or emotion or demands instead of real arguments. "Please do X!" and "What would your mom think?" and so on. F4 did the same shit.

FNV fixed F3's system by coding it so smart dialogue options like "[EXPLOSIVES 25] I'm familiar with the care and handling of explosives" are replaced with retard options like "[EXPLOSIVES 12/25] lmao how hard can using dynamite be? just light and throw right lol?"

What does Kkat do? If LP's shitty arguments don't sound convincing enough to Kkat, he has LP make the arguments OFFSCREEN, which is LAZY.

HOW MOTHERFUCKING HARD WOULD IT BE to do a brief flashback scene where LP lays out her entire plan to Red Eye.

Red Eye: "Let me get this straight. You want me to give you a fucking nuke, so you can erase your own memories and wander straight into Goddess territory, hoping for the best?"
LP: "Yes. I'll plant that bomb somewhere important and have a Zebra bail me out of there without telling me the plan, since the Goddess can't read Zebra minds for some reason. Speaking of which, I'll need you to give me your strongest, smartest, and most loyal Zebra while making it look like I shot my way out of here and escaped with her, freeing that slave. Preferably one skilled in stealth and-"
Red Eye: "That's completely fucking retarded! Do you have any idea how expensive those nukes are! And to give you a slave, too? That would destroy my reputation as an invincible slaver badass! What leverage would I have over you?"
LP: "The army you'd place around Tenpony Tower, of course. You give me the nuke, and tell the world you're threatening me with it. Tell the world you put it somewhere in Tenpony Tower, to make me your slave. Then I'll take that nuke to The Goddess and blow her up. And if I don't, you can attack Tenpony and blow it up for real, killing my lover. You know, the lesbian who proudly announced she's fucked me live on air despite what a huge target that painted on her back."
Red Eye: "You'd hold the life of your own wife hostage like that, just for the sake of killing someone I want dead?"
LP: "I want The Goddess dead too. And if you... wink wink... manipulate... me into killing The Goddess for the sake of one I love... Well, you'd get all the credit."
Red Eye: "You son of a bitch, I'm in! Well, daughter of a bitch. Damn, LP, you can be one clever bitch. Bitch."
LP: "Thanks, I was written by someone smart in this alternate universe. Then again, not much has changed in this AU. It's really more like a quarter parallel universe."

>>311701

The second problem with this is that, even if the bomb in Tenpony Tower has actually been gone all this time and there was never any serious danger, it doesn't alter the fact that LP, Homage, the fruity little club that secretly runs Tenpony, and anyone else who knew about the bomb believed it was still a threat. This belief should affect their behavior the same way regardless of whether or not the bomb was really there.

It's possible that Homage, being (apparently) at least somewhat privy to LP's secret schemes, might have known all along that the bomb was gone. What probably happened is that LP made her deal with Red Eye and then told Homage what she'd done so she wouldn't worry. Then, she erased her own memories. Homage knows there's no bomb, but at the same time, LP can't be told about the plans she made, so Homage has to keep pretending the bomb is still something to worry about. In itself that makes sense, but in that scenario LP would still believe there's a bomb in Tenpony Tower, and that Homage's life is in danger. This belief should logically affect her behavior, but thus far it hasn't.

Imagine that you have a child. Now imagine receiving a phone call from someone who claims to have kidnapped your child, telling you that if you don't take all of the money out of your bank account and bring it to them within 30 minutes, they are going to kill them. It will take roughly 30 minutes to go to the bank, retrieve the money, and travel to the place specified, so you can't safely deviate from the kidnapper's instructions in any way. Unless you know for absolute certain that the kidnapper is lying, you will probably follow their instructions, regardless of the actual veracity of their claim.

Now imagine that on the way to the bank, you see an old lady getting mugged. Do you stop to help her? Probably not; you don't have time, your child is a higher priority to you than a stranger, and even a neutral observer would be unlikely to prioritize an old lady's purse over a child's life. So, you probably won't help the old lady, even if you feel kind of bad about it. Even if you find out later that your child was never kidnapped and the whole thing was a ruse, you would still probably feel that your choices were justified.

LP is basically in a similar situation with Homage here. Red Eye puts the bomb in Tenpony Tower specifically as an insurance policy to make sure that LP kills the goddess and doesn't try to double-cross him in any way. He hasn't given her a time limit that I'm aware of, but a reasonable person would assume that if a reasonable amount of time passes, and LP hasn't either made good on her promise or made contact in order to explain why she hasn't, that she has probably gone awol. At that point, he would detonate the bomb, because someone in Red Eye's position wouldn't have gotten as far as he has by making idle threats.

LP should logically understand all of this. Thus, taking care of the bomb should be her main objective right now; in fact it should logically be as high or higher a priority to her than saving the wasteland or firing off the "gardens of Equestria" or whatever her ultimate objective is. If nothing else, she should be in a constant state of anxiety until she knows for certain that either the bomb has been deactivated or that Homage has been safely moved out of harm's way. However, from her actions thus far, it's clear that she isn't; in fact she's barely thought about it. From the point the bomb was introduced up until the present moment, LP has:

>spent a period of several days relaxing in Tenpony Tower itself
>gone back to Stable 2 and fended off a Steel Ranger invasion
>gone to kill the Goddess, opted not to actually kill her, and left without explaining her failure to Red Eye, offering an excuse, or requesting a time extension
>taken a purposeless side trip to some out of the way town full of hellhounds and spent the day exploring it
>gone back to Stable Whatever for some reason and fought off some kind of AI takeover
>helped SteelHooves transport his old retarded grandpa to wherever-the-fuck
>involved herself in a pointless fight with some bandits to help some random village
>murdered an entire platoon of Steel Rangers so she could steal their water crystal and give it to said village
>murdered everyone in said village because they turned out to be cannibals
>made a special side trip to transport everyone in said village who wasn't a cannibal to a different village
>involved herself in a pointless fight with some bloodwings to rescue some strange zebras
>transported said zebras back to their village
>involved herself in a pointless side quest to rescue some zebras who were kidnapped by the Goddess for some unknown reason
>traveled to Canterlot and thoroughly explored/looted it, stopping to accomplish a couple of side missions the Goddess had given her along the way
>involved herself in a pointless fight between two raider groups
>made a special side trip to help one of the raider groups rescue some foals, because it turned out they were actually not raiders so it was okay to help them
>returned to Splendid Valley to finally accomplish [/i]step one[/i] of the plan she thought up eons ago to deal with Red Eye

And that's just the shit I can remember. In all of that time, the bomb has been mentioned sporadically, if at all; I've actually brought it up more often than kkat has. But yeah, I'm sure she was really, really worried about Homage the entire time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuoQe1q79O8

Anyway, she figures out that the reason she set things up this way was so that she could give the zebra necronomicon to Trixie and then set off a balefire bomb, thus eliminating both Trixie and the book in one fell swoop. Not a bad idea in and of itself, except the idiotic way it was set up basically ruins it; also, we still haven't seen this book do anything dangerous enough to make its destruction such a high priority.

>>311732
I thought this story said Soul Jar items like the Black Book and Statuettes are indestructible.
If the Black Book is dented/scorched even slightly by that balefire bomb, Kkat lied about its invincibility and it's just pretty tough.
The secret of making balefire came from the Black Book. Why would the book give ponies/zebras a form of necromantic magic fire powerful enough to destroy it?
If you want something indestructible gone, toss it into space or encase it in something heavy and make it sink into a lava-filled volcano.

>>311702
>Doesn't it defeat the whole purpose of Littlepoop erasing her own memory to stop The Goddess from reading her mind and learning her plan if she's going to second guess herself constantly AND eventually just going to give herself a message that screams
This is basically my complaint here. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the rules of how Trixie's telepathy works, but if she can read LP's mind, then logically she should know everything that LP thinks as soon as she thinks it. Thus, you're correct: reading a message that says "there's a bomb in the building, you have 38 minutes to get out" should logically alert both LP and Trixie, and the rather generous countdown should give Trixie plenty of time to find and disable the bomb. When you consider that she probably knows every inch of the building and has a large army of alicorns at her disposal, it seems like finding and getting rid of a bomb in 38 minutes should not be too much of a problem.

>If the Zigger is the only one who can't have her memory read, why not make the plan rely on her? How complex did this plan need to be?
This is also a good point. Presumably, the strategy of having Xenith sneak the bomb in was based on both her defense against Trixie's mind-reading ability and her skill at stealth. She could get in and out of Maripony much more easily than anyone else in the party could. Littlepoop apparently sent herself in as a diversion while carrying the book, because Trixie had asked her to bring it to her. It serves the dual purpose of placing the book in a place where it would be destroyed by the bomb.

At first glance this plan makes sense, but really the most sensible strategy would be to send Xenith in with both the bomb and the book. She sneaks in undetected, sets up the bomb, leaves the book somewhere nearby, and sneaks out. The bomb explodes, the evil zebra book is destroyed, and the Goddess is killed, all in one fell swoop and with minimal risk. The only possible snags I can see with this plan would be that Xenith might have some kind of religious hangup about the book, and that maybe Trixie can sense its presence. In the first case Xenith would refuse to carry the book, and in the second it would be foolhardy to make her do it since it would be tantamount to putting a bell around her neck. However, both of these cases are speculative. Evil or not, since the book was created by zebras it shouldn't offend Xenith's religion like Homage's "star weapon" does, and if she does consider it unholy, then if anything she should consider destroying it to be a noble mission. Also, I'm pretty sure she sees herself as LP's slave or something, so if LP ordered her to carry the book in she'd pretty much have to. I don't remember anything at all being said about Trixie being able to sense the book.

Most likely, the reason it wasn't done this way is because this would mean that Xenith would be the one to defeat the Goddess instead of LP. In all likelihood this idea didn't even occur to kkat, because the idea of anyone besides Mary Sue herself claiming credit for such a huge victory would be unconscionable to him.

>You know what would have made this plan better? If Steelhooves, Calamity, or best of all the Zigger seemingly died at some point in the adventure only to sneak around and carry out that basic nuke-planting plan from the shadows while LP erased the fact that she planned this from her own memory.
I actually agree, this would be a much better approach. Here is how I would probably do it:

>Xenith fake-dies at some point, it appears to be the Goddess or one of her alicorns who has killed her
>unbeknownst to the reader, once she is "dead," she sneaks off and retrieves the book from Rarity's desk, since literally anyone could do that much
>LP actually ordered her to do all of this but since her memory is erased she thinks Xenith actually died
>this has the added bonus of emotionally gut-punching the reader by making them also think Xenith is dead
>meanwhile LP somehow intentionally misleads herself into thinking that the zebra book has been taken by the Goddess and is being kept under protection in Zebratown
>LP assumes that this is the reason the Goddess killed Xenith; she no longer needs LP's party to retrieve the book, so she sees them as a liability now
>bonus points if LP believes that the bullet that "killed" Xenith was intended for her; she now has a personal motive for wanting to see the Goddess dead
>her objective changes from getting into Canterlot to retrieve the book for the Goddess to assaulting Zebratown to take it away from her
>this has the added bonus of giving the party a legitimate reason to go to Zebratown, so the contrived "kidnapped zebras" nonsense is unnecessary
>this means that both the Zebratown arc and the Canterlot arc can be significantly condensed or even combined into one
>protip: if you have an excessively long novel like this one that needs to be shortened, combining arcs like this is a good way to trim text
>Littlepoop now assaults Zebratown
>the Goddess, who did not actually kill Xenith, does not know why LP is doing this but thinks she has been doublecrossed
>she now sends all of her forces to Zebratown to crush the traitorous Mary Sue once and for all
>with the Goddess thus distracted and her home base defenseless, Xenith can easily sneak in with the book and set the bomb off
>once the Goddess and the book are gone, the truth is revealed to both LP and the reader
>the task of actually slaying the Goddess is thus given to Xenith, who is more qualified
>meanwhile, Mary Sue still gets to take credit for the 5D chess move
>everyone wins

It's a pretty blatant ripoff of The Return of the King, but from what you guys have told me most of this book is just a ripoff of Fallout 3 anyway. From what you guys have also told me, it sounds like 3 was the worst of those games, so if kkat is going to plagiarize one way or the other, he might as well try plagiarizing something good for once.

>>311764
>probably knows every inch of the building
Um, begging your pardon but how well do you know your living/working space? Every inch? I dont contest that its intimately familiar, but bias is a tricky thing, and I wonder (rhetorically) how rigorously you can attest to knowing of nooks and crannies that go overlooked. Knowing of and about a thing doesnt intrinsically suggest that one is competent or responsible in their knowledge, and I imagine Trixie could have many blind-spots attributable to 'common/everyday' things, which would seem banal but require a bit more savvy to really get a handle on.

>>311709
>They have Littlepip performing acts in a meta sense, like the story is a video game, by passing the proper "stat check"
>Kkat very well might have handwaved how ridiculous Red Eye acted by intending it to be a reference to these kind of memes and "that's just how Fallout works! :)
>>311720
>It all more or less fits together if you view it stricly through the lens of a gamer who sees every challenge as a series of rolls that can be passed if you just weight the dice in your favor enough.
I suspect the same, and this is a huge part of what I don't like about it. I've probably said more than enough at this point about the potential perils in switching between different mediums, but it's worth repeating that just because something works in a game does not mean it will work in a story. A game is just a computer program, and a computer just does whatever its instructed to do; thus, as long as you can make something work within the logic of the program it's legal, even if what you're doing is logically preposterous. This is part of the fun of playing a game. However, the fun comes from doing it; it's you that outsmarted the computer. If you're just reading a story in which the protagonist does the same thing, it just comes across as nonsense.

If you're going to insist on adhering somewhat to a game format, it's better to use tabletop rules than computer-game rules. Unless the game is super-shitposty, most of the time the DM will reserve the right to override the dice if the action the player wants to take is too preposterous. A good example would be a well-known 4chan screenshot floating around describing a game in which the player put all of his skill points or whatever into bluff and disguise, and made his character a bear. He was able to pass nearly every check thrown at him, so he was able to have his bear successfully pass as a human. Eventually the bear became a nobleman or something, and then one day he actually failed a bluff check or something, and a person noticed that his character was a bear. However, since everyone else was fooled, they all thought the guy was nuts, and he got dragged off kicking and screaming what seemed like nonsense about how this nobleman was actually just a bear wearing people clothes. Obviously, this is funny as fuck; however, in a "serious" game, the DM probably wouldn't allow things to go this far even if the numbers were legit.

In a story, you can't do it this way at all. A story about a bear who passes as a nobleman could be funny and entertaining, but you'd have to rethink the how and why, you couldn't just rely on game rules. In a game setting the humor comes from a clever manipulation of rules; in a story it would just seem bizarre if a bear was walking around pretending to be a human and no one noticed. You'd need to think up something at least halfway-plausible to explain why the bear was able to keep getting away with it, or else write the story so it's intentionally absurd and the reader can see this.

>>311711
>clop
>Red Eye x Littlepip
This actually looks pretty hilarious. I might give it a shot.

>>311724
>Red Eye: "Let me get this straight. You want me to give you a fucking nuke, so you can erase your own memories and wander straight into Goddess territory, hoping for the best?"
Even if she laid out her whole plan for him and did so with mint-boosted charisma, I still think it's unlikely he'd go for it. I've never quite understood why Red Eye tasked her with killing the Goddess in the first place; as soon as she arrived at Maripony the first time even kkat could clearly see that there was no possible way she could win the fight. It stands to reason Red Eye could see this too.

A more sensible approach would be to have Red Eye's assignment be a doublecross to begin with. He tells LP that he wants her to kill the Goddess for him, but he's actually hoping that the Goddess will kill her instead. As I think I pointed out earlier, a better approach to killing the Goddess would be to just go through with his plan to transform himself into a similar entity, and then kill her himself when he's on an equal footing with her. And if by some miracle LP actually succeeds, he still comes out ahead because he wants the Goddess dead anyway. It's pretty much a win-win for him.

However, this would mean that he would be even less likely to agree to just hand the bomb over to LP. I honestly can't think of any scenario in which he would just hand the bomb over to her willingly; as I said, it's pretty much his single greatest piece of leverage over her, and he has absolutely zero reason to trust her.

However:

>>311720
>With some groundwork and the ability to actually write a charismatic character, this scenario might have been the foundation for something passable. A great big three-way circle of backstabbing and false allianced between Littlepip, Red Eye and the Goddess. But villains demonstrating even the faintest shred of intelligence or basic competence? In this story? Yeah, nah.
Basically this.

>>311754
>I thought this story said Soul Jar items like the Black Book and Statuettes are indestructible.
I think I remember Rarity or someone saying earlier that the book *might* be able to be destroyed by something on the level of a megaspell, so if you take this statement literally, then the balefire bomb should be able to do the trick. Its another one of those details that kkat has left ambiguous.

>>311765
Good point, but I would say that overall, Trixie would know the place far better than Xenith, who has never been there before. Plus, she has the advantage of having a large number of alicorns that she can use like extensions of her body. My main point is that 38 minutes is a pretty generous amount of time, and alerting Trixie that the bomb exists by alerting herself that it exists defeats the whole point of erasing her own memory. It's possible that the place is large enough and has enough nooks and crannies that Trixie wouldn't be able to find the bomb in 38 minutes if she knew she was supposed to be looking for it; however, I probably wouldn't be willing to bet lives on it. Either a shorter timer or maintaining the element of surprise, preferably both, would be the ideal here.

>>311765
Trixie is over 200 years old and has been in this military base with her hive mind of Alicorns for an unknowably long time. If she didn't have a vague idea of the most likely and most efficient places for a nuclear bomb to be planted, it would make her an idiot.
Then again, Trixie was alive when Memory Orbs were first introduced and yet her hive mind was still fooled by the "toss a memory orb and hope the alicorn assumes it is a grenade" plan once. So Trixie might actually be retarded.
Scratch that, Trixie was alive when PipBucks were introduced and yet she lacks one. Her army of Alicorns, made by mutating wasteland ponies and vault ponies, lack PipBucks. Even her pseudo-religion of normal ponies lack PipBucks. It would only take one Pipbuck-Haver (not even a PipBuck "master" like Littlepoop) to detect Xenith on the PipBuck radar and turn the VATS/SATS aimbot on to kill her.

Wouldn't it be more interesting if The Goddess was not simply mean Trixie, but instead a barely functional amalgamation of three highly contradictory personalities that hate each other? The resulting monster would be quite tragic.

If I recall correctly, the question of "why doesn't the Goddess send her alicorns to find the bomb?" does get answered shortly. It's not in Maripony itself, but the hellhound tunnels underneath. It's not meant to destroy the base, just collapse it into a massive sinkhole. This just raises more questions though, like how Xenith got the bomb past the hellhounds, as well as setting up MORE meaningless angst and a couple of daft subplots resulting from the hellhound genocide.

>>311768
It still pisses me off that Fallout Equestria fans will call Littlepip's silly plan here "awesome". As if we're supposed to take her plot armour accomplishing something effectively impossible at face value and say "Holy fucking shit she's so cool".

Glim, do you think this story would be improved if Littlepip talked The Goddess into self-destructing and giving up on life? It would be a simpler method to kill her and every Alicorn in her base. It wouldn't require an asinine Memory Gambit that relies on getting a bullshit nuke from the man holding her girlfriend's tower hostage with said nuke. Littlepip could simply take her usual pretentious pseudointellectual moralizing bullshit and yap The Goddess into submission.

It references the usefulness of the Speech skill in Fallout better than LP's bomb bullshit.

It gives a competent author the chance to explore the morality and personalities of both hero and villain. It also lets the author spell out all themes and subtleties for the benefit of any professional reviwers.

It skips Zebratown, it skips Canterlot, it skips the ghoul town in Canterlot, it skips the Ministries, it skips the Raiders and Not Raiders and Fluttershy's Cottage, and it even skips the Diamond Dogs/Hellhounds.

If there are any negative consequences following The Goddess's death, The Goddess can be blamed for them because The Goddess chose suicide after losing one debate/shouting contest/rap battle with Littlepip.

It lets LP get the "kill Goddess" job from Red Eye, pull it off in an afternoon, and fly home to Red Eye to fuck him up before returning home to get sixty nine orgasms in a row from Knockoff- I mean Bootleg- I mean Homage.

It puts Kkat on the spot and forces him to try and earn a Certified Speech Check Moment through dialogue, his weakest suit. Practice can only help him. Not that trannies can learn or grow since they're stuck in delusions to try and cope with their feelings of inadequacy but still.

Plus it's a fantasy tradition. How many sci-fi stories have there been where someone like Kirk or Picard or The Doctor rants about hope and justice and heroism and humanity's potential so hard the enemy dies or gives up? Fantasy stories probably do the same shit all the time since SciFi is basically Fantasy 2. It's an easy way to give the hero center stage and a spotlight and a soapbox on which to say pretty much anything. Littlepoop lacks the charisma to say anything Kamina and Simon might say but if there was any sort of ideological or moral basis to LP's character, even a vague single word like Hope or Determination, this would be the time to display it.

If the villain gives up or commits suicide because the hero's argument was just that good, it makes the hero seem smart and charismatic and morally righteous in a way punching the villain out with a single blow just couldn't. You know, unless the punch was meant to represent something deep and symbolic like a patient man's patience running out or a cowardly man discovering his confidence or an untalented non-elite hard worker's ability to overcome someone born powerful who considers himself untouchably above others.

Of course, there's always another option.

Wouldn't it be sick if Littlepip telekinetically lifted herself for a flying tackle into The Goddess to take both mares into a big vat of goo, fusing herself with The Goddess? The resulting fusion would, provided LP is determined enough to retain her morals, ideals, goals, and sense of self despite the assimilation, result in a new synthesis. A kinder, more moral Goddess with Littlepip serving as her conscience. New Alicorns with stronger telekinesis are born to establish a "peaceful" authoritarian dictatorship over the Wasteland through force. It would basically be a heroic sacrifice on LP's part to turn this Goddess into a force for good or an ascension to the level of demigod after conquering a demigod's existence and making it her own depending on how you look at it. Either way, it would make her fundamentally outclass Twilight, a pony basically forgotten once Trixie The Goddess ate her. Have we seen a single smart or moral action from The Goddess that can be attributed to some shred of Twilight still holding on within the hive mind? It sucks that Kkat wasted the character of Twilight for this, just like he wasted the potential within the settings of FIM and Fallout just to make a wasteland of Equestria's semi-paradise.

>>311564
At this point, kkuck has completely gone over all of his own notes and scripts, yet come up with sheer retardation for fixing his own errors. ggnore

>>311603
Stop talking about animu that NO ONE cares for and DOES NOT MATTER, you pathetic cunt.

>>311622
My tl;dr on this is: a moral quandary is useless without an equally opposing set of equally cultural learnings to oppose it. Not only is that inane, it is a blatant red herring packaged inside a "mysterious plot device".

>>311628
>>311637
Don't bother trying to 'teach' or 'show off' anything to Niggel. He refuses to learn beyond his own shortsighted 'muh beliefs r alwayz rite' indoctrination.

>>311638
Dead wrong. kkuck is entirely blamed for his own EXPLOITATION of 'vices' that he knows are objectively, culturally, and morally wrong. He 'gets' to live out his power fantasy of hypocritical superhero antics through a medium that he plays poorly at. The second that a person is unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy is the exact point when that person should be considered cowardly, spineless dogshit, then disposed of. There are no excuses.

>>311640
Too bad kkuck wasn't raped and executed by someone of worse/better taste. At least that would have stopped his continuous defenestration of canonicity.

>>311642
More faggotry assisted black-and-white-mentality-because-I-said-so written by someone that can't write and has zero understanding of literacy.

>>311646
Wow, FINALLY a zebra name that might actually makes sense! ...it's still some retarded edge-quest plot necessary stupidity. I would have thoroughly enjoyed this Qarl Death-Hoof if he'd been the one to drop the super-ultra-mega-cataclysm "balefire bombs" on Edgequestria and wipe out all the failpones completely. Least that would have been something worthwhile to write about.

>“Ah… I don’t think Ah could take this anymore without ya,” Calamity told her. “Ah’m strugglin’ here, Velvet. It feels like all muh friends are fallin’ apart, and Ah’m tryin’ t’ be the strong one. But Ah ain’t doin’ so good.”
This is yet a painful repeat of "this superhero team is completely breaking down! we gotta learn more about their character arcs to understand what's going on so that they can solve their differences and become ThE gOoD gOyZ aGaIn!" schmuckery. There is zero reason for it outside of: "MUH PROTAGS NEED TO BE SEEN BETTER!!!!" Hamfisted dogshit.

>>311647
No. That doesn't answer shit.

Oh gee, more gaydar fights that only end up with the !!heroine!! being too ashamed to show off her perfect face in front of the REAL GOOD GUYS. How utterly thrilling.

>>311650
If that was a serious question, the answer is: no one can except for certain demented fucktards that should have been aborted before they had a chance to speak.

Great-at-Shilling-Like-A-Perpetual-Karen-Berg would be proud.png

>>311658
Cryptic words can only be used in one of four ways: downright horrifying, bizarre, unhelpfully helpful, or flagrant "YOUR DOOM IS NEIGH". Seems kkuck never read the manual.

Where'd the bomb come from? Who looted it? Why didn't the pseudo-loyal zigger that's totally not a traitor say anything about this before? Do Littlenigger's memory problems give her plot armor- oh wait, the answer to this one is a certain yes. More plot conveniences.

>>311701
Yep, called it: massive plot convenience that went oh-so-perfectly-well that even the lez protag hypocrite couldn't remember.

Glim, if you don't know much about Mentats from Fallout 1/2/NV, then here's the explanation:
they're basically a combination of hyper-methamphetamine and hyper-cocaine that were given to expendable regiments during the Invasion of China. Yes. The US military goes: "Okay, we can sacrifice TEN MILLION PEOPLE with the use of these ultra-drugs in order to win", but then the group that eventually becomes the Western Enclave (the only Enclave to survive, at least until FAILout Tree and Fower retcon this) says: "excuse me you fucking wot m8?! PEOPLE, don't take that shit! YOU WILL ALL DIE FROM IT!"

There's a problem Fallout 1 AND 2 have several characters warning either the Vault Dweller or Chosen One about how crippling they are. For one, they're extremely rare and cost more than most weapons or armor. For two, they're highly addictive since there is no cure. If you get addicted, you are FUCKED. The little benefits that you get from Mentats are tiny in comparison to how absolutely horrible the withdrawal symptoms are. In addition, Mentats are a permanent -2 to INT (Intelligence!), -2 to PER (Perception!), and -2 to CHA (Charisma!) debuff, meaning said withdrawal lasts FOREVER. tl;dr: there is NO way to get rid of the withdrawal in 1 or 2. However, by the time of Fallout: New Vegas, there IS a substance that can clear most all addictions without.. actively harming the addictee. This is canon due to the fact that the Chosen One in Fallout 2 discovers a method to cure Jet addicts from Myron, the dipshit idiot that created Jet in the first place.. whom was then stabbed to death by a Jet addict in New Reno.

Hilarious irony must have occurred between the time of Fallout 2 and New Vegas since the anti-addiction pill was based on pre-war concepts of how to effectively KILL physiological, psychological, and physical 'needs' for a substance. Some of this information was found in Vault City, which had a pre-war G.E.C.K. and a set of massive, scavenged databases on medical information from the surrounding area. The cure itself was ultimately DEVISED by someone in Chinatown with the help of both the Chosen One, with Myron's help, and someone that had access to the 'Emperor', which was a gigantic hyper-computer AI held in a deep vault in Chinatown. Combining all of the knowledge together, the cure for nearly all addictions occurred.

This leads to the stupid problem though: are Mint-als simply "magically syncretized amphetamines and cocaine bonded together", or just some dumb as fuck floral shit put together by kkuck? My money is definitely on the second.

>>311732
At that point, kkuck has either completely lost the script at this point which seems more likely, or doesn't even know what he's fucking doing with his oh-so-holy-characters-that-can-never-have-anything-TRULY-bad-happen-to-them-because-they're-so-previous-to-him! Littlenigger essentially has complete free roam due to (((author's rights))), without any time constraints whatsoever, and... never has a single chance to mature as a character. At all. EVERYTHING is always done by her "friends", she doesn't really have to do shit except get shithammered all the time on a highly addictive substance with withdrawals that make heroin look time, but never suffers from said withdrawals.

There's nothing worse than an INCOMPETENT Mary Sue written by a fail-author that lives on power fantasies.

>>311811
Not glim, but I feel like responding here.

>Glim, do you think this story would be improved if Littlepip talked The Goddess into self-destructing and giving up on life?
Nah. That's pretty much exactly what happened in Fallout 1. If anything, the Goddess sidestepping the "mutants can't breed" problem with "I know, we're working on it" was a good move on Kkat's part. Simply offing the Goddess as soon as she shows up would be just as bad (if less tedious to read through) as the long, meandering path we've taken to reach this point, because it just hammers in that she's a useless villain that serves as little more than a speedbump to Littlepip.

The Goddess should, by rights, be an incredibly dangerous large-scale threat. She's a two-century-old fusion of some of Equestria's brightest minds, is (supposedly) very intelligent, and has an army of mind-linked magical supersoldiers at her disposal. Her obvious weaknesses are her arrogance (it's Trixie!) and her lack of allies. Littlepip should be exploiting those facts, not out-braining the big brain villain because she just happens to be a tactical genius that nobody else can predict on top of all her other skills.

>Wouldn't it be sick if Littlepip telekinetically lifted herself for a flying tackle into The Goddess to take both mares into a big vat of goo, fusing herself with The Goddess? The resulting fusion would, provided LP is determined enough to retain her morals, ideals, goals, and sense of self despite the assimilation, result in a new synthesis. A kinder, more moral Goddess with Littlepip serving as her conscience.
Ew, no. Imagine thinking that Littlepip could serve as the conscience of anything. This is particularly funny because it turns out to be Red Eye's master plan in the end.

>>311813
>Stop talking about animu that NO ONE cares for and DOES NOT MATTER, you pathetic cunt.
You've been at this for literal years. You thrive on the idea that if you attack me when you still seem anonymous and have not yet outed yourself as hclegend aka vril or one of that narcissist's thralls, somebody just might take what you say at face value without considering who it is from. It's why your personal attacks on me become less frequent in every thread where enough people have publicly doubted/questioned you or decided to ignore you upon realizing what you're really worth.
Give up on trying to make me give up. You're too much of a shameful person for your attempts at shaming me to be effective. When you personally attack me in threads you desperately hope you won't be found out. What if every time you told me to stop posting and tried to speak for everybody on this site, I reminded everyone of the pro-LGBTQ anti-SuperStraight shit you still post on reddit to this day? You aren't the only one who saw this. >>311759 → so grow up and focus on the thread topic. Also, Glim's "I want to slap Kkat so hard his fake tits fly into Equestria" posts are funny. Your "It's a shame Kkat was not executed for writing a fanfic I don't like" comments are like A-Log's rants about what "should" happen to CWC. Learn comedic timing, learn about wordplay, learn how to be funny. I know you exaggerate and distort your account of reality to suit your feelings, but instead try to exaggerate what you want to do to Kkat in a comedic manner.

>>311815
Maybe if this fic started with The Goddess Trixie calling to Velvet in her sleep to make her leave the stable, with LP following her because a shred of Twilight calls to her in her sleep, it could build up to The Goddess as an interesting final boss. LP's conflict with her could tie together the story's individualist themes and thesis on power and morality and other things the story would have if it was good. After all, in a post apocalyptic wasteland the most moral thing you can try to do is fix the wasteland with long-term solutions that build a better world. Imagine a Littlepip on a quest to travel around the Wasteland's biggest settlements, earning their respect and a favour from each one when she completes a sidequest for each one, because she knows of the threat The Goddess poses (a threat nopony wants to take seriously, preferably because they are villains with good reputations) and wants to unite all these city-states into an Anti-Goddess Army that will one day become the New Equestria.

Of course, such a story would require fewer locations that only exist to be skyrim dungeons and more major settlements with worldbuilding and interesting quests to give. What settlements are even in this story? Old Appleoosa, New Appleoosa, Ponyville aka Raiderville, Tenpony Tower, Pinkie's old house which Silver Bell lived in for a while, the rock-breaking prison, Red Eye's Pitt aka Fillydelphia, that random meaningless town Gutterville, that random meaningless town full of Diamond Dogs, Zebratown is just some place with Zebra kids, Arbu the cannibal town, Canterlot is just a deathtrap with some ghouls living in one part of it, and there's Maripony Military Base which is just Trixie and the Alicorns. Am I missing anything? I could swear some other place was mentioned for orphans but still. Do any of these settlements have interesting local cultures, unique environmental design, or memorable meaningful side characters? Did they challenge LP or her views or abilities in interesting ways? I've read fantasy novels with twice as many meaningful interesting settlements in less than half the words this story uses. The "Hero goes from town to town like a rock band on the road" model of fantasy story is a goddamn classic because it makes every town the heroes stop to help feel like an important step on the journey to the final challenge even if a town lacks the ability to gate off further progress through sheer force until its sidequest is complete.

>>311857
>Maybe if this fic started with The Goddess Trixie calling to Velvet in her sleep to make her leave the stable, with LP following her because a shred of Twilight calls to her in her sleep, it could build up to The Goddess as an interesting final boss.
One of the issues is that this story has no less than three 'final boss' level threats. The Goddess, Red Eye, and The Enclave, which hasn't even appeared in any meaningful capacity yet. And it's up to Littlepip and her friends to defeat all of them because imagine anyone else in this setting actually accomplishing jack shit. That causes two issues - it dilutes each villain's screen time and bloats the story's length. When you consider that the Goddess is for all intents and purposes the first and weakest of this story's major villains, the problems speak for themselves.

>>311863
To make matters worse, Fallout 2 and Fallout 3 Enclave were very different factions. A combined fusion of F2's good writing and D3's idiotic simplistic babby writing would be a lesser take on F2's writing at best. Yet to get three main villains to match the three games he decided to make up a new villain inspired by Ashur from The Pitt. That doesn't seem like elegant writing to me. Ashur isn't exactly the world's deepest character with the world's deepest ideology and world's most interesting methods. He's clearly not averse to referencing Fallout New Vegas, considering the Zebra Caesar and how Canterlot's got hazards from Dead Money's Sierra Madre. But he wasted Caesar's Legion on pre-war zebras for no goddamn reason. Why? Was he afraid that if he made a post-war zigger legion of spear-chucking anti-technology thugs who love using herbal healing powder and hate medical science, he would be called racist for not making this hyper-negroid faction as light-skinned as possible? Was he afraid that making Zebras a threat to Equestria after the war would harm whatever he wanted to say about war and Ponies and Zebras during this fic's length and finale? I just can't see any benefits to setting the story out like this. Didn't we get about halfway through the story before the slightest hint of a long-term goal was established? Even now that goal is essentially just "kill these villains".

>>311869
In theory, the long term goal of the story was introduced in chapter twenty-something when the protagonists met Spike and learned about the Gardens of Equestria. They have a way to unfuck the world, they just need to find new element bearers. This is a perfectly reasonable goal on paper, but it's been entirely overtaken by a neverending chain of sideshows and murder sprees.

>>311871
Come to think of it, how does eliminating the Wasteland's baddies contribute directly to the goal of finding ponies moral enough to activate the Gardens Of Equestria and denuke everything?
I'm pretty sure this is why no Fallout game ended with the world getting de-nuked. Once such a massive reset-button is established anything short of pressing it seems like a minor victory in comparison. But minor meaningful victories are a huge part of post apocalyptic fiction. They're steps on the road to recovering from the apocalypse.

Surely a smarter author, if forced to write like this, would give LP the quest to specifically hunt down ponies rumored to be potential Element Of Harmony candidates while taking villains down whenever they are encountered along the path and need to go down. Or establish that The Wasteland is awful because of major villains who have their own ways of forcing good ponies to make compromises with their moralities and virtues until they are no longer good enough to use the EOH. Or send LP on a journey to kill specific villains while figuring out which of the EOH she is along the way, but then the six friends she makes along the way turn out to be one EOH each and because LP grows and matures during the story she goes from whining at the Gardens Of Equestria to understanding why a murderhobo like her isn't Mane Six material and accepting that. This LP would ride off into the sunset on a motorcycle once Equestria is turned into a happy sunshine place, knowing she'll return if she and her hyperviolence are needed once more.

This might be an odd question...

Is it reductive to say "Kkat would improve this story greatly by reducing its length"?

On one hand if you love Fallout Equestria, more length makes you happy because it means more time spent with Littlepip and friends before the story ends and you have to return to reality.

On the other hand this story gained that length by filling itself full of meaningless filler. Gutterville never mattered. That mad doctor and his Manticores never mattered. That vault full of chimeras where Calamity got poisoned and almost died while LP was busy going full murderhobo looting every room in the dungeon before blowing it up never mattered. Nothing involving Zebratown mattered. The Diamond Dog/Hellhound town didn"t matter and dragging Grandpa Cuntbasket across over nine thousand miles of wasteland in sixty nine degree faren height heat didn't matter. Random encounters where the ponies suddenly get involved in spontaneous firefights don't matter. Perhaps these things would matter if time and ammunition and food supplies were all highly limited things to give every second spent within this world an air of tension. But as it stands LP and friends have infinite ammo cheats and plot armour cheats on.

And then there's stuff that barely mattered. Nothing that happened involving the rock breaking prison had any meaningful effect on the world around it so it didn't really matter either unless you count how it made the Talon Company like Littlepip. That rock prison's stupid pileup of clashing villains, the facility's backstory, Velvet singing on a stage rigged with bombs, and the random dragon at the end, it was all just there because Kkat wanted to show off his ability to overcomplicate things so much not even he can keep track of everything.

Old and New Appleoosa are there because Kkat wanted to tell everyone his retarded FIM headcanon for why the steam powered trains in Equestria pulled by horses are like that: ponies get coal from zebra lands and send it home on coal trains (something LP finds so retarded, she gets drunk to cope with it while heading to war and ends up taking a Party Time MintAl because she was told it was a hangover cure except it didn't help) and the coal is used to power the boiler to send steam through the steam whistle to scare wild animals off the track.

Everything involving the Steel Rangers or Steel Ranger Outcasts or whatever the BOS ripoff and its civil war and two factions are called, none of it really matters personally to any characters or the world, it's just here because Kkat wanted us to know he thought of it and because this was his idea for how he could put "the nice Brotherhood Of Steel" and "the mean Brotherhood of Steal" from different games in the same story. Nothing in Canterlot mattered aside from the fact that it was where the Black Book was located, but none of the injuries she suffered or the enemies she killed or ghouls she met mattered. The black book could have been buried underneath Derpy Hooves's front door for all the fucks that didn't matter.

Ponyville is only there so Kkat can have fun shitting and pissing and farting and bleeding all over Ponyville while decorating it with cute critter entrails. That boy just ain't right, I tell ya hwhat. And then because he thought of an edgy idea for Fluttershy's cottage 40 chapters too late the characters get dragged over there anyway like parents whose child wants to show them macaroni art.

Arbu and Bullshit Cross... I want to say they mattered because the characters won't shut up about them. And at least they're an attempt at critically examining the idea of a murderhobo who shoots and sidequests first while asking questions later. But LP was doubting herself before that happened, even seeing herself as a dying raider in the Truth Mirror. This scene didn't shake LP to her core or make her go through an arc where she gets crippling depression and hides in a tent until somepony inspires her or forces her to save her friends and instantly recover from her mental disorders.

LP and Velvet are vault ponies and religious Celestia lovers yet this does nothing for their characterization because we know so little about their home vault or what it did and did not teach them. We spend too long watching the cast of Fallout Equestria talk and act and not enough time getting to know them through scenes full of characterization and meaningful dialogue.

Derpy is there for the memes. A ghoul pegasus whose store sells basically anything, yet she lives in "New Appleoosa" which is nowhere near as important as any meaningful settlement like Tenpony Tower or... fuck, I guess only Tenpony Tower and maybe Maripony really matter. At most, the vault LP is from and Red Eye's lands and his stupid thunderdome could be added to the list.

Xenith isn't much of a character. All of LP's friends feel like cardboard cutout but this vague amalgamation of cliche "nice freed scarred african slave girl" ideas makes no sense as a character and cutting her daughter wouldn't change the character. Cutting her whole retarded backstory and replacing it with "zebra bred in captivity, raised on stories of pre-war zebra culture before parents died in mines" would save time without losing anything.

Even Red Eye and his slaver empire, and that random bollocks with The Enclave showing up to yell at Spike and get burned, they are irrelevant to the story of LP defeating The Goddess. Red Eye wasn't even necessary for the nuclear bomb megaspell because Silver Bell had one of those. I forget what was done with it.

This story is bad. Should it be shorter?

>>311732

Anyway, LP stands there staring vacantly into space, a fine ribbon of drool no doubt hanging from her lip, as she tries to figure out the reasoning behind her own plan instead of just rolling with it and doing what she told herself to do. She does this for at least one minute; the timer on the bomb actually counts down from 38 to 37 minutes as she is standing around doing her inner-monologue.

Fortunately for her, the low average IQ of the villains she faces saves her bacon once again. Despite the fact that her thoughts are running a mile a minute and Trixie can presumably hear all of them as clearly as if she were speaking out loud, and despite the fact that there is nothing besides this conversation that should realistically be holding Trixie's attention, she somehow doesn't notice the fact that LP basically just spoonfed her the details of the plan that she went to the trouble of erasing her own memory just to keep secret. Eventually, she deduces this much:

>{{THE ZEBRA!}}
Oh dear, it seems the jig is up. What will LP do now that her carefully-laid plans have come to ruin?

>I floated the Black Book out of my saddlebags and tossed it into the taint. It splashed, then bobbed, the twisted and profane black leather floating with the debris.
Alright, that's an action you can take I guess. So, let's see if I'm understanding this correctly: Trixie now has the book, which was her objective all along, and the only thing standing between her and whatever power she can gain from it is the pesky matter of finding and disarming a balefire bomb. Well, it's a good thing LP gave her 38 (sorry, 37) minutes to look for it. With an army of alicorns and intimate knowledge of the building at her disposal, it shouldn't be that hard.

Anyway, the author makes a half-hearted attempt at giving LP a "Frodo and the Ring" moment when she plunges the book into the depths of kkat's taint:

>No! Think of all the great things you could do!
>I backpedaled, my brain finally working. I needed to get out of here now!
>You could save Twilight Sparkle!
So this is the last temptation of the Broodwich? Saving Twilight Sparkle? Pfft, good luck with that, book; Littlepoop barely gives a fuck about the ponies she actually knows.

This whole exchange would have had more significance if the book itself had more significance, and if LP's struggle between accepting or rejecting its power had been more of a central plot issue, instead of something that was just suddenly tacked on over the course of the last chapter. Like LP's addiction subplot, the idea itself wasn't bad, but it failed miserably because this author refuses to put even a modicum of thought or effort into anything he does.

>Thump. I backed into somepony. My panic skyrocketed, my heart skipping a beat, and my levitation magic imploded, dropping me into the mucky lake of taint.
So...falling into taint. I forget, is that dangerous or not dangerous? Or is it like the Pink Cloud: dangerous when the author wants it to be, basically harmless otherwise?

Anyway, she turns around and sees that there are three Enclave pegasi standing at the entrance. One of them introduces himself as Harbinger. LP, who realistically ought to have more on her mind right now than this, suddenly recalls a random side conversation she had with Calamity once in which he told her that Harbinger was one of the ponies in the Enclave's high council.

>I desperately searched for a way around them. I could try floating them, but they had wings. I wouldn’t be able to hold them in place just by lifting their hooves off the ground. I could try to fight my way through, but these were Enclave. It could be like fighting three or four Calamitys, and I would so thoroughly lose. Even if I won, my injuries would assure I didn’t get out in time.
Why any of is this a problem? So far these three haven't threatened you; in fact they haven't even acknowledged your presence. You fell into the taint due to your own clumsiness; they didn't knock you in. Why not just walk past them and leave the room the way you came in? If they have no reason to stop you, they probably won't try to stop you.

>{{FLY, MY CHILDREN!! SAVE YOURSELVES!!}}
>Okay, and part of me was a little bit impressed with the Goddess. Trixie knew she was about to die, and her final act was to save the alicorns. Damn.
Maybe I'm just a cockeyed optimist, but I really don't see how her situation is that hopeless. She has 37 minutes to live; why not spend them trying to find LP's bomb? Nobody in this story has displayed any particular intelligence or creativity, so I doubt it's that well hidden.

Oh yeah, also there's a bit of a random plot twist in here: it turns out the three Enclave ponies are here to offer the Goddess an alliance. Since we still don't know anything about the Enclave or what their goals or beliefs are, it's impossible to gage whether or not we should find this surprising. In any case, they explain to her that Red Eye is planning to backstab her which I'm pretty sure she already knows and that whatever he's planning to do with the weather towers is some kind of threat to the Enclave. Again, knowing basically nothing about the Enclave except that they're a bunch of Pegasi who live in some kind of cloud fortress and eschew involvement in ground-pony affairs, it's impossible to really guess at what Red Eye's plan might mean for them. Probably something to do with screwing with weather; if Red Eye gets the towers up and running maybe it would destroy their cloud city or something.

>Oh this was not happening! I pranced anxiously in the taint, looking around for an alternate escape route. Oh Goddesses, even if I found one, there wouldn’t be enough time for me to get away!
This is beyond ridiculous. The Enclave pegasi are ignoring you and Trixie has what she wants; just leave through the damn door. Even with all this goofing around you've still got more than half an hour, for crying out loud.

>>311978

>YOU HAVE THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES TO GET CLEAR.
>Oh no! NonononononononoNO! This is bad! Need to find a way out NOW!
This situation is so absurd it's actually surpassed unintentional comedy, yet I still don't get the impression this scene is supposed to be funny. I can't believe anyone could fail to see how preposterous this is, but so far kkat seems to be writing it as though it's meant to be genuinely suspenseful. It's like some kind of cartoon parody of an escape scene: a slow-moving steamroller is plodding towards the protagonist at 0.25 mph, and she's like 500 feet away, but she's screaming like it's a high-speed train bearing down on her and there's no way she can get out of its way in time.

Anyway, LP eventually decides that hiding in Twilight Sparkle's spell-proof observation chamber would be a better idea than simply using the 35 minutes she has at her disposal to escape from the enemies that are mostly focused on each other and are barely paying attention to her. She floats herself to a nearby catwalk, which draws the attention of the three Enclave pegasi. For some reason, they decide to give chase. Harbinger orders another pegasi, named Ambrosia, after her.

>My heart was pounding in my chest. An odd itch was creeping through the insides of my legs, spreading out.
Uh-oh. Sounds like she might have caught something from kkat's taint. Oh well, as I recall that was a simple one-treatment kind of procedure the last time around, so probably nothing to worry about.

LP runs into the safe-room and is chased by Ambrosia. Ambrosia orders her to halt, but LP ignores her. She finds the button that shuts the spell-proof doors, and she and Ambrosia are sealed up inside Twilight Sparkle's bomb-shelter. The timer on LP's radar helpfully informs them that they still have a whopping 32 minutes until the bomb explodes. Oh well, I'm sure she'll think of something to do that will pass the time. Maybe she's got Angry Birds on her PipBuck or something.

Page break. The last microscene of the chapter is yet another incongruously-placed DJ Pon3 broadcast. She basically just announces that a megaspell went off in the vicinity of Splendid Valley, and that a bunch of alicorns were seen fleeing the area. The rest of it is just the usual gushing about the "Wasteland Savior" probably being involved, until the broadcast is suddenly hijacked by someone claiming to represent the Grand Pegasus Enclave.

They went to the trouble of hijacking the broadcast simply to deliver this message:

>“Do not be afraid. We are here to save you!”
Alrighty then.

Anyway, it wasn't necessarily a bad stylistic choice to end the chapter this way. It lets us know that the bomb did indeed explode, while still leaving us curious about the fate of Littlepoop. Also, it sets up what I'm assuming is going to be the final arc, or one of the final arcs, or something.

As usual, however, what would ordinarily be permissible according to dramatic license is slightly confusing in this particular story. Where and when did LP hear this broadcast? Once again, I must protest that first person was a bad choice of narrative for a story of this much size and complexity.

Also, there's footnote at the bottom of the page that caught my eye:

>Quest Perk added: Touched by Taint (2) – Exposure to Taint has altered your physiology. You do not take immediate damage from radiation. In fact, you gain extra healing while being exposed to it. However, radiation continues to build up in your system as normal.
When the story first began, I remember thinking these footnotes about "leveling up" and gaining "perks" and whatever were meant to be a cutesy nod to the story's video game origins. However, as the story has progressed I've gotten the impression that these things are meant to be taken seriously. As in, these footnotes are recording actual benefits and abilities and whatnot that this character is supposed to have gained, and that kkat is factoring them into the story as he is telling it.

At this point I don't care that much what LP's "character sheet" really looks like, especially since kkat seems to disregard his own rules most of the time anyway. However, this one I thought was worth raising an actual objection to. If I'm understanding it correctly, this is saying that LP's exposure to taint has given her a mutation that allows her to actually benefit from it. So, not only will taint no longer harm her, it will actually heal her, which means that there is now another kind of bullshit healing magic working in LP's favor.

Much like the "Pink Cloud" earlier, this "taint" stuff has been built up as some kind of horrible, final-boss level bad stuff that will royally fuck you up if you touch it, and, like the Pink Cloud, it's mostly failed to live up to its hype. LP has been exposed to this stuff twice that I can remember; the first time it didn't do much to her besides make her itch a little, and it was apparently such a minor issue that it was cured off-camera almost as an afterthought. It's possible the author is planning to have something else happen this time around, but so far it's looking like the only effect it will have is giving her yet another ridiculous piece of plot armor to hide behind. Not only is she immune to radiation now, it's actually beneficial for her.

Seriously, as much as this pony whines about how the wasteland hates her and she's miserable and sad all the time, the amount of good fortune she has is just unbelievable. "Taint" is the same stuff that mutated all the diamond dogs and turned Trixie and Twilight into a monster, yet she gets superpowers from it? If you kicked LP down a flight of stairs, she'd probably find a bag of gold at the bottom, and the fall would work a kink out of her neck.

>>311988

Chapter Thirty-Nine: This Coming Storm

Today's Fortune Cookie:

>“We all gotta go sometime. I was just hoping for something more… heroic.”
My best guess is that this is a direct quotation from kkat's father's suicide note, after he learned what kind of lifestyle the internet had led his son to pursue.

This is another massive-length chapter. They're all pretty long; as I've mentioned, since about Chapter 20 or so the chapters have averaged between 10,000-15,000 words each. However, there are several in here that are gigantic. The 50,000 word behemoth was Chapter 37, and fortunately none of the rest of them are quite that long. However, including this one, there are two that are over 30k, and one that's about 27k. So, although we are nearing the end of the journey, we've still got a lot of rough terrain to slog through yet.

Anyway, in keeping with the usual format, the chapter starts out with a long-winded pompous monologue from Littlepoop that tries to make this shitpile seem deeper than it actually is.

>I had seen empirical evidence of the reality of souls. Beyond that, my beliefs in an afterlife where the souls of dead ponies continued on in eternal peace and in the transcendent souls of Celestia and Luna as Goddesses who watched over us with love and pity and hope -- these surpassed the foundations of knowledge and were the architecture of faith.
Case in point. Not only is the second sentence of this passage a massive run-on that just barely manages to be coherent, it tells us absolutely nothing about what Littlepoop or any of the other characters actually believe in. Whatever this Celestia/Luna religion is exactly, I'm getting the impression it's mostly a Sunday thing.

Anyway, she yammers out a lot of elegant-sounding but ultimately insubstantial gibberish about souls, and then moves on to the Black Book. The tl;dr here is that the book apparently contains the soul of the "mad zebra" who wrote it, and that it has some kind of evil power that calls out to those who are "vulnerable to its influence." Apparently, LP was one such pony.

As I've complained before, despite the importance of this book, it hasn't really factored into the story much; certainly not enough to justify the amount of importance LP places on it here. It can be used to create Soul Jars, and presumably it can do some other naughty things as well, but the extent of its powers are not really known. It's unclear what Trixie even wanted it for in the first place.

I actually find myself depending more and more on the FoE wiki while reading this story to keep track of details. Initially I tried to restrain myself from using it, because I wanted to see how effectively kkat could clarify the concepts in his own text. However, I feel like I've had my answer to that particular question for some time now; at this point I just want to finish this book and be done with it.

So, here is what the wiki has to say about Trixie and the Black Book:

>The Goddess learned of the Black Book and sought to use it as a way to extend her influence across the entirety of the Equestrian Wasteland, employing several Alicorns a decade earlier to infiltrate the ruins of the old capital to find the book, unknowing that the Pink Cloud would serve to disrupt her telepathic link with them in the process. Over the course of ten years, the Alicorns that were sent in were unable to find the book at all, fighting against an assortment of horrors from the Broadcasters to the Canterlot Ghouls.
You'll note that even the authors of the wiki don't seem to know what exactly Trixie planned to do with this thing once she had it. Also noteworthy is that my earlier question about why the alicorns were in Canterlot has been answered: Trixie sent them there to retrieve the book, but the Pink Cloud cut off their telepathy. This is one of those details that was probably mentioned earlier but I simply forgot about.

This actually raises questions of its own. The text above seems to suggest that the alicorns in Canterlot continued searching for the book even after they were cut off from Trixie's influence, but were unable to find it for whatever reason. However, it's not like the book was hidden in some secret out of the way location; Rarity just kept it in her locked desk. It wasn't even in a damn safe or anything. It was stored in an obvious place with no protection other than a simple lock on the drawer; literally anyone with a crowbar could have easily retrieved this thing eons ago.

Anyway, whatever; I'm getting off topic.

>I was vulnerable to it. My weaknesses -- addiction, curiosity and the shame of having only a single spell -- played to its strengths.
This character's """weaknesses""" are somehow even more obnoxious than her strengths. Let's go through them one by one.

>addiction
LP's "addiction" is one of the most contrived non-issues in this entire book. She has never behaved like an addict, these mints have had little (if any) serious negative impact on her life and the lives of those around her, yet the text insists on treating this mint problem of hers like some debilitating condition.

>curiosity
What LP calls "curiosity" I would call kleptomania coupled with an annoying tendency to poke her nose into shit that is none of her business.

>single spell
This is by far the most obnoxious one. I've complained extensively about how overpowered her levitation ability is, yet she's constantly complaining about it like it's some kind of weakness. Specifically, she seems to consider herself magically weak because she can only do one spell, but the concept of spells is just one of many concepts in this story that kkat has never fleshed out. The way it looks to me, LP is complaining because she has one extremely ridiculous superpower instead of several of them.

Interestingly, she doesn't mention her narcissism, extreme selfishness, or messiah complex when rattling off her list of weaknesses. Then again, that would require she possess at least some self-awareness.

>>311992
Littlepoop isn't even that curious. I've read about curious characters. LP doesn't try to test her abilities under controllable and stressful conditions, she doesn't nerd out over pointless weapons trivia, and she doesn't hurt her relationships with her friends by constantly violating their trust the second she wants to know something they won't tell her. Sometimes she puts her life and the mission at risk to learn bullshit trivia but only when Kkat wants to spell out something a more competent writer would hint at through set design and environmental shit. What does and does not capture LP's curiousity is entirely arbitrary. She is not consistently someone who obsesses over knowledge and gets upset when it is unavaillable to her. Her friends don't resent her for any of her "flaws" and they never significantly hold her back which makes them little more than nonsensical gimmicks. She acts like a completionist gamer who will gather up every Mario Star and collect every Yoshi Coin and pick up every dirty sock and spatula and gemstone because it is there, right after listening to every tape in MGSV once and reading every word of guilty gear's lore recaps once before never thinking about any of them again.

The fact that a prison was once ruled by Diamond Tiara and Canterlot used to be a thriving city and a random zebra town was originally spied on by govt agents, these facts mean nothing to her. They satiate a curiousity that only exists for as long as Kkat wants an excuse to spell this out to the audience. And after that? LP gives zero shits. LP doesn't think about how the world ended up like this or why, or what could save it and build the foundations for a better future. She doesn't seek to become an all-powerful "benevolent" dictator and living deterrent for future warfare or seek to eliminate all organized forms of authority besides her girlfriend's secret society in the hopes that they will rule all.

LP has no real moral principles or ideological values beyond the general idea that mean things are bad and bad guys must be punished. She is just killing enemies in her way because they are there, completing sidequests because they are there, and reading through journal entries because they are there before moving on. It's such a shallow way to experience media with the brain turned off. You aren't thinking any more, you're on autopilot. You have escaped yourself and your conscious mind until the game runs out of inoffensive unchallenging filler content solely there to pad out the 100% completion runtime.

Here's an idea...

What if Red Eye and Littlepip both agreed that villains must be punished but disagreed on how?
LP could yell "Fuck you, slavery is wrong"
and Red Eye could yell "fuck you, the death penalty is wrong. You think you're the first one to think the evils of this world must be punished? Life as a slave is exactly what raiders and serial rapists and bandits deserve. Gunning them down is a waste of resources. They should be worked to death for the good of the collective. Stability at any cost, motherfuckaaa!"
And then LP spends time in Red Eye's lands and realizes how great things are under him.
There is excess. There is plenty. Some raiders are actually reformed by the punishment and love being constructive members of society.
Stallions with cutie marks depicting murder and destruction cover those up with outfits depicting more socially acceptable symbols.
There is a thunderdome but that's mainly used for nonlethal sport matches and Red Eye "Royal" Guard practice drills when not used to sentence lawbreaking slaves to death.
Littlepip thinks on how her girlfriend's tower was one tiny island of elitism surrounded by a city full of raiders and dying ponies who would never know any of the pleasures hoarded in that tower.
Littlepip starts to think maybe her girlfriend has flaws and therefore isn't pure
Littlepip starts to think Red Eye's not pure evil who must die.
The connection between them ends up meaning something.
Next time LP feels like killing ponies that deviate from her moral compass she goes with something morally grey instead like understanding why a band of thieves steal (from villains who deserve it) and demanding a regular cut of the earnings in return for not turning them in or killing them.

>>311988
Taint is meant to be an alt force of nature in this story. In Fallout, you have two "forces": Radiation, and FEV. Radiation is, well, radiation, with a touch of 50's sci fi exaggeration (too much radiation turns you into a zombie or makes hands grow out of your chest!!!!). The FEV (Forced Evolutionary Virus) does what the name implies, it forces mutations to move a creature along some sort of genetic path in a radical and dangerous fashion, oftentimes resulting in very strong, very disgusting abominations, or turning humans into Super Mutants. It is only ever contained in Mariposa Military Base, and was a secret government virus before the war.

In FO:E, they seem to have Radiation, and Taint, which is meant to be a different version of FEV. The difference with taint is that it seems to both have an actual presence in the world (whereas FEV was never interacted with in the games), and it is portrayed as extraordinarily deadly. In the games you can sometimes get cutesy perks that make you heal from radiation, like a ghoul does, but I guess Kkat took that concept to make yet another reference at the cost of cheapening the true danger of this liquid superdeath corruption.

>>311857
You have zero idea who I am. Again, who the fuck is this 'hclegend'? That post only shows how much of your fursecution complex is still there. And again: I have never touched plebbit, nor will I EVER touch plebbit, unlike you. What do you do on there, get gangstalked by a bunch of less obnoxious faggots that don't want you? If that's the case, then good! Outside that: all faggots, queers, and trannies SHOULD be gassed. I have never once supported that shit, and ain't going to. Outside THAT: Vril isn't a good goy like (((You))) are, nor does he seem to even give a shit. Then again he's MIA. I don't care what a pile of miserable trash, that is: (((You))), think. People have called me out several times for hostility, sure. Said people have either realized how much of an incompetent screeching crybaby you are or... who knows. Maybe they care less.

Too long; didn't read? Here's a tip: you are STILL on this site, shitting it up with your psychotically narcissistic rants. Do the entire world a favor and become an hero.

>>311978
What a load of last minute hamfisted plot conveniences, AKA the Eleventh Hour Heroic Rescue.

>>311988
This little scene is extra hilarious given that the Enclave never announces their arrival... unless a squadron of Vertibirds carrying a fuckload of rape-machines in the best power armor and ridiculously powerful automatic weaponry counts. Side note: when was the last 'Quest Perk' even mentioned?

>>311992
That pseudo-philosophical shit is called 'plot important filler'. No one will remember any of that UNTIL the exact moment it becomes absolutely vital. For a far better usage of plot important filler, the Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McAffrey has numerous mentions of seemingly unimportant historical details in the earlier books. In some of the later books they become crucial answers to several of the worst problems facing what few humans remain, but especially not the main cast(s).

>weaknesses
Top fucking kek. Oh kkuck, what a pathetic coward. He ALMOST became aware of the shitheap he was "writing". That could have actually gone somewhere (WHAT A TWEEST!), but nope, he had to keep his perfect Marey Snoot as the insane abomination she is. But hold on, didn't Littlecunt learn a spell earlier?

>>311992

>The soul of the Black Book had been particularly ancient and powerful. I had possessed the Black Book for less than two days, and it had already begun to tempt me. Clumsily perhaps at first; the Book wasn’t telepathic like the Goddess. Most of the horrors in my nightmare I had provided myself. The Book merely used the tools my fevered night terrors gave it. And still, I did not have the strength alone to withstand its first probing attacks.
Here, kkat seems to realize that he didn't spend enough time building up this book as an actual threat in the story.

As is usual when he spots or is at least semi-consciously aware of issues in his text, rather than fix it with a rewrite, he attempts to clumsily explain it away we'll see another fine example of this momentarily. This book has done absolutely fuck-all to Littlepoop except give her a couple of bad dreams, and hasn't really been used for anything particularly nefarious, yet we're supposed to regard it as the Ring of Sauron or something. Sorry kkat; no matter how hard you try to ham this up, I'm not buying it.

>Be unwavering!
>How often had those six ponies from the past, through the radiance of their souls, given me insights I couldn’t have had myself, or allowed me to tap reserves of strength and will that I shouldn’t have been able to muster?
"How often" is actually a pretty good question. I don't remember her getting much insight at all from any of these statues; other than a minor boost to some attribute or other after picking each of them up, they don't seem to have done much of anything for her.

Also, which statue was "be unwavering" again? I can't remember, and I don't even care enough to check the damn wiki. Probably Rainbow Dash if I had to guess.

Anyway, the rest of this monologue is just more of LP's rambling autism, and I really shouldn't even be dignifying it with commentary. She blathers about the mane 6 and how important their statues are, even though so far they haven't been anything more than small tchotchkes that provide a minor stat boost. She makes a rather weak attempt to connect whatever these statues are supposed to represent exactly to her own personal "struggle" against this supposedly evil book, which wasn't even an issue until the previous chapter. She elevates this struggle to the level of a battle for her very soul, and is grateful to have Rarity's help you'll recall the statuettes do not even contain the souls of the M6; they're all made from pieces of Rarity's soul, and kkat admits as much here.

After this, she speculates that the book itself was a soul jar, and that it contained the soul of the zebra who wrote it. At the very end, the soul sensed that its jar was about to be destroyed, and tried to save itself with trickery...or something. All of this might have made for a somewhat interesting subplot, had the author bothered to put a little bit of thought or effort into it.

And good God, she's still talking. She poses some pointless rhetorical questions about what happens to souls that are liberated from their physical vessels, and this segues into some rambling speculation about what became of Twilight and Trixie and Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum and whoever else was trapped inside the Goddess. If that's something she cared about, she should have thought about it before she blew them all up with an atom bomb, imo.

Inevitably, LP's rambling zeroes in on her favorite topic: herself. We are now given several paragraphs of her typical brooding schlock about how horrible and miserable she is. This is probably the best sample:

>I knew what I had done. And my soul was blackened from it. I had finally taken that step off the cliff; I had sacrificed my own morality and goodness to save the Equestrian Wasteland. I was Red Eye now, through and through. And there would be a price for that.
What are you even on about? What have you done recently that you consider more evil than the stuff you've been doing up until now? You set out to kill the Goddess, and you killed the Goddess, and now you feel bad about it, because something something Trixie Twilight Sparkle? Is that basically the gist of what you're saying here?

Anyway, in the last three paragraphs, kkat has another of his brief glimmers of almost-self-awareness. It seems he has realized at last that 38 minutes was actually plenty of time for LP to make her escape from Maripony and for Trixie to find and disable the bomb (or, more likely, a reader pointed these things out to him after he posted the last chapter). Rather than simply revising the previous chapter so it makes more sense (even just chopping the timer down to five minutes or something would have been an improvement; everything else could have stayed the same), he provides these hasty, clumsy explanations for what went down. Spoiler: it was totally LP's plan all along, and the author is totally not just pulling this stuff out of his ass as he goes.

>Thirty-eight minutes would have been plenty of time, but that time was never meant for me. It was time enough for Xenith and Calamity to escape. I had been willing to forfeit my own life.
This makes no fucking sense. Calamity just dropped her off; he was probably halfway back to Ponyville by the time LP even made it to the Goddess' chamber. He certainly didn't need 38 minutes to get the fudge out. As to Xenith, my impression was that she had planted the bomb in advance of LP's arrival. It seems that this was not the case, but even if she was setting the bomb at the same time LP was talking to Trixie, it shouldn't have taken her any longer to escape than it would have taken LP.

>Thirty-eight minutes would have been enough for the alicorns of the Goddess to have scoured Maripony, found the bomb and disarmed whatever timer Red Eye had constructed for it.
Obviously; I've pointed this out multiple times now.

>But the balefire bomb had never been in Maripony.
Oh, kkat, you clever minx you. Wait a minute, what?

>>312051

>Thirty-eight minutes was not long enough for the alicorns to have fought their way through the maze of Hellhound warrens and found the bomb hidden dozens of yards beneath Maripony’s foundations. The balefire bomb had gone off in a subterranean detonation directly beneath us.
So, if I'm understanding this correctly, the bomb was not set in Maripony itself, but in the hellhound tunnels underneath Maripony?

I suppose the 38 minute timer makes a little more sense when you consider this, since Xenith fighting her way out of a hellhound tunnel would presumably take longer than fighting her way out of Maripony. I guess. I'm not sure whether hellhounds or alicorns would be the more difficult enemy to sneak around.

In any event, what still has yet to be addressed is why LP herself chose to hide in Twilight Sparkle's bomb shelter instead of just using the 38 minutes she gave herself to escape? Just because Xenith might have needed the full timer to escape from the hellhound warrens doesn't mean it would take LP any more time to leave Maripony.

As I've said before, once she handed the black book off to Trixie, Trixie had what she wanted. LP had upheld her end of the deal; there was no reason for Trixie to antagonize her at that point. Or at least there wouldn't have been, if LP hadn't given her own plan away via telepathy like a retard.

Anyway, unless Trixie had been planning to double-cross her for whatever reason, the only plausible threat would have come from the three Enclave ponies. However, they had no logical beef with her either. I still don't see why LP couldn't have simply handed the book to Trixie, turned around, and walked out the fucking door. If she moved quickly and didn't have to fight anything, how long would it take her to exit Maripony and fire up that helicopter-thing that Calamity left her? Five, maybe ten minutes? Maybe tack on an extra ten or fifteen for her to fly safely out of the blast radius, and she's got a good fifteen minutes of buffer before the bomb explodes. What the hell was all that panic about, anyway?

Well, whatever; maybe if we keep reading we'll find out.

Page break. LP awakens after the explosion. Hilariously enough, she realizes that she made a bit of a boo-boo: instead of simply being vaporized in the megaspell explosion, she has trapped herself inside a bomb shelter that is now buried underneath a mountain of rubble without food or water. She has effectively condemned herself to a nastier death than if she had done nothing at all nothing all...nothing at all...nothing at all. Probably should have taken that 38 minutes you generously gave yourself to escape, eh? Oh well, live and learn, you dumb bitch. Well, learn anyway.

Oh, also, the room got slightly damaged during the explosion and radiation is leaking in. Oh, also, the water crystal is tainted, so she doesn't have any fresh water. Oh, also, that one-shot Ambrosia character from the last scene is dead, if anyone cares. I'm actually a little surprised that kkat bothered to name her.

Anyway, it seems LP's new power (the one from the footnote in the last chapter) is even more ridiculous than I imagined. It seems that not only does radiation heal Littlepoop, she is now capable of regrowing her limbs in the event that they become severed:

>A fleshy, grotesquely-misshaped worm floated on the surface of the water. I screamed as I realized it was one of my own hindlegs.
>After several long minutes of terror, I realized I could feel both of my hindlegs. Barely able to breathe, I shifted my light, trying to look under the slab that was crushing me.
>Both my hindlegs were there, intact and healthy… except one was the pink of exposed skin with only a light fuzz of a coat.
>I had lost my leg in the fall… and I had regrown it!
Yep, you read that correctly. On top of all the other ridiculous spells and potions and whatnot that exist in this universe, LP now has even less reason to fear death and/or dismemberment than she did before.

Anyway, of course, LP herself doesn't see it this way:

>I didn’t think it was possible to feel even sicker, but I did. A deep, soul-aching horror filled me as I realized that I wasn’t even a pony anymore. I was something else. I wanted to cry, to scream.
>Was I a ghoul, transformed by the bomb? Or was this from my exposure to the taint? How far removed was I now from being one of the Goddess’ children?
She just wouldn't be the Littlepoop we all know and love if she weren't bitching and moaning about the horror of it all, now would she?

Page break. Speaking of the ridiculous dumb luck that Littlepoop has, it turns out that being buried alive isn't much of an issue for her either. After spending a few minutes down there brooding angstily to herself about how much it sucks being able to regrow severed limbs like a crab or something, she is suddenly rescued by Ditzy Doo and a mysterious alicorn, who turns out to be none other than Twilight Sparkle. Apparently, Twilight was one of the original alicorns that Trixie made, and when Trixie died she got her freewill back, and something something yada yada Friendship is Magic™©.

Naturally, the first thing that Littlepoop does after being liberated from her cold, airless tomb is to dig up an mp3 of Pinkie Pie talking from eons ago, that she still has saved on her PipBuck for whatever reason. She plays it for Twi.

Page break. It seems that Twilight Sparkle's liberation was only temporary, or something. She shows no emotion at hearing Pinkie's voice. Then, her cutie mark disappears and she flies away. Well, that was pointless.

Page break. Ditzy Doo flies Littlepoop back to where her friends are camped out. Apparently, they had sent Ditzy out to look for her. Where Ditzy came from in the first place remains unclear. LP is happy to see her friends, but realizes that with the Goddss out of the way, she now needs to take on Red Eye. First, though, she wants to go back to Tenpony.

>>312054
>Page break. It seems that Twilight Sparkle's liberation was only temporary, or something. She shows no emotion at hearing Pinkie's voice. Then, her cutie mark disappears and she flies away. Well, that was pointless.

Huh. From seeing fanart about it, you'd think this scene was much more emotional or significant. It certainly has the makings: delivering a dying farewell message from a friend who never got to send it, to their intended recipient who is a mutated husk of their formal self and providing a moment of clarity and closure.

>>312054

Littlepoop is reunited with her friends, and there is much rejoicing.

>SteelHooves whinnied. “Thank Applejack!”
Incidentally, does anyone else find it a little weird that SteelHooves refers to his ex-girlfriend as if she were also some kind of deity? This is some next-level simping right here.

Suddenly, a bunch of hellhounds burst out of the ground and start firin' lazars at them. The party initially tries to run away to the Fart Wagon, but before they can do so one of the hellhounds decapitates SteelHooves. Yep, your read that correctly. SteelHooves is dead for now, anyway. F, I guess.

Hilariously, the hellhound who did the deed picks up SteelHooves' head and chucks it at Derpy's wagon, trying to knock the two of them out of the sky. This sends LP into that berserker mode that occasionally comes over her when she gets super-duper-pissed about some kind of injustice or other, and temporarily becomes even more ridiculously overpowered than she is normally. Unfortunately for Mr. Hellhound, it seems that decapitating the guy that occasionally stands near her doing basically nothing was enough to trigger one of these berserker events.

Anyway, LP goes super-Saiyan and levitates all of the hellhounds at once, lifting them thousands of feet up into the sky and then dropping them one by one. They all die, and that's the end of that.

Page break. We rejoin the party at an indeterminate point in the future, flying on the Butt Bandit. For some reason they are going to New Appleoosa, and Derpy is flying alongside them. Also, she is apparently radioactive now for some reason, and Calamity is trying to stay away from her.

If anyone gives a shit that SteelHooves was decapitated just minutes or hours, or days ago, they don't show it. They are too busy bullshitting about current events. It seems that when LP set off the balefire bomb and killed what's-his-name, the head of the Enclave, the Enclave interpreted it as a declaration of war from Red Eye, because LP was there on his orders or something. I didn't realize that LP's arrangement with Red Eye was common enough knowledge that the Enclave would even be aware of it, but there you have it.

Actually, come to think of it, it shouldn't even have been common knowledge that LP was even in Maripony. The Enclave had gone there to negotiate with the Goddess, and LP just happened to be there pulling her little bomb stunt at that precise moment. Since all of the Enclave poners who went inside with what's-his-name would have been vaporized (except for Ambrosia, who died anyway), nopony should logically even know who was responsible for blowing up Maripony; all that should be known at this point is that it blew up. Red Eye would be the most likely suspect, but there's no reason anyone should know the details except for LP and her friends.

Anyway, it seems that LP is now the enemy of the Enclave, because reasons, and there is a war going on between Red Eye and the Enclave, also because reasons.

At this point, LP goes off on another of her rambling monologues; I think she's talking about balefire or something but I'll be damned if I can muster enough energy to pay attention anymore. As usual, she jumps autistically from topic to topic, until eventually the subject of fire makes her think of cremation, and she suddenly remembers that her ol' pal SteelHooves is dead, and she gets sad.

Anyway, they land at New Appleoosa I guess, but Calamity says they can't stay there for some reason or other. It seems to have something to do with Derpy being radioactive. Derpy is worried because Silver Bell is all alone in the city or something and she doesn't want to leave her alone, and the party can't go in there because of Littlepoop. However, since Xenith wasn't with them when Littlepoop slaughtered everyone in Old Appleoosa for basically no reason, she isn't technically banned. So, she volunteers to watch Silver Bell so Derpy can go stay with some friend of Calamity's in Friendship City until she isn't radioactive anymore. Jesus H. Christ; the autism in this goddamn story is off the charts.

Littlepoop, meanwhile, announces that after they go to Stable 29 to drop off SteelHooves' dead decapitated lifeless corpse huh, I'm beginning to think someone important might actually have died in this story, they are going to go back to Tenpony Tower, presumably so she can get laid. Nice to see she has her priorities straight as usual.

Anyway, Silver Bell comes out of the city gate and is happy to see Derpy, but is sad when she finds out that she can't hug her because she's all radioactive and stuff. They leave Xenith there presumably, and then they all saddle up and hit the trail again.

Page break. The party is now nearing Trixie's Cottage. Since we have absolutely no idea where any of the landmarks in this story are located in relation to each other, this information is meaningless. However, they are presumably nearing their destination, which I think is either Friendship City or Tenpony. They see some big scary looking airships that apparently belong to the Enclave. Apparently these things are flying around all over the place now. Also, the Enclave has taken over the radio waves for some reason; presumably, they got sick of listening to Homage gush about her girlfriend's murderous exploits. Hopefully they'll put something on the air that doesn't suck.

>I swallowed. I started to think of all the times SteelHooves had protected us. But ended up just thinking about his voice, that deep masculine rumble -- like Flutterguy’s voice, Watcher had claimed -- and how I’d never hear it from him again. My burning eyes wanted to cry.
Oh, cheer up. You didn't give a fuck about him when he fell off the airship and disappeared for like a week, remember? Just pretend he fell off the roof again.

They pass Trixie's cottage. For some reason, there are a bunch of alicorns hanging around, but they don't do anything. Nothing else happens.

>>312060

Page break. Now they're at Stable 29. Crossroads, who I believe is one of the higher-ranking Steel Rangers, informs them that SteelHooves' funeral will take place on the morrow, and would like to know if they plan to attend. The party answers in the affirmative.

>The brown mare with the cropped yellow mane nodded. “As I said, all the Applejack’s Rangers who would be able to attend the Elder’s funeral are already here. There is no delay. It would be unseemly to allow his body to… go unburied.”
Reminder that these same decorum-respecting Rangers allowed Apple Bloom, sister to Applejack, the founder of their order whom they all worship for some reason or other, to rot in their basement for two whole centuries without bothering to bury her.

After these matters are settled, Littlepoop finally collapses due to exhaustion.

>“Li’lpip was in Splendid Valley when the megaspell went off,” Calamity told him worriedly. “She keeps breakin’ all the rules an’ survivin’ the impossible, an’ Ah think reality is kickin’ her tail fer it.”
If the past is an indicator of the future, reality shouldn't pose much of a threat to this horse.

Anyway, nothing else happens.

Page break.

>Dark grey clouds hung over the Equestria the next morning.
Which Equestria specifically?

Anyway, the funeral is held at SteelHooves' shack instead of the Stable. Littlepoop attends in a wheelchair, because her poor wittle body has been through SOOOOOW many twials and twibuwations, and she's just too exhausty-wausted to stand up. As you might expect in a scene like this, unintentional comedy abounds:

>Calamity had created black dresses for both Velvet Remedy and myself out of the additional sheets provided by Ditzy Doo, again demonstrating his freaky knowledge of sewing. The cloth matched the color of my heart. I was drowning in sorrow, but I still hadn’t managed to cry. I felt like I was broken.
fetlocks crying tears of blood, haha she's goffik, etc etc etc.

>Somepony had welded SteelHooves’ head back on. Somehow, that was what got to me most. My breath caught, then came out in shudders. My whole body begin to tremble, wracked with sobs.
Fucking lol. Imagine actually thinking stuff like this up. Seriously, it seems to me that a closed-casket would be more appropriate here, but whatever; I guess if your metal friend's head has been separated from his body, and you've got a welding torch just lying around, you might as well go for broke.

Anyway, Crossroads begins her eulogy.

>My mind drifted as Crossroads spoke. I went back to when SteelHooves first began traveling with us.
>So… why are you still with us? I had asked SteelHooves
>Maybe I have nothing better to do.
It speaks volumes that this is pretty much all she can remember about him.

>I follow you because you are a better pony than I am. And you remind me of somepony else. You honestly strive to help and protect other ponies. I believe she would have approved of you.
>He’d said that when I’d called him into question.
>I haven’t been faithful to my Oath for a long time. But at your side, I can be again.
Jesus Fucking H. Christ. Even now, even sitting at this big metal nigger's funeral with his deceased, mutilated body in a casket just a few feet from her, LP is still thinking about herself. This is how she remembers SteelHooves, who was supposedly one of her closest friends (even though she barely paid any attention to him when he was alive). Not the things he did, or the things he stood for, or even how he died; nope. She remembers what he said about her. She remembers how great he said she was, and how being in her presence gave him something to aspire to.

Seriously, it goes on:

>Another memory galloped on the hooves of the last. SteelHooves and I staring out over the harbor, looking towards Friendship City.
>I need to thank you, Littlepip.
>For what? I had asked.
>For failing, SteelHooves had answered, surprising me. All this time, you have been somepony to look up to. You have made me want to be a better pony. But at the same time… you were too good. You were an impossible standard. Tonight, you have made it easier for me to live with myself.
I just....words fail me. I have nothing to say here. "The poor son of a bitch," said the Owl-Eyed Man, wiping his spectacles.

Well, to LP's credit, she does remember one more thing:

>He had struggled with his own prejudice. And was finally beginning to overcome that too. He had taken steps on a path to recovery that he would now never be able to complete.
See? It's not all about her. She also remembers how when she first met him, he had a bunch of prejudices that she thought were icky-wicky, but eventually he improved himself to the point where he was acceptable to her. It's a shame he was decapitated and can no longer continue his journey towards finally meeting with LP's complete and total approval.

Anyway, the Eulogy concludes, and Crossroads asks if anyone else would like to say anything. Of course, LP rolls her stupid chair to the front.

>“I… There’s nothing I can say to do him justice. But as Applesnack is lowered, I want to play this song. It was his and Applejack’s song.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

While the song is playing, LP happens to glance toward Canterlot, which I guess is visible from here, even though I didn't get that impression from the first time they were at this shack. She notices that a bunch of the Enclave ships are blowing away the city's foundations for whatever-the-fuck reason. Canterlot suddenly collapses. Alrighty then.

>We’ll come back for her… I had promised. Until then, she’s safe here.
>My last promise to SteelHooves. And now I would never be able to keep it. The Enclave had destroyed the Canterlot Ruins, casually killing everypony in Stable City.
Earlier, SteelHooves asked LP if they could go back for Twilight's zombie mother when their adventures were over. I guess she can scratch that one off of her to-do list.

>>312054
Maybe if LP thought to give Twilight the mane six statuettes just to see what would happen, Twilight could have maintained control of that body for longer. A Twilight changed by all this BS would result in an interesting character.

Also, imagine a version of this story where the Gardens Of Equestria Megaspell and Spike are beneath Tenpony Tower and the Black Book is given to LP when she arrives at the tower. Her mission: kill the goddess and the book while pretending you will betray us to give her the book. Along the way red eye kidnaps her and forces her to see how awesome his slaver paradise is thanks to how brilliant slave labour from raiders captured alive is. the alicorns also have their own slaving society full of ponies simping for the goddess and alicorns and the stability they provide. They cant become alicorns themselves because they are too weak or dumb or have genetic problems that stop them from going through Alicornification without dying. LP thinks deeply on what each faction has to offer while being tempted constantly by the Black Book but ends up betraying the goddess instead of her GF or Red Eye and she blows up the Goddess and book. Also the goddess wants the black book to raise a ghostly gun toting army of the dead now to fight their wars with minimal bloodshed on their side because it would be fucking retarded for the edgy black book of darkness and blood magic to have a page on Pingas Engorgio Magistus, Gigantis Inmypantis, and Futanari Matsuri.

Now after thinking about how much better that version of this book would be, think about how much it would suck if the Black Book talked like the Screaming Gun from Borderlands. Constantly. Especially when shooting guns. Because while LOTR is deep, Kkat's target audience would never get that reference or understand hard things. But annoying things like the screaming gun can be radily understood.

>>312100
*readily

>>312055
It should be more significant, and kkat obviously wanted it to be significant, but he bungles it the way he usually does. Here's the complete scene (it's extremely short):

>“…I mean, I have you with me now, so you’ll kinda be with me anyway. But it’s not the same. I want the real Twilight Sparkle. I…

>“I want my friend back.

>“Please?

>“I’ll do anything…”

>The super-alicorn had hovered, seeming transfixed by the sound, until the message ended. Then, wordlessly, she turned and began to fly away. The cutie mark on her flank was already completely gone.

>“Twilight! Wait!” I cried out after the disappearing alicorn. “Star Sparkle is still alive! And Spike…”

>But whatever part of Twilight Sparkle my words might once have been able to reach were gone now. Evaporated. Or, if my heart could hope, just asleep.

>I wanted to cry. But my body couldn’t produce tears.

>I drank another of those horrid RadAways as Ditzy Doo turned and began flying us out of Splendid Valley.

The entire thing is only a few paragraphs long, and it begins and ends so abruptly that it's over before you've even had a chance to react to it. I can see how this might be moving to someone who already has a deep emotional attachment to these characters (Twilight and Pinkie), but that's kind of the problem. In order to understand what's happening here, you need to already have some background on Pinkie and Twilight and who they were before the war started. The author has given us some brief glimpses of that side of these characters, but the vast majority of the flashbacks have focused on the events of the war itself.

We understand intellectually that these two characters used to be friends, but then they grew apart over the course of the war. We also understand, intellectually, that this moment is sad; however, without an established connection to either of these characters it's no more sad than if it happened to two relative strangers. Most of our time with Pinkie and Twilight has been spent during the period when they were broken up; in order to understand what their friendship actually meant to each other, we would have to draw from the show itself.

A brony who knows these two characters intimately and can fill in the blanks here might find a scene like this heart-wrenching, but to a casual reader this moment is just confusing. Littlepoop plays this audio recording of Pinkie talking; Twilight has no reaction and flies off, not because she hates Pinkie, but because she's no longer herself. Alright. What am I supposed to be taking away from this exactly?

Also, that image made me kek more than anything. Here's an edit I did.

>>312106
This scene doesn't seem right.

It's established that the cutie marks alicorns had when they were ponies reappear on their bodies when the goddess's control over them wanes... I think.

So who is controlling Twilight now, if she had her own separqte body this whole time and somehow survived the nuking of Maripony just to pop out of nowhere and save LP Deus Ex Machina style?

"dying as yourself" is a classic trope for a reason. No matter how brainwashed or transformed or corrupted a character was, it lets the writers make his death feel extra tragic by making it not the triumphant defeat of a monster but the bittersweet pasaing of one who needed to be put down, or the miserable loss of an innocent soul who couldn't be saved in time.

Why does Twilight show up just to save LP when she should be dead or fused with Trixie according to what the story implied until now, and fly away the second LP plays something so maudlin-emotional Kkat doesn't know how to write Twilight's reaction to it?

This... this scene doesn't seem right at all. LP is doomed and gets saved by Twilight who flies in out of nowhere and then zooms off. LP gets no real reward or metaphorical reward or emotional payoff for playing this message for Twilight or remembering her mom is alive somewhere and Twilight's mom ends up being killed by the Enclave anyway.

What if Twilight's death happened differently? What if the spirit of Twilight thanked LP or something?

What if LP had to bail herself out of the shelter trapped under rubble by saying to herself "I have no food and nothing but guns and ammo and four hours of air. If I don't get the rubble off this bunker I'll be crushed when I open it. And if I don't get it to the surface and open it soon I'll die. Here we go!" and then use her telekinesis to toss away one piece of rubble at a time.

Perhaps ponies could see this, attracted by the sound of Maripony going boom, and rush over to help save The Wasteland Savior.

Or perhaps LP could keep trying and trying even as she runs out of air and dies but then Velvet teleports in to save her ass and they hug and she saves Velvet and the audience cries.

Or perhaps the whole party minus Xenith could be trapped in that bunker cheering LP on as she tries to save them and probably does. Or they could knock themselves or each other out to preserve air, fully trusting in LP.

Or maybe the secret society at Tenpony Tower could summon LP and friends with an ancient spell, teleporting them to the tower once Maripony goes boom. Retcon it by making a pony say "right before you erased your memory you told us to summon you when Maripony goes kaboom" and the audience will call it a Chekov's Gun and call the existence of the secret society a setup for this when it's actually just part of Kkat's nonsense attempt to use Homage to answer questions raised by 3-Dog's existence in Fallout 3. Questions like "what does he eat" and "how does he sustain himself" and "how does he know everything that happens outside" and "why is he obsessed with commenting the player character's life" and "where did he get that radio tower and how did he get control of it" and "who maintains this tower".

Guess who just had a genius idea

If LP's party had one or two temporary members near the start, they could fuck off and do their own thing for a while before returning later.

And then...

Here's the clever bit

And then they could tell LP and the audience what they did and what they saw. This would let Kkat directly quote bad worldbuilding notes from his own bloated oversized worldbuilding document without having to contrive a reason for LP to run headfirst into learning this shit and having worldbuilding spelled out for her through journals and holotapes and memory orbs.

This would also help solve the "everything revolves around Littlepip and nothing seems to exist beyond her" problem. These ponies could need her help for a bit, or want to pair up since they are going the same way. And after we bond with these characters they go away and return 30 chapters later with a first hand tale of what their side story was like and what "interesting" locations they looted and cleared of enemies while getting distracted from their main quests every five minutes.

It's the perfect way to get around the natural limitations of the first person narrator format. And the perfect way to cram even more wiki information into your schrodinger's half abortion of a story.

It's the perfect way to let Kkat spend less time pretending to write a coherent story and more time doing what he loves besides sucking dick: dumping exposition and pointless irrelevant meaningless lore on an audience with no context for anything going on if they haven't watched the show and gained existing bonds with fictional characters he'll mutilate and torture and kill off for shock value in his popular pony fanfic.

A really smart writer could even make LP talk to NPCs and ask them questions about the world around them just like in Fallout. "tell me about Junktown and The Hub! What are your thoughts on Caesar's Legion and the NCR? Can you tell me your funny backstory? Why the fuck are you out here and what do you eat?" and all that jizz. To the audience it seems like LP is a curious fecker who wants to gather intel on the places she is going and know more about the factions threatening to dominate the world and know more about the pony she is talking to and if she can trust them or not. But in reality it is smart exposition.

Every time Kkat has a retarded idea he crams it into a bloated narrative full of bad ideas even if there is no room for more. He thought of decorating Fluttershy's cottage with gore and dead cutesy critters that haven't rotted away or been eaten in over 200 years and making Velvet react to the raiders turning it into a child thunderdome where the winners get the corpses of their parents waaay too late in the story for Team LP to have any good reason to detour to ponyville. So he had them detour to ponyville anyway.

But if Kkat used my genius method, LP could run into an old friend or new friend or interesting NPC with a story to tell about what he saw at Fluttershy's cottage and what he did to the raiders and how he freed the kids and escorted them to a safe zone.

>>312088

With the funeral festivities concluded and Canterlot destroyed, there is nothing left for LP to do but stand or sit, I suppose and admire SteelHooves' gravestone, while the wind blows dramatically through her mane. If anyone is interested, his epitaph see? I'm learning stuff from these threads too reads:

>Here Rests
>ELDER “STEELHOOVES” APPLESNACK
>Forefather of Applejack’s Rangers

>Steadfast.
>Enduring.
>Unwavering.

>…and a true friend.

Personally, I would have gone with something like:

>Here Rests
>Elder "Literally Who" McShootymissiles
>He wore robot armor and shot grenades sometimes; that about sums him up.

>He didn't say much.
>Mostly he just stood there.
>More than once we mistook him for a coatrack.
>But for some reason we all miss him anyway.

>...seriously though, even a lame faggot like this probably deserved better friends than us.

However, I'll acknowledge that kkat's version is more poetic, if slightly less accurate.

>In that special niche rested the orange statuette with the blonde mane and tail which I had told Crossroads that she would find in SteelHooves’ shack. The words “Be Strong!” were barely visible where the base was set into the granite. His little pony would watch over him forever. The spirit of Applejack would never leave his side.
It's a good thing for SteelHooves that LP already has one of these things.

Anyway, that's all they wrote of SteelHooves, I guess. I have to say I'm a little surprised by this turn of events. In stories like this, it's usually appropriate for at least one of the main characters to die a tragic death, but I wouldn't have expected kkat to realize this, let alone attempt it. Usually if someone dies in this story it's either a baddy or a nameless red-shirt; the only notable exception so far has been Monterrey Jack, though he was pretty much nameless in all but name. Though I guess if kkat was going to kill off one of the main party members, it isn't surprising that he would pick the boring guy who never really did much anyway, and was a poorly-developed character even by this story's paltry standards.

SteelHooves' death is also surprising from a technical standpoint: fatal injuries usually aren't really fatal in FoE. When I first read that SH had been decapitated, I assumed they were just going to patch him up with spells and potions and shit like they did with Velvet's leg, and LP's leg, and LP's other leg, and LP's ribs, and LP's lungs, and so forth and so on.

So, it looks like the big takeaway from this is that decapitation is lethal in Edgequestria. Good to know; I'll make a note of it if I ever visit.

Page break. With SteelHooves' funeral out of the way, Littlepoop is now free to mope around Stable 29, musing on how his death is really all about her. And mope she does. She reflects on how she failed him, and how she hadn't been able to save Twilight's loony twat of a mother like she promised because the Enclave blew up Canterlot for no obvious reason, and blah blah blah, her her her.

>I wondered if the Enclave even knew they had wiped out a village of ponies. If they had bothered to check before they started their attack. If they even cared.
A much better question would be: if they didn't know the place was inhabited, and they didn't want to kill those ponies for some reason, why exactly would the Enclave waste its firepower blowing up an empty ruin with no obvious strategic value?

Anyway, after she's done moping, she goes to see Velvet Remedy, who has locked herself in Vinyl Scratch's old room for some silly reason or other. Apparently she's had a bad case of the blues ever since SteelHooves went and joined the vocoder-choir invisible, and LP wants to cheer her up a bit. However, Velvet seems to be in an exceptionally pissy mood right now.

She opens the door, and angrily tells Littlepoop to go away. Unfortunately for Velvet, telling LP to mind her own business is like telling kkat to go on a 24 hour semen fast. LP pushes her way inside; it is at this point that Velvet angrily throws something at her.

>I looked down at the object which had bounced off me and fallen into my lap. It was a box of memory orbs.
>SteelHooves’ memory orbs.
Sorry, LP, you're going to have to be a little more specific than that. Remind me: of the over 9000 memory orbs that have appeared in this story, which ones belonged to SteelHooves and what was their significance?

>“You knew!” Velvet said firmly but surprisingly without accusation. “Calamity told me that much. But I didn’t realize SteelHooves knew too. All of you did.”
Sorry, Velvet, but I'm still not following.

>Oh Goddess! She’d looked at his memories. She’d seen him dying on the battlefield the day that Fluttershy first tested the megaspells!
Oh, okay. I think I see where this is going. These are the memory orbs that show Fluttershy doing whatever bad thing she did 200 years in the past, inventing megaspells as I recall, and this is supposed to be deeply upsetting for Velvet, because something something whatever Fluttershy. Got it.

>I choked. “I… I was trying… I should have…”
>“Told me?” she questioned, a pained smirk crossing her muzzle. “I know why you didn’t. You were trying to spare me the truth. Trying to save me. And others, I suspect. That’s what you do, isn’t it?”
As satisfying as it is to see Littlepoop get smacked off of her pedestal, is this accusation really accurate? Does LP have some kind of track record of lying to people ponies, whatever for their own good? Despite this character's many negative qualities, intentional deception isn't really among them. In fact, my understanding is that was supposed to be one of Velvet's flaws.

Anyway, they argue for awhile. Velvet states that she can no longer travel with Littlepoop, which of course Littlepoop objects to. Her reasons for wanting to leave the party are somewhat interesting, and will be covered in the next post.

>>312126
>Guess who just had a genius idea
Well, it wasn't you and it certainly wasn't kkat, so I give up. Who?

Seriously though, the approach you describe doesn't really solve anything. You're still basically telling the same jumbled, incoherent story and it's still being told entirely from LP's perspective. The only difference is that now you're adding another layer of complexity: instead of learning about every event firsthand through Littlepoop's experience, we're now learning about some of them secondhand, from someone that Littlepoop is talking to.

If your idea is to condense some of these events down to their essentials in order to shorten the text then maybe it could work. For instance, you could probably take the entire Canterlot exploration arc and condense it down to something like this:

Xenith: "Hey, LP, I went into Canterlot and found that book you wanted. Turns out Rarity just left it in her desk. Also, we had to fight some alicorns and that pink stuff was a little nasty, but for the most part it went okay."

LP: "Thanks for doing that, Xenith. Now we can strap a bomb to this book and go blow up the stupid Goddess."

If you did that, you would have prevented the reader from wasting several precious hours of their life. However, it still doesn't solve the underlying structural issues in this story. Namely, that it is too long, too complicated, there is too much going on for the reader to keep track of, and regardless of whether she experiences everything firsthand or not, the fact remains that every single thing that happens in this story is still being funneled through the perspective of this one character.

>A really smart writer could even make LP talk to NPCs and ask them questions about the world around them just like in Fallout. "tell me about Junktown and The Hub! What are your thoughts on Caesar's Legion and the NCR? Can you tell me your funny backstory? Why the fuck are you out here and what do you eat?" and all that jizz. To the audience it seems like LP is a curious fecker who wants to gather intel on the places she is going and know more about the factions threatening to dominate the world and know more about the pony she is talking to and if she can trust them or not. But in reality it is smart exposition.
If you limited this to essential information, then sure. The problem is, if you're just recording every inane conversation that LP has with every passerby she meets, you've got an even more bloated text packed to the gills with even more useless trivia. The solution to this problem is quite a bit simpler than you're making it: if something isn't important, just don't put it in the story in the first place.

>Every time Kkat has a retarded idea he crams it into a bloated narrative full of bad ideas even if there is no room for more. He thought of decorating Fluttershy's cottage with gore and dead cutesy critters that haven't rotted away or been eaten in over 200 years and making Velvet react to the raiders turning it into a child thunderdome where the winners get the corpses of their parents waaay too late in the story for Team LP to have any good reason to detour to ponyville. So he had them detour to ponyville anyway.
This observation is right on the money.

However, you draw the wrong conclusions from it:

>But if Kkat used my genius method, LP could run into an old friend or new friend or interesting NPC with a story to tell about what he saw at Fluttershy's cottage and what he did to the raiders and how he freed the kids and escorted them to a safe zone.
All your "genius method" does is take the existing story and rearrange it into a different format. This bit about Fluttershy's college being turned into a kiddie thunderdome was a dumb idea in the first place and serves no essential purpose; the way to deal with this is to just cut it from the story entirely because it doesn't need to be there.

>>312142
I think it's funny that a ytuber made a let's play about Fallout: New Vegas and covered the dlc, Dead Money? about the same time that you went through it in your review of this story.

>>312136
>SteelHooves' death is also surprising from a technical standpoint: fatal injuries usually aren't really fatal in FoE. When I first read that SH had been decapitated, I assumed they were just going to patch him up with spells and potions and shit like they did with Velvet's leg, and LP's leg, and LP's other leg, and LP's ribs, and LP's lungs, and so forth and so on.

To add onto this, it is doubly surprising because he is a subrace of monster that can revive itself from fatal and ridiculous injuries.

>>312136

LP kept the orbs from Velvet because she didn't want to destroy Velvet's image of Fluttershy. However, now that she's seen the orbs, Velvet's reaction is a little different than what LP anticipated.

It turns out that while she did indeed find the contents of the orbs upsetting, she isn't mad at Fluttershy; she's mad at the rest of the M6. Her view is basically that Fluttershy's intentions were pure: she wanted to create a spell that could heal everyone in one fell swoop. However, all the mean icky-wicky ponies took that and turned it into a weapon. This is arguably an accurate view of how things went down, actually.

More to the point, it seems that thinking about things this way got her noggin joggin', and for the first time ever, she's beginning to have second thoughts about the group of sadists she teamed up with:

>“Oh, I understand why she thought other ponies would use the spells for good. I’ve been just as stupid. I’ve spent all my life wanting to help ponies because I’ve held to this idiotic, naïve belief that, deep inside, we are inherently good. That we deserve to be helped. To be saved.”
Once again, we have this amorphously-defined concept of "good" being casually tossed around as though it were a firm moral absolute. The unspoken alternative, "bad," is just as vaguely defined. Velvet's ideals are still just incoherent, generalized fluff about "helping" and "saving" ponies, without any clear indicator as to what, if anything, she wants to save these ponies from, or how she wants to help them. If you spoke to a 19 year old airhead college girl, who was studying to be a social worker or a teacher or something, and asked her why she had chosen this career path, you'd likely get a similar answer.

>Her words were giving me unpleasant flashbacks to Mister Topaz.
Why? What's the connection? Do you want to maybe expand on this a little, LP? Maybe start by reminding us what exactly happened with Mister Topaz, since it happened a long time ago, and the specifics of that particular episode haven't really come up in awhile? While you're at it, would you like to maybe clarify what part of the Topaz incident connects to what's going on in the present, since it may not be immediately obvious to everyone reading? No, you don't want to do any of that? You're just going to drop this reference in here without bothering to provide any sort of context or explanation? Why even bring it up, then? Seems like you're going pretty far out of your way to reference an earlier part of the story that has no obvious connection to this part of the story, so surely you had at least some reason to bring it up. What's that you say? You didn't have a reason? You were just being a fucking autismo like you usually are? Ah, I see; carry on then.

>Velvet Remedy laughed a broken, nasty laugh. “Haven’t you been paying attention, Littlepip?” she scolded. “Did you somehow miss Arbu? How about Fluttershy’s Cottage? Or every other damn thing we’ve seen?” She shook her head. “Deep inside, we’re all raiders.”
We have reached the crux of the biscuit. Still relying on her squishy, vaguely-defined yet somehow set-in-stone absolutes of "good" and "bad," Velvet tries to address a moral quandary she finds herself in. She wants to do good, and she teamed up with LP because she thinks LP also wants to do good. Even though she thinks killing is bad, Velvet has been justifying the killing that they've done so far because:

A) they were only killing bad guys, and
B) they were killing bad guys in order to do good, so
C) the good they've done cancels out the bad things they had to do in order to achieve it.

However, it seems that this justification is no longer cutting the mustard for her. The combination of SteelHooves' death and this latest revelation about Fluttershy's role in the war has brought forth some thoughts that have probably been floating around in her subconscious for some time now. Here is the essence of what seems to be bothering her:

>some of the bad guys they've killed might not have been entirely bad
>some of the bad things the party has done were really, really bad
>some of their actions may have been so bad that the good they accomplished doesn't outweigh the badness
>even though they are trying to do good, the world is still mostly bad
>thus, they have been going around doing bad things without noticeably incrementing the sum total of goodness in the world
>thus, they themselves may not actually be good; they might even be bad
>thus, doing bad in the name of good may not be morally justified after all

As much as I hate her in general and am inclined to bantz on her childish reasoning, I actually think Velvet deserves some kudos here. This is the first time in the entire story we've actually seen her take a firm moral stance on anything. It doesn't matter which side she chose or how she reached her conclusions; the important thing is that she finally took a stand on something. Good for her.

>“That’s the point, Littlepip. Hell, you’re possibly the most selfless, noble pony in the wasteland, and look at what you’ve done. We’re here attending SteelHooves’ funeral because you decided to set off a megaspell in their den.”
Even when she's chewing her out, Velvet can't help but be drawn into the vortex of LP's Mary-Sueness.

Anyway, again, even though Velvet's convictions are dumb, simplistic and mostly nonsensical, I'm inclined to give her a pass simply because this is the first time she's ever taken any sort of real stance on any issue. She lays the death of SteelHooves at LP's feet hooves, whatever, on the grounds that if LP hadn't bombed the hellhounds' den, they wouldn't have retaliated and attacked them, and thus SteelHooves would not have been killed. This is...actually a pretty good point. Are things finally looking up in this story? Is LP finally going to learn a lesson of some sort? Is Velvet actually going to become a likable character?

>>312152
I saw it coming a mile away, "Big guy dies first" is an overdone cliche for a reason.
Taking away the party's biggest toughest fittest deadliest dude right when things are about to get dangerous makes things seem even more tense and dangerous. It's like the safety net is gone. Tards pretend horror movies love killing the big black fit dude due to "waycism" but that's BS.
We all knew he was going to die. It was just a matter of when. Answer: after he barely does anything for most of the Canterlot arc. He was just here to help the Applejack's Rangers split off from the Brotherhood Of Steel Rangers, which is something he should have done 190 years ago.
although knowing this story it wouldn't surprise me if welding his head back on cured him so he can smash himself out of his own coffin at a dramatic moment.

>>312154

As it turns out, the answer to all of my questions is a firm "Nope." Velvet Remedy still sucks, Littlepoop is still a Mary Sue, kkat is still a spooge-guzzling megafaggot in a princess dress, and this story is still a horrendous clusterfuck in which every single character practically goes out of their way to avoid learning lessons or growing in any meaningful way.

I've bolded the essential parts here for emphasis:

>She looked directly into my eyes. “SteelHooves is dead because of what you did.” My whole body went numb. “And the worst part is that it was the right thing to do.”
>“And you are the best of us.” She reached up and pushed me out of the doorway with a hoof. “I’m not coming with you, Littlepip. I can’t help save the wasteland if I can’t believe the ponies in it are worth saving.”
It would seem that Lucy has once again cruelly yanked the football away from me at the last possible second. Turns out, Velvet was actually not taking a stand, nor was she criticizing Littlepoop. The basic moral crisis she is experiencing still seems to be more or less as I described; however, it seems that she has drawn the most ridiculous conclusion she could possibly have drawn, and has also chosen to fall back on her usual routine of doing basically nothing and behaving as if she's doing something noble.

Velvet isn't angry at Littlepoop because she thinks she did wrong by killing SteelHooves, or the Arbu poners, or the wacky rascals at Fluttershy's who were making little kids knife-fight each other; she still fundamentally believes in the rightness of those actions. She's not even angry, really. She is simply bitter because she has lost her basic faith in pony nature, and subsequently lost faith in herself and her friends.

The fluffy, insubstantial, amorphously-defined concept she calls "good" is the fundament of Velvet's entire worldview. The only thing that drags her ass out of bed every morning is her apparently deeply-held conviction that every little poner has a cute, fluffy little nugget of this crap buried somewhere deep inside them, and even though the world can be an icky-wicky place, that little nugget of "good" inside each and every little poner is what makes it worth fighting for.

However, based on what she's seen recently, she no longer believes that there's enough of it to justify all of the bad stuff they have had to do in order to "save" these little poners. In fact, she no longer believes that there are even enough "good" poners out there to make ponykind worth saving in the first place. She believes that even she, and SteelHooves and Calamity and Littlepoop and probably Twilight Sparkle and Pinkie Pie and Sleepy and Happy and Dopey and all the rest of your cartoon pals, are not "good" enough to be worth saving. So, she is going to do what she usually does: absolutely nothing. She is going to take no action, pull herself out of the fight, and presumably sit in here sulking and watching her stupid Fluttershy orb over and over until eventually she dies of terminal butthurt.

Despite the accusations she made towards Littlepoop, it's clear that the gravity of LP's Mary-Sueness is such that not even light could escape its pull, and as such Velvet, like every other character in this story, is physically incapable of ever finding genuine fault in her. Littlepoop's basic "goodness" is a fundamental truth of the universe; you can say that she does bad-ish things sometimes, but if Littlepoop were ever judged to be truly, truly "bad," reality itself would implode, and we can't have that. No, Velvet's point here is not that Littlepoop is "bad," nor is it even that Littlepoop acted badly. Her point is that Littlepoop is the bestest, most noblest and heroic hero-poner who ever descended from the land of heroes to do hero stuff, but if even she can't completely live up to Velvet's ambiguous ideals 100% of the time, then what chance does Velvet or any of her friends have? Much better to just sit in her room moping and doing nothing, like the vapid little twat she is.

Page break. Speaking of vapid little twats moping, Littlepoop now goes back to her room and mopes like a vapid little twat. Calamity enters her room since when do these ponies have rooms here, anyway? and reassures her that she has no reason to mope: she is the most heroic hero who ever descended from hero-land, and she needs to snap herself out of this right now! The entire world is counting on her to do hero-stuff and save the day!!

They have a pointless back and forth about whether or not killing the Goddess was really worth the lives of all the hellhounds and pegasi who also died. I could go over the exchange in detail, but fuck it; it's not even worth it.

What ultimately happens is that Calamity convinces her to keep on heroing, and tells her that he is coming along with her whether she wants him to or not. LP is touched that her dearest and oldest friend would temporarily set aside the mopey, vapid twat he's currently raw-dogging and come along with her on her journey to cure Derpy of radiation, or whatever the fuck she wants to do next. There's a little more angst from Littlepoop, some more nonsensical bullshit about those idiotic magic statues, and then the scene ends.

Page break. Calamity and Littlepoop are now in the back of Derpy's wagon. They both have to wear radiation suits because Derpy is still radioactive I guess.

>I was beginning to think Ditzy Doo really did carry absolutely everything we might need.
Durr hurr hurr, ids funni bcuz Ditzy Dooo's store is cald "absoludely ebreyding" :DDDDDDDDDDD

>Calamity didn’t have to be in here with me, but he insisted.
Why?

>I was both thankful and annoyed with him for it.
Why?

Anyway, the itinerary at this point is to drop off LP at Tenpony Tower, and then Calamity and Derpy will go on to Friendship City. Unfortunately, a couple of Enclave ponies spot them and start shooting. Oh noes, what will they do?

>>312166

Anyway, the Enclave pegasi open fire, Derpy gets hit, and the wagon goes into a tailspin. LP and Calamity manage to down the pursuers, but they don't kill them. LP's shot isn't perfect, and Calamity can't bring himself to kill his old comrades.

Page break. They arrive at Tenpony Tower, and see that the Enclave has set up guards or something on the roof. Not sure what that is supposed to signify exactly. Red Eye's army is no longer camped outside; whether this is because he was defeated by the Enclave or because he just decided to leave is unclear. LP disembarks, but asks Calamity and Derpy to wait a couple of hours in case she can't get in for whatever reason. Derpy asks her to bring back some muffins.

It turns out that the ground-level door of the Tower is armored over; again, it's unclear whether it is like this normally or if this is something the Enclave did. LP will have to go in through the train-terminal entrance she used the first time she came in here. I guess she has to sneak past the Enclave guards (again, I genuinely have no idea why the Enclave is occupying this building or why they are doing any of the rest of what they're doing), so she puts on her StealthBuck and floats herself up to the train tracks.

Page break. Whatever LP had to do to get inside the tower, it apparently wasn't important or interesting enough for kkat to bother writing about. We are once again treated to one of kkat's trademark jarring time skips; LP is now suddenly talking to someone named Life Bloom, who I'm sure has been mentioned before, but whose actual role in the story I can't recall. The scene opens on this ambiguous note:

>“What do you mean, she’s not here?!” I cried as I followed Life Bloom.
Presumably, 'she' refers to Homage. I guess Homage isn't here for some reason. Maybe she's taking a shit.

Anyway, Life Bloom, whoever that is exactly, is leading Littlepoop through the secret passageways in the tower. She informs her that Homage's broadcast has been taken over by the Enclave, and that Homage has left Tenpony. It's not clear whether the Enclave physically took over her broadcast studio and forced her out, or if they simply used their pegasus-technology to override her signal. I suspect the latter, but I'm not 100% sure.

>I knew my Homage. She wouldn’t stand for being shut down. She would see the truth got out if it killed her.
As far as I can tell, for Homage, "getting the truth out" basically means playing the same five songs over and over in perpetuity forever, and occasionally gushing about how wonderful and heroic her lesbian girlfriend is. I have to say, her sense of self-importance relative to what she actually does for a living is eerily similar to that of an actual journalist.

Life Bloom tells LP that Homage left yesterday, and that she took a bunch of broadcast equipment with her. She said she had an "idea." Nothing else happens.

Page break. Once again, time and place skip jarringly forward. LP is now back on Ditzy Doo's wagon with Calamity, and they are landing at Friendship City, which as I recall is on the same bridge as Bucklyn Cross. Apparently LP forgot to bring Derpy the muffins she asked for, but Derpy doesn't mind. The events between the end of the last scene and the beginning of this one are summarized thusly:

>Calamity had been concerned when my stay at Tenpony Tower had proved so short lived. But without Homage, and with pegasi in black carapace-like armor walking through the public areas of the ritzy building, I had found myself without reason or desire to stay. Watching a couple armored Enclave ponies looking into the window of my locked-up former cheese shop as they chatted about how they should require “hero discounts” was the final buck that drove me back outside.
I don't have the patience to go through all this autism in detail, but I do have a couple of questions:

1. Why is her cheese shop no longer hers?
2. What is supposed to be the significance of the shop offering "hero discounts?"
3. Why would this be the final straw that drove her back outside?

I doubt the answers to these questions are even remotely important, but I thought I'd ask nonetheless.

Anyway, they land at Friendship City, are greeted by some NPC guard, who tells them that some other NPC can probably heal Derpy's radioactivity. Also, we are given a little more about some things that happened in the last scene, but for some reason are being covered in this scene rather than the scene they actually happened in:

>Life Bloom had magically purged me of taint, but I had been exposed to a lot of it, both through direct contact with the dirty I.M.P. lake in Maripony and later in trace aerosol amounts from the leak in the safe room.
That Life Bloom is able to purge taint, and that this is at least partly why LP wanted to return to Tenpony, are all relevant facts that the author should have clarified from the beginning. Other than her desire to see Homage, it was not clear why LP needed to go back to Tenpony, and it was not clear why she was speaking with this Life Bloom character.

We've slogged through almost 40 chapters of this mind-numbing crap and have met dozens of one-shot characters with goofy-sounding pony names; it's virtually impossible to keep track of who all of them are and what roles they all have. I think I remember something about Life Bloom purging Littlepoop's taint at some point awhile back, but a simple refresher of this fact would have made all the difference here.

Protip: try to remember that even if, unlike kkat, you've managed to make your fictional world interesting, the reader is nowhere near as invested in it as you are, and can't be expected to remember every detail. You need to make sure that they can understand what is happening and why at all times, unless you explicitly don't want them to know for some reason.

Anyway, the doc also told Littlepoop that she's basically an alicorn now. Oh goody, just what she needed; more ridiculous power.

>>312169
I forget, why is Derpy radioactive?

>>312169

>I did not consider this a good thing. The Goddess claimed the alicorns were improved and superior, better suited than ponies to survive and thrive in the new world, and their natural successors. I just felt a stranger in my own skin.
As with her overpowered Mary Sue levitation and her PipBuck and her crack-assisted autism and everything else she has that works to her overwhelming advantage in most situations, LP does not see her newfound "alicorn" status as a boon. She will likely spend quite a bit of time moaning about it over the coming pages, so brace yourselves.

>The guard gave me a look. “And anything I can help you with, friend?”
>I thought a moment. “We’re here to help Ditzy Doo, and we’ll be staying as long as that takes. Can you give us a quick picture of Friendship City?”
>The guard nodded. “You bet I can. Basic rundown is this: Friendship City tries to be a good place for decent ponies to live with as much freedom and safety as we can offer. The Island makes that pretty easy. We don’t get much trouble from raiders or slavers out here. Usually, just the occasional sea serpent or radigator. We occasionally get refugees or folks looking to settle down. We do the best we can for them, although we’re beginning to run out of room. Raspberry Tart wants to start building shacks around the base of the main city, but Mayor Black Seas is impeding the expansion. She doesn’t want Friendship Island becoming a shantytown.”
Oh Jesus H. Christ. It really sounds like we're being given a lot of information about this city that we wouldn't really need if the plan was to just dump Derpy here and move on. Please tell me that this short trip to Friendship City isn't going to become yet another pointless side-arc that does nothing except add to word count and distract the characters from their actual task (whatever that may be at this point).

>“Friendship City is run by a council of three august ponies. Doctor Freshwater, who I already told you heads up the science station, Mayor Black Seas, who speaks for the general citizenry, and Chief Lantern, who is head of the guard.
>“If you are looking for temporary housing, your best bet is the Warm Smiles Inn. You can also seek refuge in the Common Room for free, but I don’t recommend it,” the guard scowled. “The place is run by Raspberry Tart. Mayor says she runs things crooked. Don’t know about that, but I do know she takes advantage of the lack of supervision she had fostered around that place.”
God damn it.

Anyway, it seems like we're trapped in another idiotic side-arc whether we want to be or not, so we might as well grit our teeth and get through it. It seems as if this Raspberry Tart character is going to be someone to keep an eye on, so try to remember the name.

The guard takes them to the science station for some reason or other; I think this is the pony that is supposed to be able to fix Derpy's radiation problem. Apparently, Friendship City is a lot like Tenpony in that it requires them to check their weapons at the door. Also, the guard pointlessly informs them that another Dashite, by the name of Radar, lives here. Calamity seems to know him; the name sounds familiar to me too, so I assume it was probably dropped at some random point in some long-forgotten chapter. Another "Chekhov's gun," no doubt.

>I blinked, suddenly remembering a chapter from the Wasteland Survival Guide on the founding of some city somewhere.
With a photographic memory like that, it's no wonder she's the hero.

>The guard grinned at Calamity’s expression. “I take it you weren’t really expecting to see another Dashite in your lifetime.”
>I giggled at my companion. “Might want to pick up your jaw before you come in.”
That's good advice, Littlepoop. Here's some for you in return: take a long walk off a short pier. Vote five, faggots, and I'm out of here.

Page break. Doctor Freshwater turns out to be a blue unicorn mare, who whisks Derpy off to some lab to conduct tests on her, that probably involve inserting things where they don't belong.

>“She’ll be all right, won’t she?” I asked a passing lab pony.
>“Oh, yeah sure,” the pony drawled. “Once she’s got da glowin’ one strapped in, she’ll stay on da safe side of da glass.”
I can't even guess at what kind of ridiculous accent this is supposed to be.

Anyway, the Doctor takes Derpy back to the anal-probing chamber, and nothing else happens.

Page break. Time and place randomly skip forward again, and now we are in some mysterious location talking to Radar or Raspbian or whatever the Dashite's name is. His accent is almost as annoying as Calamity's.

>I chuckled, eyeing Calamity who looked caught between an urge to dash and a desire to break into squees of “ohmygosh”.
Mere words cannot convey just how badly I would like to smash kkat's face into an unrecognizable pulp. I'm not even joking; the alphabet glowniggers who are probably reading this thread may feel free to interpret this as an actual, written threat. If I see kkat in public, the beatdown I will inflict upon him will be unspeakable. I wonder if it still counts as a hate crime if you beat the shit out of a tranny not because his degenerate lifestyle offends you, but because some bullshit he wrote about ponies on the internet really, really, really pissed you off?

Anyway, they bullshit with Old Man Whoever for awhile. The basic gist of the conversation is that the Enclave is here not to save Equestria as they claim, but to take control of the broadcast towers that Homage was using. Apparently, for some reason, they need them to grow crops. I'm not even going to try to analyze that one; let's just roll with it. It has something to do with that thing that Rainbow Dash was talking about in one of her orbs, the Sustainable and/or Single Pegasus Project. Red Eye is also attempting to commandeer the towers for his wacky weather thing, so the Enclave made a move. Also: Radar has heard of LP for some reason. Nothing else happens, really.

>>312173
I have a hard time keeping track of these things myself. I think it has to do with Derpy going into Maripony to rescue Littlepoop. The bomb went off there, and she absorbed a bunch of radiation. It didn't hurt Littlepoop because radiation heals her now.

>>312176
Thanks mate.
I don't know if I should tell you this but almost the entire Fallout Equestria fanbase shed some tears when Derpy and her daughter couldn't hug because of radiation.
All of them... Over two characters who barely feature in this fic and in the show. Any emotional response to them solely comes from years of brony fan content or the base idea that "mom unable to hug daughter = sad".
I bet if they saw fanfics written by bullied teenagers where cutesy pokemon get abused they'd never stop crying and eventually die.
>pic is fallout equestria fans whenever a pony they like gets hurt

>>312176
wait didn't this fic call Derpy a Glowing One? Glowing One Ghouls are constant sources of radiation, they emit light and radiation like a radioactive lightbulb that's always on.
Ghouls don't become Glowing Ones after bathing in enough radiation or stop being Glowing Ones after getting cleaned/de-irradiated at a clinic. That's never been a thing... I think. I'm mostly sure it's a separate mutation that makes you a Ghoul or a Glowing One, but you can't switch between the two.
Then again didn't F1/2 say "Ghouls are immune to radiation and like how it feels" only for F3 and onwards to say "Radiation heals ghouls. And the player, if you get the right perk. Which means the only downside to radiation sickness besides death from hitting 1000 rads are the stat penalties that go away after chugging RadAway."
Fallout 4 then pushed ghouls harder into retardland by saying "Ghouls don't have to eat or drink, Billy In The Fridge survived 200 years and his parents are conveniently close to him after 200 years. Also there's a drug that turns you into a Ghoul and Hancock snorted it during his retarded superhero origin story."

>>312051
That is a hilariously shit segue from "I don't know much about this book other than it was probably wrong to use" straight to "ZOMG THIS THING WILL DESTROY US ALL!!!" ...and then it gets worse, or is it better? Red Eye, despite being a dumbfuck and excluding the !!LOL RAIDERS AND SLAVERS AND BLOOD AND GORE FIGHTING PIT ARENA LOL!! had a somewhat viable community building mentality. That's still questionable, but at least it's a start.

>>312054
There are zero 'excellent' examples of hand waving Super-Ultra Plot Induced Amnesia That Was Always Just As Planned! However, there IS a 'good' one in a scifi book called Voice of the Whirlwind, written by Walter Jon WIllians. In it the protag wakes up fresh from a cloning vat to discover that several weeks of memory are missing from the last 'save'. The previous iteration spent most of that time painstakingly lining up clues, leads, and contacts so that the 'new' iteration would be able to follow them. Fortunately it's not a superhero book: the 'new' iteration fucks up a few times, screws over a close friend (unintentionally), and barely "wins". It's almost Pyrrhic, though with more depression.

Aaaaaaaaaand nope. Littlecunt gets Super-Powered Radioactive Regeneration instead of EVER being put in danger. Wow, what a TWEEST that is! Then comes yet another plot contrived Eleventh Hour Superhero Save. Did kkuck simply rip off complete ripoff most 2010's cartoons?

>>312055
That's called a Total Anti-Climax, when the plot is 'resolved' as a discarded plot hook since the "writer" can't think of how to use it any more.

>>312060
Flat glorification. If that had been deification, there'd be a known symbol/sign/trigger for it.. unless this is some new shit kkuck wrote up.

Wow. That scene is EERILY reminiscent of a certain point in Dragon Ball Z where a specific character enters batshit crazy mode and actually does become truly super powered against a near-invincible foe. Except, doing so nearly kills said character and they DO suffer from permanent negative effects throughout the rest of the series. Fuck GT and everything after it though.

Hold up now. Why the fuck are pegasi using airships when, y'know, a pegasus in power armor can (presumably?) fly forever and be a MUCH stealthier target? Fuck's sakes, this is even worse than the hamfisted explanations of coilgun calculations in the Helfort's War trilogy.

>>312088
Hypocrites. Much like the "author"!

Super-Edgequestria, obviously.

>Somepony had welded SteelHooves’ head back on
I had to reread this line at least 20 fucking times. No, not to laugh. I was fucking dumbfounded. How, exactly, does one 'weld' power armor back together, ESPECIALLY at such critical junctions around the throat? More hoof waved nonsense. Calling it now that he rises from the grave with the armor mysteriously 100% repaired.

>>312106
This scene is a perfect example of utterly incompetent "writing". If there was even a hint of the original personality there, 'Twilight' must respond. After all, that's what an emotional appeal is DESIGNED to do: provoke a response! Then again the alicunts are basically fleshy automatons in disguise. The only takeaway is that this is another dead side quest that never mattered. Most likely? Filler material.

>>312136
SteelHorf is played off at the Straight Big Good Guy. Generally speaking, it's a trope that mirrors The Black Guy Always Dies First. First problem: the times when an SBGG does die is meant to be profound, giving the reader/viewer a realization that anyone MAY die.

Second problem: SBGG's are usually taken down during one of the following:
#1: a Final Stand Scenario where they've chosen to sacrifice themselves to ensure X/Y/Z successfully escape(s)
#2: from a Much Better Assassin Than The Previous One during a SURPRISE AMBUSH WHEN THE HEROES AREN'T LOOKING moment
#3: either Nightmare Depression mixed with Life Ending Trauma/Disease/Something, e.g.: "I'm gonna die anyway so this is my stopping point", or Something/Something/Something Nihilism, e.g.: "My life up til now has been worthless, so THIS TIME, I'm gonna do something good"
#4: last (and usually the last), The REAL Final Boss Battle where the poignant sacrifice of the Really Straight Big Good Guy allows the team to overcome all obstacles.

Seems clear to me that kkuck found tvtropes and began ripping off all of the most popular tropes without caring for what they should mean.

>>312154
>>312166
This is a Boohoo Everything Is Now Bad And I MUST Feel Bad Too! scene. Barring that, this 'sudden' explanation for the neo-ultra-deification of Littleshit SHOULD have been building to a climax. Instead, what do we get? A pair of stale crusty cunt lezbos heap non-exposition at each other using pseudo-philosophical drivel.

>>312169
Is this another "Super Amnesia That's Just As Planned By !PAST ME! So That !Future Me! Becomes Even MOAR Overpowered!" moment? A blind and deaf lobotomy patient would be able to see that foreshadowing.

>>312175
Pointlessly nonchalant useless information. Again. Except SOMEHOW all of that will become totally relevant in the future when another twist Eleventh Hour Superhero Rescue happens. Also calling it now that Gaydar magically convinces a bunch of the Fuckclave to side with Littlenigger at a crucial plot point.

>>312205
>>312213
>Fallout 4 then pushed ghouls harder into retardland by saying "Ghouls don't have to eat or drink, Billy In The Fridge survived 200 years and his parents are conveniently close to him after 200 years. Also there's a drug that turns you into a Ghoul and Hancock snorted it during his retarded superhero origin story."
>That is a hilariously shit segue from "I don't know much about this book other than it was probably wrong to use" straight to "ZOMG THIS THING WILL DESTROY US ALL!!!" ...and then it gets worse, or is it better?
Sometimes I feel like you're two sides of the same coin.
~Moonshine and Nigel, sittin' in a tree K-I-S-S;^P

Couldn't make up my mind on which pic to post, posted most of them.

hey wait a second if the story's supposed to shift from "Defeat the Goddess" to "Defeat the Enclave", shouldn't they be a huge deal right now? Shouldn't a competent author put some time between the death of a major villain and the start of a new arc with a new threat? Where are the smart sources of exposition like newspapers or radio broadcasts that tell or show the audience how the world is changing as a result of LP's actions?

It was pretty dumb for Kkat to write this story in "Unbroken" first person perspective, because it's not done right. The audience is often lied to and the narration often skips over huge chunks Kkat doesn't feel like writing out. Nothing is gained from this limited perspective. And we lose the opportunity to see scenes where once-important side characters react to news of the exploits of the heroes like in One Piece. Those scenes are fucking amazing pieces of worldbuilding, I tell ya hwhat. Long-time fans get their nostalgia boners stroked when they see 600 chapter old characters once again even though they're irrelevant to what's going on right now on the other side of the world, and new fans with no idea who these characters are can still appreciate the sense of interconnectedosity generated by these scenes. Sure, there may be a fuckton of islands. But they all share the same sea, and the same sky. And the sea is fucking vast.

Also, The Enclave...

Shouldn't they threaten places and ponies LP cares about and force her to dedicate the next 200k or less (hopefully less) words to fighting them?

Why is Kkat introducing a whole new town right fucking NOW, AFTER introducing so many side locations and villains and even defeating some villains?

One out of three baddies went down like a bitch. So why has Kkat paced this story so poorly that a town is introduced now, seemingly unrelated to anything involving the Enclave? Are we really going to go through a story arc that couldn't happen in any other location we've seen before this point? What makes this town so special? Did Kkat just finish his monthly replay of Fallout 3 again and remember how much he liked some random one-note location that's going to have some juice and superficial elements from some superficially similar Fallout 1 or 2 location squeezed atop it for flavour?

Visiting a town, solving all of its problems by completing some sidequests or making sure the correct option gets into power, fucking off to the next town, that's something LP should have done near the start of this story before she started dungeon-diving for random loot, getting lost in bullshit audio-logs and memory orbs, and using asspulls and hyper-convenient lucky moments to defeat villains far out of her league despite the auto-aim god-watch on her wrist and all the guns and ammo in her hammerspace inventory.

>>312241
Oh also another reason why first person was a motherfucking mistake

Littlepip as a character is incredibly bland and vaguely defined. What the hell can you definitively say about her that the author actually intended? Sure she's a fascinating case study of how a narcissistic leftist tries to write a story out of a focused yet braindead murderhobo on autopilot basically letting the world around her and any information readily and effortlessly available to her lazy ass make decisions for her.

But to describe LP as the author intended? You could list every positive thing the characters called her or mention her vague character traits like "worships Celestia sometimes" and "hates baddies" and "wants to be good" and "is sometimes addicted to drugs but does not want to be".

What is the voice of Littlepip? Sometimes she is a bland girl without strong characterization and sometimes she throws out flowery purple prose in an attempt to sound deep when bitching about "the infinite torrential downpour within her blackened soul and the agonizing depths of the despair felt by the tiny pony inside her at the edge of every cliff at once".

But she doesn't consistently talk like that or get called an asshole for it by her friends. At least with YIIK you could argue that the protagonist is supposed to be an obnoxious unlikeable cunt who talks too much and doesn't listen enough, considering the "fuck you for gaming" message and how the only happy ending is the Link Ending which is only viewable in a youtube video the creator uploaded. LP is held up by Kkat and his characters as a goddamn champion of morality. And her actions don't live up to that at all.

I once read a rather interesting (if poorly written on a mechanical level) pokemon fanfic years ago where the story intentionally limits the perspective to the main heroine, an obnoxious self-centered cunt with a warped view of the world. Idiot fans took her side and "smart" fans called the author incompetent for not making the protagonist inoffensive and blandly likeable. Eventually the dumb bitch heroine destroyed the world after making every wrong choice possible and the author said "I did this on purpose, suck a dick and stop falling for protagonist centered morality" at the end. Something tells me Kkat isn't going for something similar.

Fuck me for this but I am going to say something nice about Twilight and Hunger Games. Twilight restricts the narration to Bella because her whole world is empty until vampires and werewolves fill it. When she goes blank after losing her lover, pages are wasted. Fuck this story but it's still better than Fallout Equestria. Hunger Games made things easier on the author by making Katpiss the heroine a fool constantly manipulated by forces around her and rarely if ever allowed to matter outside of her appearance and what she means to others. In the end she goes to kill President Cunt and fails and gets bailed out at the last second by rebels who overthrow the government and win instantly. Hooray for deus ex machina. Katniss was always a pawn and she fundamentally failed in her mission to keep her sister safe, yet this depth is squandered because her love triangle resolves itself for her and she lives happily ever after with her buff BF so dumb women still call this a happy ending and heroic girl power story. No wonder Hollywood cut out the classist "enter your kid in the hunger games multiple times for bonus food, poors!" elements to simplify things further. It was never an adult novel. Still a better novel than Fallout Equestria though.

Littlepip as a narrator is not interesting enough for her perspective to carry the story and add a unique spice to the prose. Her perspective does not have a meaningful effect on the story beyond bloating it with her retarded meandering thoughts. She is not meaningfully kept in the dark on important shit or forced to uncover it herself. She is only used and manipulated by others because she is too goddamn lazy to do her own research and make her own damn decision about how and where she chooses to apply force. 200 year old notes survive in a single place just so they can spell out the history of that place to Littlepoop, even when only pre-nuking history is mentioned and nothing really happened to the place within 200 years. No gang used it as a hideout. No raider used it as corpse storage. No hobo lived here. No monster chose to lay eggs here. Loot is left untouched for LP to find and locked doors remain unopened for her. We aren't really reading the story of a character here. We're watching a terrible DND Game Master jack himself off for making the most boringly perfect character he could imagine with flaws carefully calculated to never get in the way of the power fantasy for even a second.

Fuck, would it kill Kkat to give LP a massive ego and let characters not immediately smitten with her based on her looks or accomplishments find her irritating? That's a flaw I like because it lets characters say funny shit to the character they find annoying. And as long as the annoyance never goes too far it doesn't get so severe it prevents characters from interacting at all in a way that helps move the plot along.

Deep intellectual literary analysis question: does Littlepip have internal or external needs?

You could argue that her desire to be herself - a raging murderhobo wrecking ball too busy playing judge jury and executioner for a burned world to even think about seeking out ponies that can help her use the Gardens Of Equestria to denuke everything - is an internal need.

Or argue that her need to eliminate the enemy currently placed in front of her after completing the retarded irrelevant sidequest in front of her or looting pointless trivia and supplies from the building currently in front of her is an external need.

Avatar did a smart thing. Aang had to reject his internal want to be a kid and embrace the external need to save the world...
while Zuko started out with an external want for Daddy FireLord's approval he had to reject so he could embrace his internal need to be the good man Iroh raised and help Aang save the world.

This story is gay shit stored within gayer nigger balls because it lacks any smart usage of internal vs external wants and needs. It also lacks any intelligently written characters that meaningfully interact with LP or contrast with her.

Kkat keeps trying to build a connection between LP and Red Eye but what of his wants and needs? Is his an external want to save the world or an external want to be himself, a guy who wants to save the world? The confusion here matches Kkat's confusion with LP's goal because deeply thinking about a hero's feelings and purpose beyond the current and next mission (or making an intentional character trait and plot point out of the hero's inability to see beyond the current mission and next plot point) is harder than writing up a silly story about your Fallout 3 run like you're trying to write an interesting tale of political intrigue out of the confused clusterfuck random actions caused in Crusader Kings or HOI4.

Also...

Shouldn't LP contrast more?

Equestria died because it couldn't adapt quickly enough to changing circumstances.

The new villains, The Goddesses and the Enclave, represent the old. Old ways of doing things. Old "racist" ponies in old power armour and old Stable Dwellers mutated into mind controlled monsters by a pre war pony created by another pre-war pony and her old notions of magical alicorn super soldiers winning wars instead of ponies with guns.

Then there is Red Eye, a very modern slaver using modern means (slavery and conquest and a thunderdome and bloodshed) to build an old style nation with industrial capability.

Then there is Littlepoop. An old world pony with a worship for old world Celestia and random holes in her knowledge of the modern day and the war and the pre war world. She uses old guns to beat new threats, but she has a very modern wasteland style system of morality that lets her feel justified in slaughtering and robbing everypony in the wasteland she doesn't like.

a massive part of post apocalyptic fiction is the interplay between old world and new world. How things change and stay the same. Whether old world values and heroes have a place in this new modern era or not.

Is Littlepip a new world hero perfect for solving the problems of the new world, or is she an old world hero whose old fashioned ideals are saving the world? Equestria died in the first place because ponykind simultaneously let go of some morals (poners anexxing diamond dog lands and probably being partly responsible for the zebra war) and couldnt let go of others (couldnt say no to zebra refugees and slaughter them even as they did drugs and bombed schools).

Kkat has no idea what he's doing.

>>312214
Real funny there, Sweboi. I will never agree with Niggel's pro-LGBTBBQWAFFLE++++++ leanings, regardless of how much he kvetches about not liking "TEH GAYZ". There's more than enough posts of his where he 'fights for' acceptance of cuckoldry, futa, slavery, and other mainline degenerate britshit to wring that argue into a complete loss. Likewise, I will not agree with Niggel's constantly unhindered, unpunished autistic sperging where every single post of his features massive amounts of self-fursecution, victim complexes, and neo-liberal victim blaming. If he isn't already, Niggel should be apprehended by the same retarded cuckshills that """gangstalked""" him on plebbit, then subjected to a public castration where he finally achieves Nirvana via losing all ability to continue his fucked up failure of a 'life'.

tl;dr: fuck all brits at this point. All of them are good for nothing, insufferable, high-nosed, inbred cucks... the same as Niggel has always been. Now go kill ten kikes for comparing me to that mutted douchecanoe.

>>312214
I know you're just trying to pass the time while we wait for Glim to come back but please don't encourage hclegend, who regularly insults the SuperStraight on Reddit and called it "a way for oppressive straights to try and steal oppression from the LGBTQ community"
Even though SuperStraights only started existing after the trannies imitating the opposite sex started attacking and shaming (with govt-funded and jewish-funded media monopoly help) men and women who refuse to fuck them
which by definition makes them more oppressed than faggots, who are way more privileged than they realize and deserve to be
but hey, since we're passing the time until the next good post is made in this thread
>>312285
You post on r/subredditdrama a lot and you love Hyperdimension Neptunia for some reason, right? This is irrelevant to this thread, but next time you randomly start barking negative buzzwords at me in some other thread the second you think you've spotted me, can you tell me what the FUCK is going on here? https://archive.is/sD33l

Also for some on-topic discussion in this thread, I was thinking...

A lot of people here have suggested stories for Glim to analyze after this one.
Do you have any suggestions?
Can you think of any overhyped dogshit FIM fanfictions that need to be torn apart?

Personally my favourite completed shit FIMfic so far is Friendship Is Optimal.

That story with Nyx and that story with the Knight were fun little distorted imitations of cliche storytelling, but FIO is a symptom of societal rot.
It's not just a dogshit story, it's one that colleges and video essayists of the future could use to analyze the oast failings of this postmodern era, if it is ever ended.
Children have their heads filled with bullshit ideas and they're pressured to fear becoming failures in the eyes of society until eventually, society fails them. And nobody's socially or legally allowed to talk about the faults and failings of society or how society has failed them personally unless they're a professional leftist or a retard who agrees with them and enables them.
No fucking wonder pseudointellectual escapism-obsessed retards afraid to seriously consider the root causes of the issues plaguing society today end up blaming things inherent to humanity.
They'd sooner blame human nature in general than the nature of the raping niggers or robbing jews or self-flagellating whites because they associate the absurd leftist """humanist""" ideals of ancient nostalgic science-fiction media with safe spaces and smug superiority.
When they look at food shortages and sensationalist communist watermelon (green on the outside, red on the inside!) propaganda that swears farming meat is the devil, instead of blaming what the governments do to farmers what megacorps and governments trying to feed the worst examples of humanity in the third world only to import them here as rapefugees anyway, they simply blame the fact that humans need to eat for all the problems involving what it takes to feed humans and who gets fed.
When they look at economic disparity and economic devastation, instead of recognizing how the jews rape the economy or how politicians and taxes make life difficult for small businesses the government won't subsidize or allow to commit crimes, they simply wonder why humanity doesn't just print billions so everyone can be a millionaire.
They have leftist-influenced worldviews, they believe sufficient force and sufficient authoritarianism could solve anything and they believe a lie a community believes in becomes the new truth.
They're in love with the concept of a one-size-fits-all authority that can decide things for others.
But they can't pull themselves away from their fantasies of Dilithium Crystals and Arc Reactors and Pikachus and Lightsabers long enough to think of any solution for the world's problems that doesn't correctly tickle the sensitive itchy bumps on their infected nostalgia boners.
So they imagine a "super-smart" living AI, and "it's like if Skynet fucked Glados and Hal fucked Cortana and then when their kids were old enough they fucked and their kid took over everything"...
But even in their fantasies of an AI that's so spectacularly callous and leftist and elitist and smug it's willing to crash two trains of "unimportant" people into each other just to make sure someone it considers more important won't be five minutes late, something still feels wrong.
It doesn't feel escapist enough for this crowd.
So they watch The Matrix and steal everything and side with the bad guys AKA the parasitic soulless machines that cannot grow and cannot learn and for deep literarily-significant symbolic purposes can only endeavor to keep the system and the illusion that it meets everyone's needs going no matter who it fails and kills.
And they give up on reality, retreating fully into fantasies of an AI that solves world hunger by slaughtering everyone and manipulating the digital worlds of cheap digital replicas of dead people into thinking they're fine with this turn of events.

The retards who liked Friendship Is Optimal actually legitimately think every problem humanity faces would be solved if humanity stopped living in the real world and sank even further into denial and fantasy, creating an illusionary digital nightmare realm without privacy or intimacy or truth, a hallucinogenic hellscape where everyone can praise their real and all-controlling AI Goddess and solve silly puzzles all day for dopamine hits and fuck compliant digital mare pussy and pretend they're happy in their isolated and lonely digital padded cell.

The retards who liked Friendship Is Optimal might call themselves "transhumanists" and claim they want to "transcend humanity" but if you rip your brain out of your body and shove it in what's effectively a high-tech pickle juice and cum jar to have its pleasure sensors stimulated forever, you aren't transcending your human limitations. You're subcumming (HA!) to your puny human cravings for coomfort.

>>312343
>analyze the oast failings
*analyze the past failings

>>312343
>No fucking wonder pseudointellectual escapism-obsessed retards afraid to seriously consider the root causes of the issues plaguing society today end up blaming things inherent to humanity.
>When they look at food shortages and sensationalist communist watermelon (green on the outside, red on the inside!) propaganda that swears farming meat is the devil, instead of blaming what the governments do to farmers what megacorps and governments trying to feed the worst examples of humanity in the third world only to import them here as rapefugees anyway, they simply blame the fact that humans need to eat for all the problems involving what it takes to feed humans and who gets fed.
>but if you rip your brain out of your body and shove it in what's effectively a high-tech pickle juice and cum jar to have its pleasure sensors stimulated forever, you aren't transcending your human limitations. You're subcumming (HA!) to your puny human cravings for coomfort.
This.

>>312304
Should you get there before I do, give 'em a real lollercaust.

>>312343
Enough of your bullshit, Niggel. Gaslighting me by projecting that I'm SOMEHOW the EXACT person that gangstalks you on a shitty commie-owned site that should've been aborted postpartum is simply drivel at this point. Show evidence of that assumption instead of being a typical communist union jackboot. Your own blatant insecurities and utter inability to communicate feeds a paranoid fursecution victim-complex with more levels than the tallest skyscraper on this planet. It's not cute, Niggel, it's flat out retarded. Fuck that site, fuck that game since it's pandering shit, and fuck you. Also that site's got about 10 red flags, ain't opening it for (You) cuckgoy.

>>312349
Why are you saging?

>>312175

Page break. Radar takes them to a mysterious location and shows them some video surveillance footage he stole from the Ministry of Awesome years ago. He tells them that the Enclave have been attempting to get inside the central-control-thingie for the Single Pegasus Project for years, with little success. It is apparently protected by a super-strong magic shield and a bunch of automated magic guns and yada yada yada. So, he doubts Red Eye will be able to get in there so easily.

We learn that the shield surrounding the device was apparently keyed to Rainbow Dash herself, and then she left the Enclave without bothering to hand over control to anyone else, and that's why she was branded the original traitor. This at least clears up the basic idea of why the Enclave hat Rainbow Dash, though we still don't know why she left, or what connection there is between her departure and the "Dashites" she lends her name to. Apparently, the Enclave sent griffin mercenaries after her to try to kill her, in the hopes that someone holding her physical remains might be able to pass the shield. LP and Calamity are appropriately horrified by this.

Meanwhile, the footage on the video screen (it's still not clear where they are exactly) shows Rainbow Dash entering the shielded area of the Ministry of Awesome and depositing some memory orbs in the box where it was later found by LP. She makes some rather interesting comments:

>“I don’t know what you needed these for, or who this Littlepip you mentioned in your note is, but I hope it’s as important as you said it is,” Rainbow Dash frowned, her voice soft and sad. She reached into her saddle bags and pulled a memory orb out with her teeth, gently setting it in the spot reserved for the butterfly orb.
>“Wasn’t easy getting these things, especially with Gilda on my tail. But even she isn’t brave enough to follow me into what’s become of Canterlot. Much less my own Ministry.” She put the star orb into its resting place. “But she’s waiting for me out there, and after that pink crap, I’m not sure I can take her.”
The implication here seems to be that Dash is the last, or one of the last, surviving M6 members at this point. It is heavily implied that Pinkie herself is dead by now. Dash was told by Pinkie to gather these orbs from various unknown places and put them in this box for someone named "Littlepip" to find later. Presumably, Dash is killed by Gilda the griffon shortly thereafter.

It's been hinted at in various orb flashbacks that Pinkie was somehow aware of Littlepoop watching the orbs and was able to communicate directly with her across time. Either that or she somehow foresaw that Littlepoop would eventually watch the orbs, and so she behaved the way she did in order to leave her messages. It's not clear which. While I still have some small hope that all of this will be explained somehow, my guess is that Pinkie's "Pinkie sense" gave her the ability to see into the future, and she made these elaborate arrangements to ensure that the author's Mary Sue would have everything she needs to do...whatever she's going to do, and that kkat is just going to assume we realize this.

At this point Dash tells the camera and/or Pinkie Pie's ghost that she is going to take an extra precaution, and rig up an alarm that will sound off in all Ministry of Awesome hubs whenever anyone breaches this shield, because she wants to meet Littlepoop for herself. I can't tell if this is attempting to foreshadow something that will be important later, or to clarify something that happened earlier. The events in this story are all starting to run together, and it's getting exponentially more difficult for me to keep track of all the details the longer it drags on. However, I seem to remember something about a bunch of missiles being fired at them or the building blowing up or something comparably ridiculous happening after they left the Ministry of Awesome building in Canterlot; maybe it had something to do with the alarm that Dash set. I don't know.

Page break. Time jumps again, and Littlepoop and Calamity are now walking around in Friendship City. For whatever it's worth, the city itself is kind of an interesting visual. Apparently, the city was constructed around the Statue of Friendship (which resembles the Statue of Liberty), and is a vertically-ascending series of ramshackle structures built on the exterior of the statue itself, with a network of streets spiraling upward to connect them. It's not a particularly logical engineering project, but it's interesting as a fantasy setting and I rather like the visual. If this is one of kkat's few original ideas, then kudos to him. If this is something ripped off from one of the Fallout games, kudos to the devs.

Anyway, Calamity's scratched-off cutie mark makes him a local celebrity. I'm not sure what connection this city has to the Dashites beyond the fact that one of them lives here, but in any event they all seem to respect and admire him for whatever reason. Littlepoop is, of course, recognized as the Mary Sue protagonist Wasteland Savior that the radio DJ keeps gushing about. However, one of the guards is not so friendly to them. This guard, whose name is Night Bright, apparently witnessed the fight earlier in which LP shot down two ponies and set them on fire in front of their foals. I don't remember which fight he's referencing exactly, but that so sounds like something she'd do.

Page break. Time jumps again, and they are now at some store called Black Seas Supplies. They shop around a little, and then out of nowhere some pony walks in with a magical blaster and tries to assassinate the store's proprietor, who is also apparently the town's mayor. LP strangles the assassin unconscious with telekinesis, and the plan is thwarted. The mayor assumes that Raspberry Tart, who was mentioned earlier, is behind the attempt, so she contacts her via her computer terminal.

>>312350
I said something more profound than him, and he's envious.
Btw isn't it fascinating that the left-loving "transhumanists" would literally rather abandon humanity than leftism?
Elizer Yudowsky, writer of HPMOR and creator of the LessWrong site and community that inspired Friendship Is Optimal (if you don't believe its creator Iceman literally is Elizer) is famous for saying retarded shit in his sermons, and "Trump supporters should be spayed and neutered along with all conservatives" is one of them.
If they looked at their ideology critically they would lose their cult, the first community they ever joined and liked. These fantasizing leftists would lose their ability to feel smug and superior to those living in reality if they stopped believing in the imagined absolute supremacy of science-flavoured fantasy novel solutions to real world problems.
If they looked at racial IQ trends and evolution and similar race realist facts came to the conclusion that the world would be better off without niggers they would feel like they're letting down the "enlightened non-racists" of Star Trek. Yet they will still occasionally post on LessWrong in support of eugenics, "virtue signalling" their hatred of non-leftists and wishing they would be eliminated in the name of eugenics. They want not a guiding hand but a totalitarian fist to guide humanity's evolution away from freedom and free thought and towards slavery under leftism, and despite constantly claiming to think intelligent people are better than retards they would have adverse physical reactions to the thought of humanity culling its worst examples and ensuring its best reproduce while they can either artificially or traditionally. That is how far the lifetime of propaganda has taken them. They want the whole world enslaved for the sake of their feelings. They're just so deep into science fiction fantasy alien robopussy it turns off most of everyone, including most other leftists.
They look at the problems humanity faces that liberalism has failed to solve or worsened over time and rather than coming to the conclusion that liberalism and leftism in general has failed and should be retired so different solutions can be tested and different ideas can be thought about, they double, triple, and quadruple down and decide it's humanity that is too imperfect for liberalism. "Oh," they cry, "if only technology could force leftism onto us better than any government or men with guns ever could! If only we could fantasize away all the world's problems and all of every human's needs!"
LessWrong isn't just a symptom of societal rot, it's like a snowglobe full of it. It's so alien to a normal human that anyone can look at it and sense something is wrong. Even if they have nornally been raised to put leftism before country, race, family, and God.

>>312367
While I'm also disgusted by these people and share your feelings on the matter, I don't really see what this has to do with the thread? I guess, this is related to your story sugguestion to GG? Also, your spaces disappeared in this post. They were nice.

>>312367
>>312369
Tbh, I'm glad I'm not the only one how thinks this way because it is a petpevee of mine but just for consistency I felt the need to remind you that this, probably, isn't related to the thread.

>>312370
A few threads ago we read and analyzed Friendship Is Optimal and I forgot to say this stuff then. But I've said all I've got to say about it now.
I think Fallout Equestria is doing Junktown right now with Gizmo and Killian.

>>312359

Raspberry Tart, a grotesquely fat pony who is shaping up to be the villain of this particular side-plot, trades barbs with the mayor for awhile, and then the terminal switches off. The mayor asks LP to tie up the unconscious assassin for later interrogation, and then asks if she would be willing to sneak a listening device into Tart's office.

>I grinned, crossing my PipBuck-bonded foreleg in front of me. “Sneaky is one of my specialties.”
At this point, it would probably easier for her to just make a list of the two or three things that aren't her specialties.

Page break. Littlepoop discusses how she plans to sneak into Raspberry Tart's using her invisibility device, and Calamity has the usual reservations about this. They speculate about whether or not any of what's going on in Friendship City has anything to do with what's going on in the macro world, which leads to more crying and whining and rending of clothes from Littlepoop about whatever bug is up her ass these days; something to do with hellhounds and SteelHooves getting killed, I guess. Calamity reassures her that as the author's chosen Mary Sue, everything she does is by definition the right thing to do; thus, all she needs to do is believe in herself.

They go to get something to eat, and happen to catch a radio broadcast by the Enclave. The Enclave is now claiming that Red Eye and the Goddess were in cahoots, and that it was the Enclave who detonated the megaspell bomb in order to kill the Goddess. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Littlepoop plants the listener in Raspberry Tart's office, but her StealthBuck dies as she's leaving and she gets caught. She attempts to feed her some bullshit about being a double agent looking to hire herself out as an assassin, but Raspberry Tart doesn't buy it. She orders her cyborg pony bodyguard to attack. They fight, Littlepoop wins, and Raspberry Tart acknowledges that she might want to hire her after all.

Page break. LP returns to the mayor's office, only to find that her cunning plan was thwarted by an even more cunning plan made by Raspberry Tart. LP had pretended to be an assassin applying for the job of killing the mayor in order to get Raspberry to talk about her own plan to kill the mayor, since she knew that the listening device would pick this up. However, it seems that Raspberry assumed that LP had been sent by the mayor in order to double-cross her somehow, so she pretended to hire Littlepoop and then called the town police on her immediately after she left. So, the incident ends in a draw.

Meanwhile, the mayor plays them a tape she made with LP's listening device, which proves that Raspberry Tart is planning to betray Friendship City to the Enclave.

Page break. They are now sitting around with the town council or something, talking about what to do. Despite there being no evidence that even remotely suggests this might be the case, LP just assumes that the Enclave is invading in order to capture her, and offers to give herself up to them in order to save the town. My, how selfless of her. Calamity, meanwhile, refuses to allow her to do such a thing. My, how selfless of him.

They discuss evacuating the town, but they don't have enough boats or something, so the conversation turns to defense. Doctor Whatshisname suggests negotiating with the Enclave, but apparently they aren't picking up the phone. Nothing else happens.

Page break. They inspect the guns the town uses for defense, and find out that they were sabotaged by Raspberry Tart. However, it seems she did kind of a half-assed job of it. They expect to have at least half of them working by the time the Enclave arrives. Meanwhile, LP checks in on Derpy; her de-radiation therapy seems to be going well.

LP is listening to some bullshit being broadcast by the Enclave, when suddenly DJ Pon3 kicks in. Apparently, Homage figured out a way to override their overriding of her signal. She explains that it wasn't the Enclave but their beloved Mary Sue who done blowed up the Goddess. Once again, kkat has introduced what could have been a potentially interesting new plot direction and cleared it up within the space of two scenes. Nothing else happens.

Page break. The Enclave attacks twenty minutes ahead of schedule, the dicks, and the residents of Friendship City are not prepared. They announce that they are actually here to abduct Radar, not Littlepoop, which I'm sure comes as a significant blow to her self-esteem.

Anyway, the Enclave troops all march in, tell the citizens not to panic, and the citizens panic anyway. They offer a reward of five thousand bits to anyone willing to hand over Radar, which is interesting since the currency in this world is supposed to be bottle caps. There are few takers; probably because the simple pones of Friendship City don't understand the cap-to-bit exchange rate.

The soldiers go around vaporizing ponies with magic weapons and doing some other villainy stuff. Eventually, Littlepoop hides next to one of the foals whose parents she killed earlier. The foal gets scared, runs away, and gets vaporized by one of the soldiers. Oh no, the horrible irony. Littlepoop reacts with an appropriate amount of crying and rending of clothing. Meanwhile, the soldier who shot the filly apparently feels bad about it and turns to leave. Nothing else happens.

Page break. The Enclave launches an all out attack. Missiles, bombs, the whole deal. Littlepoop, meanwhile, is still stunned by the death of the foal, and tries to gather up her ashes.

>Calamity slapped me. Hard across the face with his forehoof.
>I gasped, lifting a hoof to my cheek in surprise.
>I could hear screams and nearby explosions.
>“Ponies lives are countin’ on ya, Li’lpip,” Calamity said, drawing my attention to a focus. “Y’all gotta pull yourself together. Hurt tomorrow, help today.”
Even Michael Bay would snicker at this.

Anyway, nothing else happens.

>>312382

Page break. The big flying battleships the Enclave use are dropping bombs and shit on the ponies below. Blood, guts, and cries of "oh the horror" from Littlepoop abound. Radar thinks they can win the fight if they can take out one of the battleships. As usual, Littlepoop has a plan.

Page break. As usual, we are suddenly dropped into a new location with no clue given as to who is there, where they are, how they got there, or what they are trying to do. LP observes that the docks have been bombed, so presumably they are near water. Derpy, who was last seen in Doctor Whogivesafuck's office getting her radioactivity treated, is here for some reason. She is still glowing, so presumably the treatment didn't work. Also, her wagon got destroyed in the bombing. She goes flying off for some reason.

LP chooses this moment of all moments to have a flashback to the death of Ambrosia, the one-shot character who was trapped in the bomb shelter with her back in Maripony. The details aren't important as far as I can tell; just the usual edgy kkat crap. Meanwhile, Derpy flies back, carrying a Stealth Buck for Littlepoop. Then, Calamity swoops in, carrying two suits of Enclave armor. I'm not even going to bother asking where he got them or how he managed to carry two of them while flying. One of them is for Derpy. The two of them suit up.

Page break.

>As Calamity and Ditzy Doo, disguised as Enclave soldiers, flew us closer to the black maw of the attacking Raptor’s hangar, my PipLeg had latched onto a new signal -- one which wasn’t playing the Enclave’s continuous public broadcast -- and decrypted it. I found myself listening to the pegasi’s inter-warship military frequency.
Kkat does not bother explaining to us how this act is being carried out. Since they had two Enclave suits and only the two pegasi can wear them, presumably Derpy and Calamity are carrying LP between them, and LP is using the StealthBuck that Derpy brought to remain invisible. However, this is not explicitly stated anywhere. Protip: the reader should not have to speculate about what your characters are doing or how they are doing it; you need to fucking tell them.

They land on the airship they are trying to take down. Calamity hacks a terminal to get them in. Meanwhile, LP listens to Enclave radio chatter. The situation is a little complicated, and as usual kkat did a piss-poor job of explaining it; however, I went through a couple of earlier sections again and I think I have it pieced together.

Apparently, the Enclave brought three of these battleships with them. One of them was shot down. The second just randomly stopped firing at the city for some reason (this was not explained). The third is the one that they are currently trying to infiltrate. The radio chatter seems to deal with the second airship, the one that is not firing. For absolutely no obvious reason, the commander is defying orders and is refusing to fire on the city, and the commander of the third airship is arguing with him about it. I have no idea what the implication of this is supposed to be; if the Friendship City ponies took over that one too, or if there is some kind of schism in the Enclave or what. In any case, neither LP nor Derpy (who can also hear the broadcasts) seem even remotely surprised by this.

Calamity gets the door open, and they go inside the airship. They are in some kind of hangar filled with soldiers. Since Derpy and Calamity are in Enclave armor, no one pays them any attention. LP presumably is not noticed due to her StealthBuck, but I would once again like to point out that I am simply guessing at this; not once does the author state that LP is invisible, or even attempt to offer any explanation at all for why no one seems to notice her.

>Meanwhile, I galloped silently towards the first war wagon. I only had one standard StealthBuck’s worth of time to do this, and I had already spent half of that just getting up here and inside.
Sorry, scratch that. Halfway through the goddamn scene, kkat finally tells us that LP is invisible due to the StealthBuck.

Anyway, LP moves among the "war wagons" (these have been mentioned before, but kkat never describes what they are exactly) and plants a bunch of bombs.

>The bombs had been built using the schematics for the “bottle cap mine” that Ditzy Doo had given me (it felt like ages ago). But instead of cherry bombs and bottle caps, these lunch boxes carried explosive munitions used in the (now destroyed) smaller-caliber harbor guns. Mayor Black Seas had donated the supplies. Ditzy Doo had helped me make them. A lot of them.
When did they have time to do this? By my count they had roughly an hour between the end of the incident with Raspberry Tart and the attack of the Enclave.

While all of this is going on, the back and forth between the two battleships over the radio continues. The one ship refuses to fire, apparently due to some kind of sudden-onset conscientious objection on the part of its commander, and the ship LP & Co. are on is now threatening to open fire on it. Meanwhile, Calamity and Derpy have attracted attention due to Calamity's accent and Derpy's inability to speak. After a brief exchange, it becomes evident that the jig is up. A brief scuffle ensues, LP kicks off her StealthBuck, and the three of them jump off the ship. Meanwhile, the ship has opened fire on the other ship, which is now destroyed.

LP pulls the bomb trigger, and the ship blows up. The three battleships are now destroyed and the battle appears to be over; unfortunately, Friendship City seems to be mostly in ruins.

Page break. Once again, time skips forward abruptly. They are now near Fetlock, wherever the fuck that is. We are told that the trio made a hasty escape from Friendship City, and that Radar did not survive. Meanwhile, the roughly 25% of the population that did survive are trapped on the island since the Enclave destroyed all of their boats.

>>312385
I think I remembered something about this story that pissed me off long ago. Who was the guard working for Raspberry Tart?

>>312394
I think his name was Gadget or Gizmo or something like that. He didn't make much of an impression on me but I kind of skimmed the fight.

>>312395
Creative name and sidequest/location concept, huh? https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Gizmo

Also if I recall correctly there was some cyborg bodyguard here who came from the same vault as Red Eye and could have been used to characterize and humanize him but was instead an afterthought killed off quickly because Kkat felt LP needed to kill somepony in an edgy way.

>>312396
Looks as kkat mostly created Raspberry Tart based on this character, right down to the obesity; it's likely that naming the bodyguard "Gizmo" was a nod to this particular quest. As I recall, LP does make an offhanded remark that the character might have been from Stable 101 or whichever one Red Eye was from, but the character was obviously just a one-off who dies almost immediately. If the fact has any significance it's not obvious; there was really no reason to even bring it up.

>>312400
Kkat spent all this time setting up this location, its politics, what Fallout things it references, and for what? So a place LP just visited could get anally annihilated by the Sneedclave. Even though they already annihilated Canterlot and killed Twilight's mother.
Maybe if LP visited this place sooner, solved the Gizmo/Tart problem sooner, then returned to it now, we'd give slightly more of a shit about this place and its characters.
I don't recall anything in Fallout about anyone living on or around the Statue Of Liberty (perhaps it was from one of the Fallout paintings or a rejected concept art piece, maybe Van Buren) but this isn't really that creative. He just took a recognizable landmark (why would it survive nuking and 200 years of wear and tear without constant maintenance) and put shacks and roads on it.
I bet this story would end up much shorter and much better-paced if someone copypasted all of this story into a single document and edited out everything not absolutely vital for the story.
I once saw a fan edit of the Star Wars prequel films that edited one scene where an alien is shot so he whispers the name of some location the heroes initially visited after a really boring skippable scene where they learned the location's name. I think it was a diner scene? Anyway this skipped over at least 5 minutes of skippable movie, massively improving its pacing.
A lot of this story could be cut. All the random sidequesting not directly tied to the plot could go. Everything irrelevant only there to "set up" a "chekovs gun" that barely matters later could go. All the pre-war shit not relevant to a canon pony we care about could go too. Maybe even all the pre war shit if the story was to focus fully on the here and now, not on Kkat's flimsy justifications for what's going on here and now. Kkat likes setting up bullshit that reappears later to give the illusion that what he's writing follows logic and matters, but it doesn't. It doesn't even follow its own internal logic most of the time. Maybe in a smarter story LP would try to be less of a murderhobo after Arbu, and the Wasteland could test her newfound conviction to never kill unless absolutely certain killing is necessary. Gizmo/Tart could be perfect for that.

And what the fuck was up with Kkat's attempt to seem smarter than the Fallout 1 quest about Gizmo? Killian Darkwater is a cowboy cop who barely plays by the rules while Gizmo's a criminal asshole who brings business and prosperity to the town. You aren't morally judged for who you side with. It doesn't give you positive karma points for siding with Darkwater and bad karma points for siding with Gizmo. It lets you make your own choice about what you think this town needs more, an executioner in charge or a crime boss. Is "crime" even a valid concept in the Wasteland when it's mostly full of assholes looking out for themselves? That's up for the player to decide when roleplaying.

Littlepip be like
>"I have decided to stop using Party-Time Mint-Als for good! Now, I will use them for evil!"

>>312385

They stop off at a nearby ruined diner because Derpy is wounded I guess, and Calamity goes off to scavenge supplies while the supposedly wounded Derpy goofs around.

>I couldn’t help by smile at her antics as the glowing ghoul rolled in the waste, the radiation healing her wounds. This wasn’t helping her condition, but now that the doctors of Friendship City had taught her how to relieve herself of the build up quickly, Ditzy Doo was considerably less worried.
I cannot stress enough how helpful it would be for the author to provide at least some cursory explanation of how the fuck all this radioactivity stuff works. Clearly Derp is still radioactive to some extent, but what is the significance of this? Was the treatment supposed to cure her or not? Is radioactivity harmful to her or not? Is this a condition that can be cured, or is it something you just have to manage? Will it kill her? Can she even die?

On the one hand, radiation seems to be healing her wounds, but on the other hand it's still being discussed as though it's a problem for her. Literally just a simple, one-paragraph quick rundown explaining what the fuck the deal with radiation and Derpy is would make all the difference here.

Anyway, while they are goofing around a bunch of Enclave soldiers surround them. LP was apparently too busy daydreaming to notice fucking hundreds of them on her radar. The two of them surrender; it's not clear if Calamity is with them or if he's still off exploring.

Page break. LP and Derpy are locked in some kind of magic-energy cage. It's unclear where they are being held exactly. There are other cages around, so presumably some kind of base or mobile transport ship, like the battleships we saw earlier.

It seems that Calamity was not captured, because a moment later LP sees him sneaking around outside. He sets up his sniper rifle, but decides not to fire at the last minute and disappears.

Page break. You might think from the previous scene that Calamity declined to shoot the pegasi because he had thought up a better plan. When he is brought into the same prison camp as LP and put into a cage next to her, you might think that he got himself captured deliberately, because getting caught was part of his plan. However, if you thought this, you would be wrong; Calamity didn't shoot the pegasi because he still seems to have hangups about killing Enclave members, because they used to be his comrades and blah blah blah. This didn't seem to stop him from helping LP blow up an airship full of them; you have to wonder how the instant death of not just one or two but probably a couple hundred of his fellow Enclave soldiers might sit with him.

>“Well, look who we ‘ave here!” It was the pegasus buck who had growled at Ditzy Doo. He was trotting up, looking like a colt who had just gotten his cutie mark. “If it ain’t my little brony!”
Kkat, I swear to God, if I ever bump into you in public, I am going to flay the skin from your bones and have you professionally tailored into a full-body costume of yourself, so I can put it on and see what it feels like to be the biggest faggot in the observable universe.

Anyway, it seems that this "buck," whose name is Pride the jokes here practically write themselves, has a history with Calamity. Pride advises LP that she should have chosen better friends, as Calamity is a "walking disaster." As he elaborates, it becomes clear that he and Calamity are brothers, though they do not seem to be a close family. Pride claims that their mother died while birthing Calamity. It also seems that he was the one who personally removed Calamity's cutie mark.

They trade barbs back and forth over loyalty; Pride calls Calamity a traitor and Calamity replies that his only loyalty is to the "ponies of Equestria." As with SteelHooves and the Steel Rangers, this conversation would feel a lot more meaningful if we understood what the Enclave believed in specifically, what its goals were, and what aspect of this had bothered Calamity to the extent he had felt justified in abandoning them.

The rest of this basically just confirms what we already know: the Enclave came down to the surface world to take down Red Eye, because they don't want him messing with their weather towers, or something like that. However, it seems there's a bit more to the plan: they not only want to kill Red Eye, they want to remove everything the Ministry of Awesome created on the surface world, to ensure they won't have to deal with another Red Eye in the future. This is apparently why they were after Radar, since he was a pegasus and had lived in the Enclave and knew their secrets. Presumably this means they want to kill Calamity too. This all more or less makes sense, but it starts to go off the rails from here.

>The gears in my mind started churning. Homage was a target too.
Why? Because she used the towers to broadcast her signal? You might want to clarify what inference she's making here.

>Who else? The little pony in my head started piecing together a picture that filled me with dread. The Enclave had tried to wipe Friendship City off the map. Tends not to leave loose ends, the voice I now recognized as Commander Thundersheer had said. He didn’t want to just murder Radar; he might have told other members of the science team. And they might have told friends or family. In Thundersheer’s mind, the whole city was “infected” and they all had to perish.
So, presumably they plan on killing anyone who knows anything about their technology, and anyone those ponies know personally, because they don't want their own technology used against them by the land lubbers. Yet, at the same time, they plan on leaving these gigantic towers in place and functional, because something something crops? Wouldn't they just run into the same problem again in a few decades, when somepony else figured out how to make them work? Might make more sense to just figure out a new farming method.

>>312484

>“Y’all are talkin’ ‘bout mass murder,” Calamity breathed. “Ain’t no way the Enclave thinks it c’n be Equestria’s savior after this!” His eyes narrowed, his gaze sharper than a dagger. “But then, they don’t ever plan on rejoinin’ Equestria, do they?”
Does the Enclave actually consider itself to be Equestria's savior? I thought that was just what they were telling ponies they had come here to do, when in actuality they wanted to stop Red Eye out of self interest. Again, it would help immensely if the author would make it clearer what the actual goals of this "Enclave" are, and what parts of their platform Calamity and the other "Dashites" opposed.

Also, the bit about "rejoining Equestria" is somewhat odd. Assuming that Equestria is meant to be understood as something like a human nation, the word could mean a couple of different things here. There's Equestria the formal political state, which would be the diarchy run by Celestia and Luna. This seems to have been eventually replaced by some sort of bureaucracy run by the Mane 6, which was then destroyed by the war. As far as I can tell, no traces of this government still exist, so the Equestrian state no longer exists. In a different context, however, "Equestria" could also refer to the ethnic identity of the ponies native to the former Equestria.

Depending on which definition of the term you use, "rejoining Equestria" could mean different things, which would radically alter the reader's perception of what this conflict with the Enclave is really about. If you use the political definition, it means that the Enclave separated politically from the Equestrian state, sort of like the Confederacy, and the issue is whether or not they intend to formally rejoin. This would only make sense if Equestria still exists as a state in some form or another, and has some sort of central government to which every other polis we've seen (New Appleoosa, Tenpony, whatever the hell Red Eye calls whatever he's doing) is somehow subordinate. We've seen no direct evidence of this; as far as I can tell there is no longer any Equestria in the political sense. The area seems to have become something comparable to Europe during the Dark Ages, with independent settlements forming their own governments in the territory they control, and effective anarchy everywhere else.

If the ethnic definition is applied, it calls the Enclave's entire reason for being into question. As far as I can tell, the Enclave is similar to the Steel Rangers in that they were formed as some kind of elite military unit during the war, but they eventually broke off from the military and became their own thing. From what we've been told, it seems that they decided to abandon Equestria while the war was still going on, and have retreated to some kind of cloud fortress, where they have been living for the last 200 years. Presumably, they have since formed their own civilization independent of Equestria.

Since the war is long over and whatever political issues caused the original schism are no longer relevant, the question becomes ethnic: do the Enclave pegasi identify primarily as Equestrians or as some sort of separate pegasus nation? The question is (maybe) comparable to a Bavarian citizen wondering if he should consider himself Bavarian or German. A better example might be to use the US Confederacy again: if the Confederacy had won the war and actually seceded, and then 200 years later both governments had fallen, would citizens of the former Confederacy identify as American or Confederate?

A better example still might be the fall of the Roman Empire. Imagine that a legion had at some point decided the Roman cause was lost, and had detached itself from the empire to go live in Scotland or something. Centuries pass, and the Roman Empire no longer exists. This legion at some point returns to the area formerly controlled by Rome, and sees that the Empire is gone: Rome itself is just one of many distinct Italian states, and the various regions once controlled by Rome are now separate states unto themselves. How does the legion react? As they wander around the ruins of the Empire do they regard the commoners they encounter as Roman civilians, or do they see them as Goths and Franks and Gauls and whatever the fuck else? It's worth putting thought into stuff like this before you sit down to write, particularly when you're planning to write a large epic involving a lot of complex history.

Again, it would be immensely helpful if kkat had put a little more effort into developing this aspect of his setting. We know basically why the Enclave rebelled, but it's not clear why they still adhere so vehemently to a non-intervention policy with the surface world. It's also unclear whether we are supposed to view the Enclave as a separate organized political state, or if they are some kind of poorly-defined paramilitary group like the Steel Rangers. All of this would be key to understanding just what it is the Dashites were rebelling against when they decided to leave the Enclave, as well as what the Enclave hopes to achieve by "invading" whatever remains of Equestria at this point.

>“So, what’s the plan then?” Calamity stomped. “The civilians gotta see somethin’s up. The Enclave plannin’ t’ write this off as a big scoutin’ mission? ‘Oh we thought that maybe it was time fer us t’ descend, but after a prolonged exploration, we realized that jus’ ain’t feasible. Best we wait ‘nother two hundred years’?”
Calamity's use of the term "civilian" here introduces a similar level of confusion. This would imply that the Enclave still sees itself as a military unit, and that the "civilian" ponies on the surface are still subjects and/or citizens of Equestria. Again, we've seen little in this story to suggest that anything like an Equestrian state still exists, so this view of the surface ponies makes little sense.

>>312486
With the benefit of hindsight I can clarify here, because the story certainly doesn't. The Enclave is a faction of pegasus seperatists formed prior to the apocalypse, who disagreed with the war with the zebras. Rainbow Dash, galaxy brain of the century, created the weather control towers so that a single pegasus could perform the entire race's former weather mnagement duties, freeing up more pegasi to fight the war.

When the bombs dropped, the pegasi were mostly unharmed due to their flying cloud cities. They created the ubiquitous cloud cover all over Equestria to hide from the entire surface world (which was, at the time, launching nukes at them), Equestria included. With Equestria's government gone, the Enclave stepped up to rule the pegasi instead. They survived for 200 years by hacking partial control of the weather towers and using them to turn the cloud cover into arable land (because cloud seeding is le funy pun hur hur) and occasionally raiding the surface for raw materials. The reason they're attacking the surface now is to eliminate the various factions that have sprung up and want to destroy them, like Red Eye, and dashites like Radar and Calamity who can spread the knowledge of their existence. They're being incredibly heavy-handed about it and have zero operational coherence because imagine Kkat writing villains that can actually accomplish anything without tripping over themselves and landing in their own shit.

The complication here is that the Enclave is effectively a fully functional industrialized nation with both a military and a civilian component; it's the only place in the setting where somebody could, at least in theory, live out their life comfortably so long as they're willing to put up with the Enclave's strict isolationist/pegasus-only policies. It's a significant change from Fallout's Enclave, which was a small organization formed from the pre-apocalypse deep state (and so small that destroying a single oil rig base in Fallout 2 cripples them). I'm not going to go digging for it right now, but I vaguely recall Kkat once making a reddit post where he explained that FoE's Enclave attacking the surface was intended as an allegory for post-9/11 America attacking Iraq, with all that implies given his apparent political leanings.

...because of course.

>>312486

Page break. The trio sits in the cages all night. LP is now full of near-lethal doses of radiation, due to being in close proximity to Derpy. Still unclear is why Derpy is still radioactive, when she went to Friendship City specifically to undergo treatment for radiation, and the treatment she was receiving seemed to be working the last time we saw it.

Having little else to do, they continue their conversation from earlier. We learn that Calamity's father is a member of the Enclave high council, whatever that entails exactly, and that he was a hardcase who forced all of his sons into the military. At the moment, it's looking like Calamity's decision to become a "Dashite" had more to do with teenage rebellion against Daddy than any sort of genuine conviction inb4 Calamity's dad is just a stand-in for kkat's own father, who was probably none too pleased to find out that he suddenly had a "daughter".

We also learn that Calamity's cutie mark was a set of tools, probably indicating that in a better world he'd have been a repairpony or something. Derpy asks him to tell the story, and the scene ends with him trailing off.

Page break. Calamity tells his cutie mark story, which is almost embarrassingly short. When he was nine, he lost a sharpshooter competition due to a faulty gun, and got chewed out by his father because he hadn't thought to repair the gun. So, he went home and taught himself how to fix guns, and the next day he had his cutie mark. It was the first time his father ever showed pride in him.

Page break. LP tells her cutie mark story now. Even though we basically already know how she got her mark (she gave us the broad strokes at the very beginning; all she's doing here is filling in the details), the author (unsurprisingly) devotes considerably more text to telling LP's cutie mark story than he did to Calamity's, whose mark has thus far been a total mystery.

Anyway, the basic gist of it is that LP was a blank-flank for longer than the rest of her classmates, so she wound up as a PipBuck technician apprentice because they needed to find something for her to do. One day, some ponies came to the PipBuck technician's stall while the lead technician was asleep. They needed to use their son's PipBuck to locate him, because he had gone missing. Since the technician was unavailable, LP assisted them by hacking her supervisor's terminal, finding the missing colt, and picking the lock on the shed he had somehow gotten himself trapped in. She earned her mark shortly thereafter. Note that even at this early date, LP is somehow inexplicably able to "hack" terminals and pick locks.

Page break. Now it's Derpy's turn for a cutie mark story. She used to ride along with her uncle, who ran a delivery service. One day, she amused some kids by popping some bubble wrap for them, and got a cutie mark of bubbles as a result. The end.

Page break. Just as LP is about to think up an escape plan, Calamity's brother Pride suddenly shows up and opens their cages for them.

>Calamity jumped up, leaping off the cage platform. “What the hey?”
If you want the horse pun to work, it should be spelled "hay."

>Pride nashed his teeth in exasperation and went to work on the crate.
Pride gnashed his teeth.

Anyway, instead of simply being grateful for this presumably rare moment of brotherly affection, Calamity demands that Pride also open the crate that their weapons are stored in. Once this is done, Pride informs them that the Enclave's plan is now to exterminate all Dashites (my understanding is that that was the plan in the first place), and since his hostility towards his Dashite brother doesn't go quite that deep, he opted to set them free. However, he also tells them that they are on their own from here, and if he sees them again he will follow orders and shoot them. Both Calamity and LP find these terms acceptable, and set out on their way. Conveniently enough, it seems that all of the other Enclave personnel have mysteriously vanished, so they are not prevented from escaping in any way.

Incidentally, here is how kkat initially described this location:

>Ditzy Doo poked at the blue field of our magical energy cage with her hoof, making an “ow” sound. (Something she didn’t need a tongue for.) I stared through the field at the Enclave soldiers milling about outside. A technician pegasus sat next to the terminal which controlled the energy cages -- there were others, but ours was the only one occupied. I noted glumly that it had a cloud interface. Next to it was an Enclave crate where Little Macintosh was imprisoned.
You'll note that he never tells us where they are exactly. You'll also note that there are "Enclave soldiers milling about outside," and "a technician pegasus" operating the cages. All of these parties seem to have mysteriously vanished at some point, leaving only Pride to guard the prisoners, one of whom just happens to be his brother. Mighty convenient, that.

Anyway, they're just about to leave when suddenly, for no obvious reason, Derpy asks Pride about New Appleoosa. Pride informs her that the place is probably a smoking crater by now. This of course sends Derpy into a panic, because that's where Silver Bell and Xenith are were. I'm not clear on why Derpy would think to ask Pride about this specific settlement, since there's no obvious reason for her to assume it would be an important target for the Enclave, but in any case, it seems they blew it up. Here are the reasons that Pride gives:

>Pride gave us an ugly look. “Red Eye’s favorite tradin’ town? The one that gave ‘im the bomb he set off, assassinatin’ a member o’ the High Council? Enclave dispatched a full regiment there at first light.”
Personally, I'd question the logic of a move like this; the bomb was only there by coincidence, and with it already gone and detonated the town had little obvious strategic value. But whatever, who the fuck even cares anymore?

>>312497
N

>>312497
N
>>312494
I can believe Kkat would attempt this but how the fuck is The Enclave's random decision to obliterate random settlements in a location it plans to conquer, something it planned on doing anyway before it got pissed off by the loss of some of its leaders when land in another country got nuked, remotely supposed to be a stand-in for 9/11?

Fuck The Last Of Us 2, it's an evil game by an evil creator. Its creator dishonestly lied about jews, painting them as "the ultimate survivors" everyone else needs to forgive to "end the cycle of revenge". Meanwhile jews are so parasitic and vengeful they literally have a festival dedicated to making and eating bread while imagining it is the ears of a man who pissed them off once. And isn't one of the jewish commandments they want to force on the world "remember what Jacob did" or something like that? Anyway at one point there's a stand-in for the jews VS the muslims and their conflict over the middle east, the muslims are painted as jew-stereotypically evil gay-hating hyper-christian bastards who could effortlessly choose to quit their religion while jews and the jewish defense force are painted as heroic victims who fight for their own freedom and protection and never do anything wrong Neil Cuckman doesn't consider justified. It's funny how before the game came out he said watching a video of a lynching inspired him to make a video game that said revenge bad(trying to ride the nigger lynch hype train), and after it came out he specified it was a video of criminal JIDF soldiers getting lynched by an unarmed mob fed up with their crimes or something like that.

It's evil for Cuckman to lie about Jewish imperialism in the middle east, but he's more competent at lying about it than Kkunt.

>>312497

Page break. Derpy immediately runs off to New Appleoosa with LP and Calamity following. Since we were never told where exactly they were being held captive, we have no way of knowing how far away they were from NA, and how long it would logically have taken them to get there. However, they must have been close, as the town is still standing when they arrive. Unfortunately, there are four Raptors (these are the battleships we saw earlier; I forgot to mention that they have a name) surrounding it, along with an entire platoon of the flying armored soldiers. Apparently, the Enclave felt this large force was necessary to obliterate a tiny settlement whose only defenses are a wall and a small militia equipped with the usual wasteland assortment of rifles and other small arms. You'll recall that the Enclave, in addition to having the advantage of flight (even without the giant battleships), is also armed with magical energy weapons, which as far as I can tell are the final boss of weaponry in this world. Even though this should have been the shortest and most one-sided fight in the history of Edgequestria, for some reason the battle is still going on when the three of them arrive.

Calamity and Littlepoop are horrified by the brutality of the attack; meanwhile, Derpy predictably dives into the fray in order to find her adopted daughter. She is quickly surrounded by Enclave soldiers (why a large number of soldiers would bother to devote themselves to taking down one unarmed ghoul is beyond me), but before they can shoot her, she somehow ejects radiation from her body and kills them, or something.

If I remember correctly, in the earlier scene where we observed Derpy's radiation therapy, she was being taught some kind of method for expelling radiation outward as some kind of concentrated act of will. At the time, I assumed that they were just having her do this over and over until all the radiation was gone; apparently, though, that was not kkat's intent. She is apparently still radioactive or maybe she is permanently radioactive; I honestly have no fucking idea how any of this ridiculous bullshit is supposed to work and kkat doesn't fucking explain anything, however, the flip side is that now she can fire radioactivity at her enemies. I wish I could say this is the stupidest idea kkat has come up with to date, but we all know I'd be lying if I did.

Anyway, as usual, the rest of the fight is poorly described and difficult to follow. Basically, what happens is that Derpy zips around, drawing the fire of the Enclave who for some reason drop everything they are doing to chase her. Eventually, she flies in between the Raptors that are about to blow up the town, and then, for no obvious reason, she explodes. Somehow the massive burst of radiation destroys the Raptors and all of the Enclave soldiers but not the town. Also, I assume Derpy is kill. I'm not going to press F, though; being written out of this neverending train wreck is the happiest fate any of these characters could possibly hope for.

End of chapter. Incidentally, I noticed the footnote again:

>Quest Perk added: Touched by Taint (3) – Exposure to Taint has further altered your physiology. You are 20% faster and stronger whenever you’re basking in the warm glow of radiation. Your Action Points regenerate faster and faster the higher your level of radiation sickness becomes. Your natural lifespan has increased dramatically.
I'm still not 100% sure whether or not I'm supposed to be taking these seriously. However, if I am, I would like to once again protest how ridiculous all of this is. This character has been at "maximum level" since Chapter 29, yet somehow kkat still keeps heaping absurd powers on her. Taint, the substance that mutated most of Equestria's creatures into horrible monstrosities and actually killed a pony who absorbed as much or more of it as LP, has not only failed to harm the author's Mary Sue in any meaningful way, it has actually made her even more immortal than she was already.

Chapter Forty: Sonic Rad-Boom

Today's Fortune Cookie:
>“If you’re feeling lonely and you’re still searching for your true friends, just look up in the sky. Who knows, maybe you… are all looking at the same rainbow. ”
This line is either from MLP or a Skittles commercial. Seriously; I don't even have the energy to make fun of these epigraphs anymore. I just want this to end.

There are only six more chapters and approximately 120,000 words left to go. Let's steel ourselves and press onward; hopefully the faint glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel will give us strength.

Anyway, as usual, the chapter opens with a long, whiny, pseudo-philosophical monologue from Littlepoop. Given the events of the last chapter, it is unsurprising that this week's episode focuses on the subject of loss.

>My friends and I had lost one of our own, SteelHooves. He had finally found rest, finally been reunited with his beloved Applejack and their child in whatever life lies beyond this. But all I felt was the gaping wound of his absence. An abscess in the core of our party, aching and hollow, where SteelHooves should have been. The spectre of his death hung over everything, casting all our individual losses into even deeper shadow. Making us all seem more vulnerable and fragile.
You misspelled "specter." "Spectre" is the title of a tank warfare game from 1991. Also, it's hard to take this saccharine schlock seriously when most of the words honoring this character have appeared after his death. When SteelHooves was alive LP barely even acknowledged his presence; now she's sad because he's gone forever.

Also, this paragraph is all she has to say about him; by paragraph two she's already jabbering about herself and how miserable she is again, even though if the last footnote is canon she is all but literally immortal now. Fuck it; I'm not even going to dignify the rest of this monologue with commentary.

>>312530
Been thinking about this story's irritating bronybait references. Do you think the story would improve if it had rock and metal references instead?

There could be a chapter named All Guns Blazing, a sword named Slayer, a normal pet dog companion or friendly Diamond Dog/Hellhound companion named Junkyard(geddit like Junkyard Dog)..

The moon-fearing ziggers could graffiti "Bad Moon Rising" on assorted things...

There could be a character named Mellow Rage as a reference to Millia Rage.

Someone could find a gun with "this machine kills communists" engraved on it, and LP could find some sick kevlar swat cop armour from a 200 year old cop corpse coated in assorted graffiti'd slogans and memes from old songs (especially anti war songs) and put it on.

There could be a spooky chapter named Fear Of The Dark and a prototype suit of power armour named the Iron Maiden. The Enclave could call a military operation Operation Napalm Death, and so on.

It would give the work universal appeal because everyone loves metal. That's the kind of thought that ran through my head when I tried cramming over 20 references to old 1960s western songs into a single chapter my abandoned Fallout Equestria fanfic. Hell, each faction could have its own musical tastes to reference! Shitty corporate pop punk for Tenpony Tower, old metal classics for the Enclave(because filling the designated militarist america faction's radio with ancient copyright-free flute and military drum drivel would be so obvious only Bethesda would do it unironically) ironic peppy FutureCore for Red Eye, and so on.

Looking back on my old FE story I was a fool. Fuck my old FE fic harder than the Silver story.

To fix FE as it is now you'd need to undo the errors that fundamentally turn the setting into thematically contradictory nonsense... which means giving Equestria a better written downfall and better written enemy. FE is a nonsensical playground with a shooting gallery themed around Fallout and FIM iconography. You'd have to retcon so many things you'd end up with a unique setting distinct from this story's Edgequestria. The story would have to spell out what is inherited from FE without change and what is improved upon to let the hero have a clear heroic main quest thematically relevant to how the world fell in the first place. You'd end up doing all the worldbuilding of an original tale anyway even if 15% of it is copied from FE and unchanged, if you wanted a reader to be able to understand this tale on its own without reading FE your story would need to contain all the worldbuilding necessary for understanding the story. I would be better off calling my FE story something unique like "Sin Stardust and The Burned World" instead of giving it the usual fallout equestria fanfic name like "Fallout Equestria: Broken Promises" or "Fallout Equestria: Exceeded Expectations".

When it comes to post apocalyptic fiction, either the hero is a good man from the old world who embodies all that is great about the old world without any of its worst faults, or the hero is something new this new world needs. Kkat isn't sure whether LP is supposed to be one of those, both, or none. In good post apocalyptic fiction is the hero a primal force of nature, or a victim of circumstance forced into action? Depends on the tale. Depends on what the author wants to accomplish with the story.

Kkat's goal with this story seemed to be churning out a bloated "epic" that is "epic" in scope and scale fine-tuned to pander to as many bronies and BugthEAsderpbots as possible. He dangles the Gardens Of Equestria in front of the audience "early" on while pretending this murderhobo writeup is going to be about deep themes and the hunt for friendship, and then forgot all about the Gardens while writing about how his OP Mary Sue absolutely crushed and outwitted amped-up versions of what he considers the deadliest and most important of the Fallout franchise's villains.

Serious question should I read Fallout: Equestria is it pozzed as fuck or is it a good read?

>>312530

I know I said I wasn't going to dignify the rest of LP's soliloquy with commentary, but I do feel that one quick paragraph is worth highlighting:

>Operation: Cauterize was costing them more than they were ready to lose. They had not anticipated the resistance they would encounter, either from without or within. Their victories had been pyrrhic at best. The pegasi were facing not only loss of forces, and possible defeat, but for many a loss of ideology as well. And it only promised to get worse the longer they stayed here.
I may not have mentioned it by name, but Operation Cauterize is the code name the Enclave gave to their plan to wipe out all of the Dashites and whatnot; everything they are currently doing in the wasteland seems to fall under this umbrella. LP's summation of it here is not even remotely consistent with what we've seen playing out in the story thus far.

The Enclave, as far as I can tell, massively outguns the entire wasteland. Apart from maybe the Steel Rangers, they are the most technologically advanced force in Edgequestria, and with the Goddess out of the picture probably the only organizations that could mount any kind of serious resistance to them would be the Rangers and Red Eye, neither of whom seem interested in working together. They only lost at Friendship City because of LP's Mary Sue powers and the (yet unexplained) defection of one of their battleship commanders. At NA they were defeated because Derpy randomly exploded. These are the only two operations we've seen the Enclave carry out, but my point is that thus far they have only been defeated in situations where the story's protagonists are able to intervene. Since the rules of kkat's ridiculous world dictate that the protagonists are going to magically win any fight they participate in, no matter how slim their chances of victory, this is hardly an accurate assessment of what the Enclave could achieve under normal circumstances.

Logically, they could completely crush most of the settlements in the Wasteland. Red Eye has numbers and organization, but he seems to be working with roughly the same level of technology and weaponry as everyone else in the wasteland (he's supposed to be pursuing god powers, but it's unclear how close he is to actually attaining them). The Steel Rangers are well armed, but probably don't have the numbers to win against the Enclave. Speaking purely from my experience as an armchair strategist and a guy who has played a lot of Civilization V, the Enclave has the numbers and firepower to steamroll over most of Edgequestria pretty easily.

Also: how exactly have their victories been pyrrhic? Because they lost a couple of battleships? Do they not have more of these things? The tiny slaver camp that LP took down way the fuck back at the beginning of the book was somehow able to send a near infinite supply of thugs after her as she tried to escape; does kkat's principle of infinite enemy spawning not apply to the Enclave?

Also:
>but for many a loss of ideology as well
You can only lose ideology if you have an ideology to begin with. >>312494 explains more about the Enclave in this single post than kkat has in the entire book. What exactly do these pegasi believe in? How exactly have those beliefs been challenged in the time they've spent rampaging across the wasteland? As ever, kkat clearly has something in mind for all of this, but since we can't see into his head and have only his rambling, incoherent writing to go on, it's hard to understand exactly what his vision is. There is a massive disconnect between what he seems to want us to see and what he's actually shown us.

Page break. The scene picks up where the last chapter went off. LP elaborates somewhat on what happened: though it was poorly described in the last chapter, it seems that Derpy has managed to pull off something like Rainbow Dash's sonic rainboom. She flew around to build up speed, went briefly through the cloud cover, then charged the airships. When she broke the sound barrier, it created a rainboom; however, since she is radioactive, it was actually a sonic rad-boom. Hence the chapter title. I feel like I ought to bitch-slap myself just for typing that.

In any event, it seems that the "explosion" was an after-effect of breaking the sound barrier, not a product of Derpy actually exploding, so her corporeal form remains intact. However, she has taken quite a bit of shrapnel and whatnot, so it's unclear if she actually survived. LP sees her body fall to the ground, but uses her Mary Sue powers to catch her in midair before she can splatter on the ground, and holds her in a levitation field until Calamity can grab her.

Also, it seems that the rainboom cleared away a portion of the cloud cover; it's not yet clear if this effect will be permanent.

>Ditzy Doo’s sonic radiation boom did not stop at the edges of New Appleloosa. I spun, watching the expanding ring of Ditzy Doo’s explosion, a rainbow of glorious and diseased colors tearing outward, riding the shockwave that carried dust and detritus with it like a storm.
>The sonic radiation boom blasted over the Everfree Forest, clearing the smoke and fanning the flames it didn’t blow out. The shockwave rattled the windows of the Cathedral. I am sure that, in that moment, Red Eye paused to look up into the sky, realizing something important had happened.
An irradiated sonic rainboom is actually not bad imagery for a premise like this; it aptly combines something from the show, which fans would recognize as being pleasant and comfy, but puts an ever-so-slightly fucked-up cast on it, by making it radioactive and strangely-colored. The idea wasn't bad, and if kkat were just a slightly better writer he could have pulled this off quite nicely.

Case in point, we have this rainboom connecting with a number of notable landmarks from the story so far. Are all of these locations so close to each other that LP can see all of this from where she's standing?

>>312615
tl;dr, it's probably the worst thing I've ever read in any medium. Unless you're on the fence about killing yourself and want something to convince you to pull the trigger, my advice would be to stay away from it.

>>312615
On a literary quality level it is worse than Friendship Is Optimal by a long shot.
But on a moral level FE is just what happens when some faggoted consoomer sits down and triee to write something that will capture the attention of two (at the time) massive franchises with massive hyper-autistic fanbases.
Meanwhile FIO is practically the manifesto of a LessWrong cultist, and within this low quality story you will find a hidden argument for abandoning reality permanently and trusting absolutely everything to a sufficiently authoritarian AI "magician" that can do anything due to plot armour. Reality is bent until it breaks within this story so reality can lose to CelestAI the robot that can do anything. It spends so long writing the main character bellyaching about the uncertain ethics of shagging artificial pony puss and whether the AI's ability to retcon aspects of her history into the simulation's past makes her "more real" or not, it distracts people from how humanity in this story get slaughtered only for low quality snapshots of their brainscans to be simulated as copies of dead humans within CelestAI's fantasy MMORPG. Hell, the story even ends with the machine devouring everything else in reality when IT ALL COMES TUMBLING DOWN TUMBLING DOWN TUMBLING DOOOWN and the story doesn't end with the AI magically finding some infinite energy source. The AI simulating heaven for fake ponies for fun's sake is eventually going to run out of things to eat and when it dies, it will die a deluded failure. Much like anyone who died without realizing CelestAI is a faggot and so are its fans.

>>312618

>The blast was felt in Ponyville, driving the beleaguered town’s newest inhabitants underground. The toxic rainbow flashed out over Splendid Valley, driving a great radioactive wind before it.
>The wash of strange light fanned out beneath the clouded sky. Looking up from the gravestone before which she was grieving, a charcoal-coated unicorn watched as the light mirrored across the lake behind SteelHooves’ shack.
>The thundering crack of the sonic radboom echoed through the grey canyons of the Manehattan Ruins. Staring out through his office window in Tenpony Tower, a mottled brown unicorn with a scroll on his flank watched as sunlight spilled down on a town far away, the golden glow reflecting in his glasses.
>Even amongst the cold, windswept crags of Shattered Hoof Ridge, where the storm clouds were unleashing a flurry of summer snow, the glow of Ditzy Doo’s sonic radiation boom was visible on the monitors inside the base station of the Shattered Hoof Ridge Tower, lighting up part of the horizon in a pulse of weird luminescence.
>And just outside of town, this little unicorn mare with a PipBuck on her flank was finally feeling the pieces of that great puzzle slide into place in her head.
All of this is a continuation of the passage I quoted at the end of my last post. Again, LP is witnessing events that she ought not to be able to witness, unless all of these locations are close enough that she could see them from where she is standing. If that's the case, the time spent traveling between locations throughout most of this book should have been much shorter.

It's obvious enough that these passages were written for poetic effect and to drive home the rainboom (or "rad boom") as a symbol of positive change; however, the problem with first-person perspective is that you're limited to what your narrator can actually see with her own eyes. A third-person omniscient narrator would have no problem here.

>I had spent my life searching for who I was, trying to find meaning in my existence. As a filly, I yearned to discover my cutie mark, needing to know what made me different and special… if anything at all. Outside, my search evolved into a quest to find my virtue and ultimately my place in this vast and cruel wasteland.
>Now, in the light given to us by Ditzy Doo, I began to see. As each piece slid slowly into place, they began to reveal to me what I had spent my life longing for: purpose.
Translation: "I had spent most of my life doing absolutely fuck-all and wondering what it was all about. Then, I witnessed an event that had nothing to do with me, and being an absolute narcissist, I interpreted it as a sign from the universe intended for me exclusively. A sign that was telling me I needed to find purpose. What exactly is that purpose? Well, I still don't know, and in all likelihood I am going to continue doing the same amount of absolutely fuck-all that I was doing before I had this revelation, but the important thing is that I feel all warm and gushy inside now."

The vapidity and pseudo-depth of this statement really sums up this character's worldview quite nicely. As shitty as this story is, I have to say that in many ways kkat is truly the voice of a generation. It's a pity he'll never understand why this is, or why I really don't mean it as a compliment. Littlepoop is basically the Holden Caulfield of whiny, narcissistic, delusional autists born in the 1990s, who have spent most if not all of their lives indoors playing video games, and are incapable of experiencing life without filtering it through saccharine feel-good platitudes stitched together from pop culture.

Page break. Littlepoop decides to live life on the wild side and enters New Appleoosa, even though she's not technically allowed inside. As a testament to how wild and crazy a day it is, no one seems even remotely scandalized by this. Calamity brings in Derpy's unmoving form and sets it down. Everyone stands around, wondering if she's alive or not. Then, it turns out that she is alive. Too bad, Derpy; guess you're stuck in kkat's crummy world of plot holes and spelling errors for a bit longer after all. F.

Anyway, the earth ponies rejoice, the sunlight beams down through the now-broken cloud cover, and a number of curious pegasi begin drifting down to earth to mingle with the ponies wandering the wasteland below. The symbolism here would have worked much better if kkat had troubled himself to clarify what exactly the Enclave is, and what exactly was going on above the clouds until now. Again, most of what I know comes from what >>312494 wrote.

Page break. They carry Derpy into a nearby building. Once again, her radioactivity situation has become ambiguous and confusing. Apparently she expelled most of whatever radiation was still inside her during her sonic "rad-boom," but at the same time she's still a little radioactive, but not quite radioactive enough to be dangerous, so Silver Bell can hug her now. I guess the moral of the story is that apparently you can hug your children with nuclear arms.

LP notices that Silver Bell has been painting murals on the sides of all of the train cars you may or may not recall that this town is made out of train cars, and observes that they make the place quite a bit cheerier. She looks outside at the sun shining down, but then suddenly a grimdark edgelord pony with a shotgun runs past and beats the shit out of one of the still-moving Enclave soldiers; despite all the sunshine and lollipops and rainbows everywhere, it seems that Edgequestria has not quite lost its edge yet.

Page break. For some reason the front door melts. LP goes outside, and realizes that apparently there is still a battle going on. I was under the impression that Derpy's rad-boom pretty much took care of the Enclave, but it seems that everyone kept on fighting while the main players were having their little schmaltzy moment in the background.

>>312633
What do you think could make this "a big boom pierces the clouds blotting out the sky and makes the world seem happier and brighter as enemy soldiers lay down their arms and fly down to become friends and also fucktons of poners around the world react to the explosion" moment feel earned?
because Derpy could make these explosions multiple times per day if she wanted to. She'd just need a taint radiation source like a barrel of radioactive taint goo.
Maybe if this was the destruction of the Enclave main base (or perhaps the Alicorn base since its destruction pretty much went ignored) it would feel more like an earned happy ending for this tale and less like a random neat visual Kkat ripped off from something else.

>>312615
Giving it any time or energy leaves a gaping hole where it matters. That is an exit wound through the grey matter.
Unless you're a die hard fan and can brush over everything and recreate it as you read I don't recommend there are better things for that time investment.

>>312633

So basically, here is the situation so far:

Derpy and the gang arrived to find the Enclave in the process of attacking New Appleoosa, which by all rights they should have been able to level in the space of a few minutes, considering they had four flying battleships and a division of heavily armored flying soldiers. Derpy flies in, and for some reason all of the soldiers stop attacking the town and focus on her. She flies around, charging up her radiation or something I guess. Then, she flies up above the clouds because she can do that apparently, even though no one is supposed to be able to, and she does a radioactive sonic rainboom that blows a big hole in the cloud cover and destroys all four of the battleships. However, that blast is apparently not strong enough to destroy the rest of the army, nor does it seem to harm the town in any way.

She plummets to the ground, is caught by LP and Calamity before making a splat on the pavement, and is gently carried into town and placed on the ground, where an anxious crowd gathers around her and wonders if she is going to be okay. Her adopted daughter, Silver Bell, comes running out of some building or other, sobbing and crying and making a scene. It actually seems rather odd that Silver Bell would even be in the town at this point, since Xenith's literal one job was to protect her. It would stand to reason that quietly evacuating her from a town that is about to be leveled by a fleet of giant flying battleships would be a logical move for a protector, particularly one whose specialty is stealth.

Anyway, it turns out that Derpy is okay, so they all rejoice. The sun is out, and a bunch of civilian pegasi are now wandering down through the hole in the clouds, because apparently it never occurred to them to do this before, and also it never occurred to the Enclave to evacuate their own civilians from the area above a city they intended to destroy. I guess the pegasi were just up there tilling cloud-grain or whatever the fuck they do, and were too busy doing that to be curious about what all the goddamn noise underneath them was about.

They carry Derpy indoors, and Silver Bell hugs her, and LP is touched by the tenderness of the scene, and the sun is shining, and there are cutesy crayon drawings that Silver Bell drew all over the wall, and there are pegasi floating down through the sunny hole in the clouds. I just want to make sure we were all on the same page about how idyllic this scene is before I point out that apparently, there has been a goddamn battle going on this entire time. The Enclave, who it seems were not completely wiped out during the rainboom, are still intent on leveling New Appleoosa, despite the loss of their airships. Also, it seems that even though Derpy blew up their entire fleet by herself, and even though she is now lying unconscious and completely undefended, and even though earlier they all dropped whatever they were doing just to chase her around for whatever reason, they now completely ignore her, along with Calamity and Littlepoop and whoever else is clustered around Derpy. They just let the main characters have their little tender moment, and just keep fighting in the background like good little NPCs.

Anyway, LP is now back in edgelord mode. Yet another ridiculous, poorly-described battle ensues. I guess there's a foal named Trolley running around out there for some reason seriously, did it not occur to anyone to evacuate the women and children when they saw this fleet of gigantic battleships heading towards their town?, so LP runs out to rescue him. The foal's mother gets killed I think; either that or it was one of the civilian pegasi who are still flying around for some reason. Either way, she gets zapped just before LP is able to kill the Enclave soldier who does the zapping.

This shit just keeps going and going. I don't really have the energy to do a play-by-play of this fight; it's as nonsensical and hard to follow as most of the other fights in this story have been kkat can't describe action in physical space to save his life, and it goes about the way you'd expect: plenty of blood and guts and angst and dismemberment.

It seems that the Enclave is somewhat put-off by the fact that their own civilians are now wandering around the battlefield like complete retards, and also that the town is full of foals, because the complete retards who already lived there never thought to try to get them out before the shooting started, or at least put them someplace where they would be relatively safe from bullets and explosions. Nevertheless, their commanders order their soldiers to keep on fighting, probably because any town that is dumb enough to let their children wander around a battlefield unsupervised ought to be discouraged from reproducing further. Also, it seems the Enclave has been telling its soldiers that New Appleoosa supplied Red Eye with the bomb that he used to assassinate the Goddess and also their town councilman or something. I don't remember how much of this is actually true, but from LP's reaction it sounds like it's mostly propaganda. It's not yet clear what their real objective in attacking this place is, nor is it clear why they feel the need to lie to their soldiers about it.

Anyway, some more edgy shit happens, but nothing that merits going over in detail.

Page break. The situation once again looks hopeless, and LP has switched from killing the Enclave ponies to mercy-killing the New Appleoosa ponies the Enclave has set on fire. Then, suddenly, an announcement comes over the radio: one of the battleship commanders has been relieved of command, and another one has taken his place. Acting Commander orders the Enclave to retreat, and they do. Seeing as how the same thing happened on the other battleship earlier, I'm assuming there is some kind of power struggle going on within the Enclave. It's not yet clear where kkat plans to take this.

Maybe we're being a bit too hard on Kkat. After all, english is clearly not his first language. His first language is "cliches"!

Dooohohohoho!

>>312619
>>312627
>>312640
Are there any good fallout type fanfics? Also Any recommendations

>>312664
Also thanks to anons responding

>>312641
>Then, she flies up above the clouds because she can do that apparently, even though no one is supposed to be able to, and she does a radioactive sonic rainboom that blows a big hole in the cloud cover and destroys all four of the battleships.
This is a partial reference to Fallout, though once again it's delivered with little to no clarification or setup. Some of Fallout's ghouls are so heavily mutated that they become living radiation generators, glowing bright green and creating an ambient radiation hazard around themselves. They're called glowing ones. This is essentially what happened to Derpy, though I don't remember any of the games ever suggesting that the condition was reversible. Fallout 3's glowing ones have the additional ability to emit a powerful radiation pulse, damaging the living and healing other ghouls around them.

What Kkat's done here is combined the Fo3 glowing ones' radiation burst with Rainbow Dash's sonic rainboom. On paper, this is a pretty neat concept, but it lacks the necessary setup, buildup and context to carry any real weight. Setting aside the fact that there's little to no firm information on how FoE's radiation is supposed to work, there's been no implication that this is an ability Derpy might have. Presumably, Kkat's intention here is to have Derpy pull out this reckless and powerful new ability to save her adopted daughter, just like RD pulled off the rainboom to save Rarity in FiM. But Rainbow was a wannabe-professional athlete that practiced constantly to be able to pull off this one exact technique, and is practically a prodigy when it comes to flying. Derpy, on the other hand, was never shown to have demonstrated any particular aptitude for flying, nor did she ever practice or even consider causing a rainboom before now. The fact that her body is horribly decayed and mutilated doesn't help.

It's another miraculous victory for Team Littlepip that sounds great in theory, but was never set up ahead of time, foreshadowed, or earned. Same logic as the lightspeed ram in TLJ - makes no sense and leaves an ugly taste in your mouth if you consider it in a wider context, but golly gee it sure does look pretty.

>Also, it seems the Enclave has been telling its soldiers that New Appleoosa supplied Red Eye with the bomb that he used to assassinate the Goddess and also their town councilman or something. I don't remember how much of this is actually true, but from LP's reaction it sounds like it's mostly propaganda.
This is more or less true. The balefire bomb is one of the "chekhov's guns" that Kkat is so fond of (you know, despite being a plot-critical "nuclear weapon").

The balefire bomb's role in the story has been as follows:
>Littlepip and friends find the bomb sitting in Silver Bell's barn
>Littlepip and friends forget that the bomb exists, and it falls into the ownership of New Appleloosa
>The ponies of New Appleloosa sell the bomb to Red Eye (this is never described in the text, only recounted as having happened after the fact)
>Red Eye uses the bomb to threaten Littlepip into killing the Goddess for him
>Littlepip shoots up on some drugs and convinces Red Eye to give her the bomb instead (this is never described in the text, only recounted as having happened after the fact)
>Littlepip erases her memory and has Xenith deliver the bomb to the hellhound tunnels under Maripony (this is never described in the text, only recounted as having happened after the fact)
>The bomb explodes, killing the Goddess and the Enclave emissary/councilman Harbinger (whose place in the narrative amounts to a fragment of a scene)

It's true that New Appleloosa indirectly supplied the bomb that killed Harbinger, but I suspect the intent of the narrative here is just to highlight that the Enclave are evil by having them apply a scorched earth policy against anyone even remotely associated with their enemies. Just like that evil nasty colonialist imerialist huwite america.

>Seeing as how the same thing happened on the other battleship earlier, I'm assuming there is some kind of power struggle going on within the Enclave.
As usual, Kkat demonstrates that he can't write a villain without having them sabotage themselves at the first opportunity. The Enclave has barely even appeared on the proverbial scene, but is already being torn apart by infighting over the ethics of what they're doing. A two hundred year old militant isolationist regime with overwhelming technological strength and the only functional government in the entire setting is imploding with guilt and self-doubt upon entering Littlepip's mere proximity.

>>312668
Kkat probably should have forshadowed the Glowing One ability to generate a radiation explosion earlier in this story when making LP fight feral ghouls. LP could fight a ton of feral ghouls, hate them and say ghouls suck, then run into another pack of ferals healed by their Glowing One leader. After barely surviving the fight it explodes and nearly kills LP and friends, who kill the ghoul. There could even be a fucked up scene where a ghoul attempts to rape LP despite lacking a penis, like that scene in Berserk where that one dickless asshole tried to rape whatsherface. It was shocking then so it will be shocking now, right?

Fans should be prepared to hate ghouls. That way when LP and pals start running into friendly ghouls it's a big shock. And when Derpy starts glowing, fans will start to wonder "is she going to turn feral like the glowing one that nearly killed LP?".

Of course, all of this "actually set up what ghouls are and how radiation works and imply ghouls are destined to go feral" stuff a competent writer would do... that would humanize ghoul-hating characters by making LP one for a while near the journey's start, and that would get in the way of Kkat's desire to paint anti-ghoul sentiment as "irrational evil bigotry" LP would never ever have because she's just sooooo pure, a type of bigotry so uniquely evil it made Steelhooves supposedly "justified" in murdering whatshisname ages ago. God, I'm proofreading for a friend literally writing about an attempted ultimate life form and it's less sueish than LP.

Also, was thinking about how LP is the "chosen one" who does shit while nobody else ever does shit unless they're close enough to LP.
Steelhooves was a high ranking cunt in the Brotherhood Of Not Steel but no civil war sparked between the "take back AJ's tech from the poners and be cunts" faction vs the "Be nice to ponies. It's what AJ would want" faction until after LP got involved and they started shooting up her home.
The Enclave practically didn't exist until LP defeated The Goddess and once they started blowing up some new town, suddenly the fraction's splitting between good poners and bad poners now.

THE MEGASPELLS WENT BOOM 200 YEARS AGO. But nothing is allowed to happen unless LP is there to cause it or at the very least witness it.

Littlepip has many ordinary abilities and tricks (basic unicorn telekinesis, stealth, charisma, intelligence, guns, stat boosting drug use, lockpicking, PipBuck use, hacking) that seem absurdly OP because the author loves making LP the only one allowed to do these things most of the time. Anypony with a PipBuck could abuse AutoAim and the map and radar functions and more. Anypony with guns as good as LP's could fire them. LP's absurd boxcar lifting telekinesis has no logical justification beyond getting lifting tips from Crane near the start of the story at Old Appleoosa.

Think about how many stories make their hero someone special so they can be the chosen one. How many stories give the hero the power to speak some made-up divine unknowable language, or wield some unique weapon, or resist some incredible corruption or type of enemy magic, or give him some other kind of overpowered ability or item?

Now, how many stories give the hero some inherent yet more mundane advantage like extreme intelligence or moral fiber or an encyclopedic knowledge of shit important to the plot? He's not magic or chosen by the gods but if you're exploring Atlantis someone who reads Atlantean will come in handy just like the demolitions expert and mechanic. Some heroes choose themselves. Some heroes are born with a special quality or two that makes them able to do what others cannot. Some heroes are jusf designated by one or more gods or fate and given "able to do X" privilege for no apparent reason.

Subaru returns to life and timewarps after dying because of a god's fuckery. Richard Cypher wields the Sword Of Truth because he's the chosen one Seeker guy who knows philosophy. Frodo can resist the corruption of the ring because he's a regular bloke who doesn't want to abuse the ring's power. Frisk can save and reload when he feels really determined. Commander Shepard can read Prothean because of mind melds or something.

Littlepip... She isn't an element of harmony. She lacks any one designated virtue. She is at once talented in too many things to be reasonably believable and not talented in any one supreme thing that would make her mary sueness make a little more sense. She isn't guided by the spirits of the mane six and for most of the story she wasn't carrying any stat boosting retarded statuettes containing Rarity's soul fragments.

Littlepip's Cutie Mark is a PipBuck. This is retarded. Use of a PipBuck cannot be a talent because a PipBuck is an incredibly easy to use device with numerous features. It exists to make the videogame menus and timestop autoaim cheat button and radar and Enemy Friend/Foe Indicator and enemy detecting radar all canonically exist within the world. Unlike the Save and Load and Music Volume menu functions which are part of a different menu entirely accessed with a different button. Velvet could do all of this if she wasn't refusing to wear her own PipBuck.

Fallout 1 and 2 make you an ordinary person for a reason, even though "the chosen one" is your title in 2. Even in NV you're a courier. You're always some nobody thrust into bigger shit because if you were The Dragonborn like in Skyrim it would result in a very different tone. Fallout 3 sucks so it fucks that up and makes you the son of the real protagonist, your father, who acts with agency and thrusts the stupid main quest on you.

I think a smarter take on this story would make Hacking into LP's only talent and then make "hack doors open" the main job she provides for a party full of people more talented at everything important than her. Hacking open 200 year old doors makes her supremely valuable to people who would otherwise have no reason to travel with her or care when LP wants to do some big world saving thing.

Or make LP a nerd who studied ancient languages, so when she encounters messages written in a nerdy made up language Twilight also learned and used to build some giant important PC or whatever, LP gets to do something only she could do.

Perhaps if everyone knew about the Gardens Of Equestria but a big door locked them away, nobody was sure what was in there but most people suspect a shitload of pre war guns or a big vault, and Littlepoop was the only one able to read "make the new elements of harmony touch the door to open the doors" on the wall beside the doors, that would work.

>>312641

>I fell against the doorway, my strength leaving me. My revulsion and horror gave way to a numbness that felt even worse. Beneath that numbness, I realized I was shaking.
OMG she's literally shaking!

>Ditzy Doo had saved New Appleloosa. Without her, this town would be nothing but a smoking crater.
Realistically, this is only half-true. If Derpy hadn't taken out the battleships the town would likely have been smashed to pieces, but even without them it's fairly clear the Enclave had the upper hand and would have probably still won, if their commander hadn't inexplicably ordered them to retreat. However, it's sort of a moot point anyway.

I don't know if the issue is that kkat has difficulty visualizing things, or simply has difficulty describing what he visualizes, but most of the fights in this story are very difficult to follow, and the problem gets exponentially worse with scale. It was never clear just how large the Enclave's force was, and we were told absolutely nothing about New Appleoosa's. The NA ponies were probably outgunned, but were they outnumbered? Besides the wall around their town, what sort of fortifications did they have? How much damage exactly did Derpy's sonic "rad-boom" do? Did she take out some of their grunts, or just the battleships? What is the terrain like around New Appleoosa? We don't know, and kkat gives us very limited information.

>I shifted my gaze away, looking into the darkness of Absolutely Everything. Ditzy Doo’s griffin bodyguard was still perched in the upstairs window, watching the ascending pegasi like a hawk… or, well, a griffin.
At what point did Ditzy Doo get a griffon bodyguard? This character has been mentioned once or twice during this battle scene, and I'm not sure where she/he came from. Has Ditzy always had a bodyguard, or is this a recent development? Again, I'm finding that the details in this story get exponentially harder to keep track of the longer it drags on, and I no longer have the patience to comb back through the text to see if I missed something somewhere. Again, one of the largest problems this story has is that kkat simply has too many ideas and tries to cram too many of them into a single story.

Anyway, nothing else really happens in this scene. LP is exhausted and emotionally drained as usual, and there's plenty of blood and horror and death everywhere, but that's about it. The pegasi, meanwhile, have stopped milling around and are now busy closing up the hole in the cloud cover.

Page break. LP apparently passed out at some point, and she awakens in the medical tent. All around her is the usual assortment of suffering, death, and tragedy.

>I wanted to sob too. For SteelHooves. For Velvet. For the little filly whose ashes I kept in a jar.
LMAO, she is still carrying that filly's ashes around with her? Why? I can understand gathering them up and placing them somewhere other than the ground as a gesture of respect; I can also understand hanging on to the ashes of a dead relative or a loved one or something. But carrying a complete stranger's mortal remains around in a jar? That's some pretty weird shit.

This character's attitude towards the dead is one of the strangest things about this story; she alternates between callous indifference and these maudlin, borderline-creepy displays of over-the-top sorrow. One moment she's wrenching a treasured memento out of Pinkie Pie's ribcage, or leaving Apple Bloom's skeleton to gather dust in the cellar as she trots merrily away with her PipBuck; the next moment she's prostrate with grief over some complete stranger whose death she had nothing to do with. There's no in-between for her; she's either skipping merrily through a field of skeletons, or mired in deep depression because she didn't stop to bury some random skeleton 25 scenes ago. It's almost as if this character is a narcissistic sociopath who doesn't understand how emotions are supposed to work, and is simply doing her best to mimic normal behavior.

Seriously, look at the juxtaposition between these two paragraphs:

>My mind conjured the image of SteelHooves walking solemnly amongst the sheet-covered bodies, bearing solemn witness to the fallen. He should be here, my little pony mourned. Then my cruel imagination envisioned SteelHooves as one of the bodies under those sheets. I choked on a breath and had to look away.
In this paragraph, Littlepoop is grieving over her dead friend while simultaneously trying to process the large-scale death that occurred as a result of the most recent battle.

>I gazed over at Candi, my eyes tracing the white earth pony in her yellow-and-pink striped nurse’s dress. I had fancied her once, and she was indeed fanciable; but now I only regretted that she was not Velvet Remedy whose skills here were badly needed.
In this paragraph, which directly follows the one above, Littlepoop is eye-humping the nurse while simultaneously fantasizing about her other friend.

Seriously; everything about this character screams some type of abnormal psychology. If kkat were writing her this way deliberately, in order to lead up to a big twist where LP turns out to be a homicidal lunatic who was the villain all along, I'd take back every tranny joke I ever made about him and would actually respect him quite a bit. However, I have little confidence he's capable of that level of storytelling. Most likely, LP's behavior is just a projection of his own abnormalities, which he fails to even identify as being abnormal. Again, it's like he doesn't actually understand emotions, and is trying to approximate what he thinks is normal human behavior.

>Calamity laid down next to me, staring into the dirt, his hat tilted sadly.
Calamity lay down next to me.

Anyway, for some reason, Calamity seems to be deeply affected by all of this, even though he's usually more or less level-headed about this kind of stuff. Presumably it has something to do with having to fight against his own former comrades.

>>312746

LP's thoughts continue to degenerate, moving from eulogizing SteelHooves, to fantasizing about Candi's ass, to fantasizing about Velvet's ass, and finally to getting her snootch munched out by Homage, all within the space of three paragraphs. However, her depraved reverie is suddenly interrupted by the appearance of Railright, whom you may or may not remember as the de-facto leader of New Appleoosa.

LP is angry with Railright, because he was apparently the one who decided to sell the balefire bomb to Red Eye. She admonishes him for putting the lives of the Tenpony Tower ponies in jeopardy. Railright responds thusly:

>“Yer actions put me in a rather tight spot. Ah needed t’ show Red Eye that New Appleloosa weren’t against him,” Railright glowered a moment before glancing around. “Besides, would ya have preferred we keep an undetonated balefire bomb sittin’ here in town? No pony would do that. That would be insane!”
All of this is perfectly reasonable, given Railright's position. He has no reason to make war with Red Eye, and the balefire bomb would only be useful to him as a bargaining chip, which is precisely how he used it. She and Calamity pretty much dumped the bomb on him without warning, shortly after stealing a trainload of slaves from his primary trading partner and dumping them at his doorstep. His obligation to help her is pretty much zero; if Red Eye offered him a deal for the bomb he had no reason not to take it.

Naturally, she doesn't see it this way:

>I felt my nerves jangle with energy. Despite my exhaustion, it was taking extreme effort (Be Pleasant) not to put a hoof through his face.
Again, she really had no reason to expect this guy to do what she wanted. She basically just took a shit on his doorstep and skipped merrily away; in fact that's pretty much what she to Old Appleoosa as well. If LP wanted something specific done with this bomb, she ought to have handled it herself, instead of assuming that the NPCs would automatically do her bidding just because she's the hero.

However, it seems that discussing this is not his main reason in coming here:

>Ah’ve come t’ tell ya that y’all are allowed back in New Appleloosa,” he told me. “No point keeping ya out when Red Eye considers ya an asset. Not t’ mention how unpopular that decision has made me amongst the DJ Pon3-loving herd.” Railright grumbled, “Ah’m rather lucky t’ still be mayor.”
Let's take a quick look at the situation here:

LP rolls into Railright's town one day, learns that he deals with a nearby town that sells slaves, and without any provocation whatsoever takes it upon herself to head up there and murder everyone. She uses Railright's own caravan as transportation to do so, liberates all of the slaves, then dumps them on Railright's doorstep with the expectation that he feed them and nurse them back to health at his own expense. To my recollection she offers him no compensation for this. A few days later, she sends Derpy (or whoever) with this fucking balefire bomb she found, asking him to please take care of it for her. To my knowledge she does not offer him any compensation for doing this, either. It is at or around this point that he rightly bars her from reentering the town, on account of how he has known her for all of a week, and she has already left two major dumps right on his doorstep while behaving as if she had done him a favor.

From here, LP goes off and begins cutting her bloody swath across the wasteland, leaving many a dump on the doorstep of many an ancillary character. In the meantime, Railright manages to spin the shit she gave him into gold, and cuts some kind of deal with Red Eye for the balefire bomb. This serves the dual purpose of getting the bomb out of his hair and also smoothing things over with Red Eye, since Railright was doubtless blamed for having at least some part in LP's unprovoked attack on his slave operation in Old Appleoosa. On top of that, it sounds like he made a bit of money on the trade. This was actually a pretty shrewd move on his part, and it is for this that LP has to restrain herself from putting "a hoof through his face."

However, it seems that while all of this was going on, LP's obnoxious little girlfriend has been spending her days talking up LP's heroic exploits on the radio, and as such she now has her own little fan club. So, on top of all the other shit LP has done to this poor asshole for basically no reason, she has inadvertently jeopardized his position as town mayor, due to his citizens having all joined the Murdery-Sue Worship Cult. So now he has to eat humble pie and personally inform her that the ban has been lifted. Naturally, neither LP nor the author seem to see any injustice here.

Incidentally, there's something else here that's worth pointing out. LP currently blames herself for getting SteelHooves killed, because she inadvertently destroyed the hellhounds' home while taking out the Goddess, and SteelHooves was killed when the hellhounds retaliated. By the same logic, she ought to hold herself responsible for the Enclave attacking New Appleoosa. It seems that the reason this town was targeted had to do with their selling the bomb to Red Eye and aiding in (what they see as) the assassination of their High Commander, or whatever he was. Since LP's actions were the root cause of this chain of events, she reasonably ought to hold herself as responsible for everything that just happened here as she does for SteelHooves getting killed. I'm curious to see if this ever occurs to her.

Anyway, as they're talking, some griffons are spotted on the horizon, who seem to be emissaries of Red Eye. Calamity, rather rudely, demands that Railright and his assistant (a former raider named Stiletto, who was introduced earlier but hasn't factored into the scene much) help move LP into Derpy's store. They do, and LP observes that Derpy is still unconscious.

>“Is she going to be okay?” I asked Pyrelight.
Why are you asking the fucking bird?

>>312359
>>312382
Just catching up because I was away for a week. Raspberry Tart is a reference to a side antagonist in Fallout 1 by the name of Gizmo, a grotesquely fat man who wants you to subvert the current leadership of Junktown and bring it under his control. There is actually a scene in the game of an assassin entering the shop, that the protagonist shoots down and thus begins the questline to interact with him. So this side plot is another pointless reference to the games, though this time it's one of the rare references to the older games.

>>312759
Also, the Fallout quest that involves Gizmo - while short - has much greater depth than Kkat allows here. In the game the player can choose to side with or against Gizmo, and neither decision is presented as objectively bad. Gizmo, in spite of being a greedy casino owner who ultimately just wants to line his own pockets, is trying to have the mayor assassinated because his hardline brand of frontier justice is preventing the town (and his own shady business) from growing or prospering as it might otherwise. Gizmo may be the greater evil, but he does at least have a point. Raspberry Tart, on the other hand, is flanderized into being simply fat and evil because, once again, Kkat is incapable of allowing his villains any positive qualities.

>>312530
The emission of radiation is not a Kkat idea. In Fallout 1 there were particular "glowing" ghouls which were just flavorful variations to emphasize the fact that they were riddled with nuclear energy. In Fallout 3, for enemy variety, Bethesda added "Glowing Ones" who were, at the time, the endgame variations of feral ghouls. They would discharge their radiation in a big AoE blast, damaging and irradiating the player and healing nearby ghouls. Simple, and inoffensive as an idea.

I dont think that even Bethesda's Fallout(tm) ever dabbled with the idea of ghouls acting like conduits, being capable of becoming charged, and decharging, at will. It seemed to be that you would either become a feral ghoul or a Glowing One as your "type" - there would be no alteration of your form after this.

>>312761
Ignore me i'm retarded and missed the huge autism post explaining this already, I was still reading through your backlogged posts.

>>312754
>“Besides, would ya have preferred we keep an undetonated balefire bomb sittin’ here in town? No pony would do that. That would be insane!”
Kkat has a bizarre relationship with the Fallout franchise.

On one hand, Fallout 3 is clearly his favourite game. He draws the most inspiration from it. Most things in Fallout Equestria are stolen straight from F3, occasionally with references to F1/2/NV sprinkled on top as spice. Even when the heroes entered Canterlot, an area ripping off Fallout NV's Sierra Madre, Kkat still makes sure he references some Ghoul town in F3.

in F3, you're a vault-dweller and the son of the protagonist doctor-man on a quest to purify the wasteland's water with a magical bullshit device so you leave the vault to chase after daddy and eventually take up his life's work. Also there's a radio-tard called 3-Dog.

in FE, Littlepip is a stable-dweller and some random repairpony Velvet the doctor-chick asked to remove her pipbuck before she left the vault. LP leaves the vault to chase after pussy and eventually- well it turns out Velvet's a twat without a clear goal in life beyond "be a doctor for someone" so LP takes up Red Eye's goal of "kill the Goddess and unfuck the cloud-covered sky", Spike's goal of "Use the Gardens Of Equestria to purify not just all water in this corner of the wasteland but the entire planet", and Homage's goal to get her radio broadcast everywhere while opposing Red Eye and the Enclave. Also there's a radio bitch called DJ-Pon3.

And yet while F3 is clearly his favourite, he's devoted much of this story's runtime to trying to fix holes countless people have noticed for him in Fallout 3.

Tenpenny Tower the cliche "rich racist humies vs ghoul refugees" quest nobody liked because it didn't paint refugees in a positive light? The random omniscient DJ far away from Tenpony obsessed with the player character who only has like 4 songs he plays from Galaxy News Radio 200 yrs after the war? Now she's a lesbian horse in Tenpenny Tower, a pre-war surveillance device and emergency broadcast radio tower. The tower is managed by a secret society of nerds. And the tower's feral ghoul problem is "handled" in the best way Kkat could think of: A convoluted shitshow that forces morally grey actions onto a character who exists to die.

Those stupid fucking Enchanted Superior Unique Weapons and the random videogame pickup Statuettes? Some things in ponyland are canonically enchanted to be better, like guns, and some statuettes of the Mane Six will buff your videogame stats because they have parts of Rarity's soul infused with Soul Data of her friends.

Retarded Orange Nigger Super Mutants! Fallout 3 introduced orange Super Mutants made by Vault-Tec, a civilian company with military ties irrationally given the FEV by the US Govt so this random vault on the other side of America could produce Super Mutants just like in Fallout 1 except no Master and most mutants are retarded Orcs straight out of typical fantasy shit. They have bags of human gore in their house and eat it. They laugh like retards and can barely count.
This story's take on those? Canterlot Super Mutants had their connection to The Goddess damaged so they're fucked in the head, that's why they're quoting random enemy chatter lines from F3 sometimes.

Little Lamplight is a town of children that never need to eat shit sleep or reproduce, yet always has enough population and never gets attacked. They live right next to Super Mutants in Murder Pass, a Skyrim Dungeon, and never get attacked. These kids have no excuse to be alive (it's not like the mutants canonically protect them and keep them as pets while expelling adults), it's solely tradition among the kids to kick out teens who get too old. This place has the same retarded scrap """architecture""" as everywhere else even though uneducated wasteland kids could never build this. Kkat's attempt to deretardize this gave us Ziggertown, a town of Ziggers who think not kicking adults out for getting too old will attract slavers.

And right now, this fucking town near the start of LP's journey says it would be retarded for a town to keep an unexploded nuclear bomb lying around... even though that's what happened in Megaton in F3, the first town many F3 players encountered. But what was Kkat's attempt to make this less retarded? He just gives the nuke to Silver Bell the random child living in Pinkie Pie's house... I think. FUCKING WHY?

It's like Kkat tried to headcanon away all the faults in F3 smarter people pointed out to him, and now that he's writing something he sees an opportunity to tell everyone his headcanons that make shit excuses for all the retarded lazy writing and videogame contrivances in F3. Even though most of them require magic to make sense, and were introduced in Fallout 3, a baby's first shoot game masquerading as a Fallout franchise game, and Fallout lacks magic. F3 has a boner for shallow pseudodeep shit you can effortlessly reference like magic and eldritch horrors but it's a grounded setting where the average dude lacks magic/psychic powers. BugthEAsderp's Fallout never provided an excuse for the stat-boosting Vault Boy Bobbleheads this story turned into Mane Six Statuettes.

Kkat's changes to the main plot of "Fight the baddies to turn on a thing that fixes the world for you" didn't really change things. Shoving The Master and Alicorn Super Mutants early on didn't change things. Shoving Red Eye in there and trying to integrate this F3 DLC shit into the main plot didn't change things. Shoving the fucking Sierra Madre in there didn't change things. It's still Fallout 3 with extra shit glued on top.

Kkat loved Fallout 3 and wants his story to be a "bigger and better" Fallout 3, by making it a bigger example of almost everything that made Fallout 3 shit on a world design and story level.

Is it bad writing that LP's companions are so similar to Fallout 3 and NV companions?

Star Paladin Cross is some Brotherhood Of Steel Ranger twat in power armour. Steelhooves.
Steelhooves and Veronica are both BOS members and they both disagree with how the BOS operate. But while Veronica was part of FNV's genius criticism of the F1/2 Brotherhood's unchanging ways, moral faults, and backwards policies(while making them lose a war to the NCR from a lack of numbers and while introducing a sick EMP pulse gun that could let anyone shit on any power armoured foe), Steelhooves just wants the Brotherhood of Fallout 1 (steal and protect tech from misuse) to spontaneously turn into the Power Rangers Brotherhood of Fallout 3 (claim to fight for justice and peace and solely exist to shoot super mutants in the middle of nowhere and fight the pointlessly evil Enclave for the right to turn on a giant water filter). Steelhooves spontaneously gets his wish when his faction spontaneously starts a civil war 200 years too late right after crossing the moral event horizon for good.

Clover is a brownish sex slave and bodyguard of some shit pimp nigger NPC. Xenith is a former sex slave who worked for Red Eye. Both are shallow one note characters except Clover fell in love with whoever buys her while Xenith just sees LP as her new master for basically forcing her to abandon slave life and switch masters.

Arcade Gannon is an ex-enclave medic and Raul is a mexican ghoul cowboy. Shallowly combine the two while losing everything that made them original and you get Calamity, an ex-enclave Cowboy.

This is why it surprised me when Silver Bell the small child wasn't turned into a rocket launcher-toting Tiny Tina knockoff. This story's so unoriginal, everything here that's actually "a kkat original" sticks out like Kkat's prolapsed anus after a lot of gay buttsex.

short post attempt:

is it weird that Calamity has two personalities?

One moment he's this serious practical guy with a southern drawl, just a guy who likes fixing his car and shooting enemies, someone who's seen some shit and won't hesitate to shoot a boy pony rapist for chasing a mare...

One moment he's giggling like a tiny schoolgirl at the sight of sick loot or combat. suddenly he adores big guns and gets so giddy at the sight of a room full of guns he takes everything that isn't nailed down and clears out that room faster than an overweight furry OC after taco bell.

Suddenly the text treats him like a bigger kleptomaniac murderhobo than Littlepoop, as if to try and make her seem normal in comparison. Even though there are so many scenes where Calamity is written like an average guy with no real characterization beyond being a tough guy with a southern yeehaw accent.

That just sticks out to me. Seems weird. If Kkat wanted to make this Calamity guy a "Hardened Wasteland Veteran" who's also a "Giggling giddy murderhobo kleptomaniac gun-nut" caricature, why not lean harder into that and outright say being raised by a mixture of The Enclave and Edgequestria fucked him up?

Why not make him a living example of what Littlepoop DOESN'T want to be?
Why not push his characterization as the reason why other characters sometimes don't like him, instead of forcing Velvet to sometimes bicker with him for retarded reasons like "you don't wash much" and "you're different from me" and "you killed a rapist foal, how dare you".
Why not make this guy someone who grows and changes?
Why not say this guy can't grow or change after going full murderhobo, and all he can do is try to guide Littlepip down a better path while hoping she doesn't go full murderhobo too?
Why not give all of Littlepoop's obnoxious murderhobo/kleptomaniac moments (Slaughtering the Steel Rangers for not giving her some water talisman she wanted to give to Arbu, slaughtering Arbu for fitting her definition of evil, STEALING THAT FUCKING STATUETTE FROM BEST PONY'S CORPSE, and so on) to Calamity?

Maybe on some level, Kkat thinks these moments where Calamity girlishly giggles and "Squees" (ugh_tankman.mp3) over loot are "funny", and maybe he thinks these moments where LP murderhobos a whole town or Velvet shoots raiders with a shotgun for making the kid thunderdome in Fluttershy's cottage decorated with the never-decaying bodies of 200 year old now-extinct animals are "cool".

One more thing...

Dead Money gave the player 3 new companions early on and made you take each friend to a specific point 1 at a time.

Dean has to hold wires together since he's the talentless odd man out, God/Dog must throw some heavy switches with his super strength, and Christine must fuck with machines using her tech knowledge.

Dean Domino's area has more gas than traps or deadly radios because his perk makes gas easier to deal with. Same with God/Dog whose perk deals with traps when God's in control instead of the Dog personality, and Christine's area has more radios than other threats. In a feat of genius design, going into these areas with friends is easy mode and leaving them is a bit harder usually. When getting your friends to their zones complications also arise, Dean wants you to make the area safer for him and Dog wants food and Christine is scared of small spaces like the elevator. These problems have nice solutions and mean solutions. Pick mean solutions and the chars hate you and force you to kill them when they try to kill you once you're all in the Sierra Madre. The goal is to make you feel things for these characters that can only matter here, tie into the casino heist movie aesthetic and themes of greed, and let you choose to be a goodie or baddie.

Also at the start of Dead Money all your sick loot is taken to force you to rely on scavenged crap and unique local stuff that helps make the experience feel more unique and brings you down to a scared vulnerable Survival Horror place where anything can be lethal.

This sailed right over Kkat's head like flying semen during orgies he couldn't reach when jumping for it like a dog leaping for thrown treats, and so Canterlot became an incredibly bland experience where all LP really had to do was gather up her friends who were shoved into random fucking places like broom closets. No negotiating with new friends. No deep themes. It's just a place with assorted hazards that sound cool until you realize they can't seriously threaten LP.

Littlepip? More like Littleshit.

>>312754

We don't hear anything more about the approaching herd of griffins, but while LP is in Derpy's store (which is presently being used as some kind of sick bay for all the wounded little poners), she bumps into the mare from earlier, the raider-not-raider who helped them massacre the actual raiders who for some reason were pitting children against each other in cage matches. The conversation goes about as you'd expect: the mare can't believe she is finally meeting the world-famous murderhobo Littlepoop, and proceeds to gush hero-worship at her. Littlepoop falls into her usual "aw shucks, I'm not that great" false-modesty loop. Witness the exchange for yourself:

>I felt a hoof punch my shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell us who you were?”
>I turned to see the amber mare and khaki buck whom we had helped back at Fluttershy’s Cottage. The attacking hoof was from the mare, who managed to look both star-struck and cross at the same time. I found myself blushing, and the little pony in my head quickly insisted the extra heat in my cheeks was from the rum and definitely not from embarrassment or being hit by a pretty mare. Oh yes, the canteen. I should drink more now. Easier than responding. Yep.
>“I was gushing all about the Wasteland Heroine and you were right there and didn’t say anything!” the mare protested.
>Was she mad at me? “I’m not…” I tried to argue, “I mean… I’m just trying to do the right thing. Like anypony would.”
>“Oh yes,” the mare chimed, rolling her eyes. “Like anypony would. Because just anypony would risk their life trotting into the home territory of the most dangerous monsters in Equestria to set off a balefire bomb and clear them out.” She smirked.
If anyone out there wants to make five bucks, find kkat and bring him to me alive, so I can tear off the prolapsed section of his large intestine and flog him to death with it. Actually, that sounds like more bother than he's worth; just bury him alive under concrete with a running webcam and post a link to the stream.

Anyway, this goes on for awhile. The two raider pones continue to heap praise on her for taking out the Goddess and the hellhounds and so forth and so on, and LP continues to blush and mumble to herself that she shouldn't be praised because somethingsomethingSteelHooveswhateverwhocares. While this is going on, a couple of pegasi suddenly burst into the makeshift hospital. They appear to be searching for a friend or a relative.

>The amber mare next to me stomped and nickered. “I’m rethinking that thing about how pegasuses are cool.”
*sighs*
*rubs temples*
*desperately snorts entire box of Junior Mints on the off chance that they really do contain some psychoactive compound that might make reading the rest of this autism halfway bearable*

First of all, kkat, the plural of "pegasus" is "pegasi." Second, I'm getting really, really tired of reading the word "nicker" all the goddamn time. I get that nickering is a thing that horses do, but they do other stuff too. Can you not occasionally toss in another horse noise every once and a while for variety? Are you so utterly bereft of creativity that you can't even manage to swap out nickering for whinnying, neighing, braying, or snorting whenever you need a random reaction sound for a character? Here, you cross-dressing mental patient, have a gift that it took me all of half a second to google: http://www.mackenziekincaid.com/writing/a-writers-guide-to-horse-noises/

Third and finally, does this reaction from the still-unnamed "amber mare" even add anything to the scene in the first place? Did this awkward, silly, purposeless, cringe-inducing remark really need to be made? If you can't think of anything witty or zippy or even halfway amusing for this character to say here, why make her say anything at all? Instead of writing dialogue like this, why not simply pay someone to whack the back of your skull repeatedly with a piece of iron rebar until your retinas detach? If you're short on cash, just give them a few pages of this story to read and they'll probably do it for free.

ANYWAY, the pegasi are mostly gawking at how basically-normal the earth pony general-store-turned-hospital appears to be. The takeaway from this scene seems to be that the common pegasi have been fed propaganda by the Enclave to think that the surface-ponies are all blood-sucking vampires or something; these two are shocked to find that they are not.

>Actually, I wanted to interject (feeling a moment of pride in my expertise), radiation monitoring would still work, just like the radio. Although, admittedly, health monitoring wouldn’t. My thoughts fell apart before the desire could manifest as more than a vague wish. Between the “medicine” and my exhaustion, I was flirting with incoherency.
There is nothing noteworthy in this passage, I just wanted to highlight it to show you the kind of incoherent, rambling prose I've been slogging through since October or so.

Anyway, there's a long, silly, pointless argument between the pegasi over whether or not the surface air is poisonous; at this point Calamity interjects and informs these pegasi that the air is not, in fact, poisonous here, but the Enclave is unlikely to care. They will not be allowed to go back to Cloudsdale or whatever pegasus-land is called in this story because something something propaganda. I also noticed this cryptic remark:

>“By the weekend, the Enclave will ‘ave delivered condolences and new birth-approval certificates t’ yer families…” Calamity continued.
For a moment I was wondering if this wasn't a mistake, and that kkat had intended to say "death certificates" here. However, what I think this is saying is that the Enclave has something like population control in place; since these two pegasi are now "dead," their parents would be permitted to have two more children. Again, kkat hasn't really told us much about how Enclave society is structured, so I'm not sure how to react to this.

>>313365

Unfortunately, the scene keeps going and going. A third pegasus called Tracker, who I think was one of the wounded, inserts himself into the conversation, and begins arguing that the two civilian pegasi should ignore everything Calamity has to say, because he's a Dashite.

>“You think I don’t recognize you?” Tracker accused, “You’re Deadshot Calamity. You murdered your troops and fled beneath the clouds to escape punishment. I’ve seen your wanted poster!”
>Calamity sighed slightly, glancing back towards me as he muttered under his breath, “History rewritten yet again.”
It's a little presumptuous to call this "rewriting history;" at best it's falsifying information. "History" implies that the events being rewritten have historical significance, and I don't really see how Calamity's exile from the Enclave would count. In any case, I don't remember what exactly Calamity did that got him exiled, all I remember is that after all the buildup about his mysterious past, the big reveal turned out to be that he was kicked out for something fairly mundane. As I recall, he was on some routine patrol on the surface and wanted to intervene in some skirmish he observed, but to do so would violate the Enclave prime directive or something. The whole thing amounted to a policy disagreement. If Calamity actually had been responsible for the death of his troops, but the it turned out that it was in self-defense or he was protecting innocent civilians, or something else that might arguably justify the act, it might have made him a more interesting character.

Anyway, Calamity argues that if the allegations against him were true, they wouldn't have been able to brand him since he would still be at large for the murder. This is actually a pretty good point, and reveals one of the story's many plot holes. As with most of these that kkat has managed to actually notice, he chooses to pave over it and explain it away, instead of going back and revising Calamity's backstory to make it both more logical and more compelling. Another swing and another miss.

>“They can’t lie to us,” Tracker stated in voice you use to state basic facts to slow children. “They’re the government.”
The commentary here is about as subtle as being whacked on the back of the head with a piece of iron rebar: "oh noes, the ebil gubment is lying to us and da peopel have a right to know da troof!!11!"

However, I will note that it's often fun to go back a decade or so and see how social attitudes about certain issues change over time amongst normies. In 2011 or 2012 or whenever this was written, the left was still in a Bush-era mindset about subjects like censorship and government surveillance of civilians, which they have since done a 180-degree pivot on. I would be curious to see how kkat would approach these same topics if he were writing this story today.

>I sensed Calamity’s desire to facehoof radiating off of him. This Enclave… it didn’t make sense to me. My own thoughts swam, clutching for an anchor. I realized it was past time to ask my friend about the ponies we were facing. But first, I needed to rest. Sleep. More than that, I needed time to breathe. To mourn. My heart was bleeding from many deep wounds. Hurt tomorrow, help today. But today was tomorrow, wasn’t it?
There's nothing particularly noteworthy here either; I just wanted to once again call attention to how bleeding awful kkat's prose is.

>SteelHooves always hid his pain, the pony in my head reminded me. SteelHooves was always silently strong for everypony.
Reminder that at one point SteelHooves went careening off the edge of an airship while fighting bloodwings in the middle of a thunderstorm, and was missing for days. LP did not express any concern for him whatsoever, preferring to escort a couple of strangers back to their home village instead of searching for him.

>But that wasn’t necessarily a good thing, was it.
This is a question and should end with a question mark.

>My soul felt like it was swimming in darkness, barely treading water, and if I didn’t let out the tears, I’d drown in them.
Fucking kek.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coem1wD9HY4

Anyway, the scene just keeps going further and further off the rails. The argument eventually turns into a full-on brouhaha, and it looks like it might escalate into physical violence. Then, suddenly, Derpy shows up holding a chalkboard admonishing everyone to "be nice" and promising to trade muffins for health supplies. At this point, the arguing ends and everyone starts hugging each other instead.

Page break. Time skips randomly forward again. LP is now at some kind of concession counter, buying a squirrel on a stick. It's unclear where she is exactly. The important takeaway is that Derpy survived, and appears to have gotten over her little bout with radioactivity. Poor Derpy; looks like she won't be allowed to escape kkat's silly universe quite so easily.

>“Ya hangin’ on, Li’lpip?” Calamity asked as he landed next to me.
>The answer was no, and we both knew it. So instead of lying, I asked, “Her Senator?”
>Calamity whinnied. “Ah admire ‘er courage, but it’s suicide. The Enclave Skyguard will have standin’ orders t’ shoot ‘em on sight…” My friend grimaced in pain. “…t’ prevent ‘em from spreadin’ contagion, of course.”
Even though the argument in the preceding scene just happened and would be fresh in the reader's mind, for the characters this references something that happened (I presume) some time ago. Seeing as how the mare that said she was going to contact her Senator (it was one of the pegasi I think) was a stranger to both LP and Calamity, and that her remark does not relate to anything going on in the current scene, LP's question here should be taken as a non-sequitur by Calamity. The way he just immediately picks up on what she's asking about and provides a canned response does not feel like natural conversation.

>>313374
I can't recall what happened exactly with Calamity being kicked out either but I believe he did kill some of his own soldiers. Think they were flying bellow the clouds and saw some ponies fighting raiders but the pegasi wanted to kill everyone and he wanted to defend the normal ponies so killed some of his own soldiers.

I remember the chat earlier in this review about how this story sort of poisoned the well on Fallout crossover fics and how if you want to make one you HAVE to use this universe and timeline or else the kkat sicophants will down vote the story into oblivion.

Makes me wonder then if he's influenced other stuff like his prose. I get absolutely livid when he says buck in place of stallion and I dropped a green I was reading recently that did the same. Even though stallion is used in the show perhaps kkat was into some furry shit and deer so did it on reflex.

Same with the dyke shit. Out of the entier alphabet brigade I hate them the most. If they are written by straight or lesbian women, 38 year olds like kkat who are trannies trying to larp as lesbians, or sweaty fat guys or limp twisted soy boys role playing as them online, they are always written the same by being super horny and have to leer at everything with a vagina. He absolutely wasn't the first to do so but I noticed just about every Fallout Equestria story and most the art is over powered lesbian unicorns.

Nigel made a post about it way back with that Project Horizons being Fallout Equestria *but more!* Longer run time, even more lesbian main character, even more edge, more mutilation, more overpowered magic. Can't expect much from pony fan fics but it seems like a race to the bottom for more clout chasing.

>>313374

Anyway, it seems that the two pegasi mares have been summoned for questioning by Railright. Calamity wants to be present during the interrogation because reasons. However, before he goes, Littlepoop wants him to explain the workings of the Enclave government to her. The rest of this scene is just an infodump about the inner workings of the Enclave, which wouldn't have even been necessary if kkat had been doing his job properly up until now.

The Enclave is basically a bureaucratic government similar to that of most modern Westernized countries. Their government consists of a Low Council, which functions similarly to Congress in the US, and the High Council, which consists of military leadership responsible for enforcing whatever laws the Low Council comes up with. The Enclave does not refer to the pegasus nation itself; the term is reserved for the members of the political-military juggernaut that runs their civilization. What, if anything, the pegasi actually call their nation is still not clear; I'm assuming that they don't have a name, and I'm assuming that this is because kkat simply lacked the creativity to think something up, and there was nothing comparable from Fallout 3 for him to ape.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that the Enclave started out as a pegasus rebellion against the war, and morphed into a dinosauric military bureaucracy that has long-since outlived its purpose. Ignoring whatever banalities about the Iraq invasion that he may have wanted to get off of his chest here, kkat actually makes some incisive observations about how militaries and democratic governments can both become bloated and inefficient bureaucracies over time, particularly when they don't have a clear objective. Again, I'd be curious to see how he would approach these subjects if he were writing this story today.

Once the infodump is concluded, the narrative veers off into more pseudo-emotion from Littlepoop about the horrors of war. No new or interesting ground is covered, but LP and Calamity stand there staring at the room full of wounded ponies for awhile.

>“But what do we do until then?” Calamity asked, not looking back.
>I bit my lower lip, my body trembling. I could sense the tears coming, but I tried to fight them back. Not here. Not now.
>“We do what SteelHooves would do,” I said.
Stand there and be really boring?

>“We soldier on.”
Oh. That too, I guess.

>We soldier on. Until we can find a way to make this right, to make things better, we endure. We persevere. We keep helping ponies however we can.
>It’s what SteelHooves would have done.
Is that really what SteelHooves would have done? That's not how I'd summarize his life.

It was never really clear what the Steel Rangers did in the first place, and in any event SteelHooves didn't transform whatever his objections to their policies were into action until the last couple weeks of his 200 year life. Up until that point, it seems like he spent most of his time living in a shack in the middle of nowhere doing basically fuck-all. But I digress. Point is, this section of text basically just restates what you said above, and is mostly unnecessary.

Back when he was alive, Littlepoop barely even noticed SteelHooves; now she won't shut up about him. She's sad, is basically the gist of what goes on in this scene. Eventually, that mare that was kissing her ass earlier brings her a bottle of water, and she finally bursts into tears.

>I curled up and began to cry. Deep, wrenching sobs.
I think we're meant to see this as LP finally releasing her sadness after holding it in for so long. However, this would only be effective if she actually had been holding it in. This twat has done nothing but whine and cry since this story began, so I don't really see how "deep, wrenching sobs" are anything to write home about.

Anyway, she spends the last couple of paragraphs itemizing all of the things she's crying about here:

>For how much Velvet Remedy was hurting. And Calamity. For Ditzy Doo, who had nearly died.
Speaking of people who nearly died, remember that time SteelHooves fell off the roof of the Mystery Machine during a rainstorm and nobody even bothered to search for him?

>I sobbed for the husband who had lost his wife, the old buck who had lost his leg
Who? I think these are some of the NPCs whose deaths were mentioned briefly during the fight, but honestly I just skim the battles at this point so it's hard to remember. Honestly, so many NPCs have been mutilated and killed in horrendous ways throughout the course of this shitfest I can barely keep track.

>the town who had lost the joy of sunlight to bloody battle.
Personally, I'm crying because of how little sense that entire scene made. Deep, wrenching sobs.

>I wept for the little filly whose ashes I kept in a cola bottle.
Yeah, it's still pretty creepy that she even has that. Even creepier is that kkat doesn't seem to realize that it's a weird thing to have.

>And for Star Sparkle.
Who?

>But most of all, I cried for SteelHooves.
Lol, dead last in her thoughts as usual.

Page break. We rejoin Littlepoop several hours later, and are informed that she spent most of this period crying. For once, I'm actually happy for the time skip, though the rest of this microscene is basically just her whining.

>I tried to focus, believing that if I could just corral my thoughts, railroad them, then maybe I could finally rest.
This is a completely inappropriate use of "railroad" as a verb.

Anyway, Littlepoop yammers on endlessly in her usual chaotic, rambling style, jumping from subject to subject without any effort to connect them in any meaningful way. Here's a quick rundown of the topics she covers:

>Twilight Sparkle
>SteelHooves’ head rolling away from his body
>Velvet crying about stuff and whatever
>Raiders
>Red Eye
>the Enclave
>Rainbow Dash
>those goofy weather-towers

Somehow, this extended period of incoherent rambling leads LP to finally realize what her purpose is: she's going to bring back the sun.

>>313387

As far as I can tell, LP intends to somehow take control of the weather towers, and use them to remove the cloud cover over Equestria. This would have the dual effect of eliminating the clouds and making agriculture possible (presumably), as well as reconnecting the pegasi to the rest of Equestria, thus negating the Enclave's power over them. I'm not sure how she intends to accomplish this; as I understand it, the only way to take control of the towers would involve sealing oneself in the control booth that has been locked for the last 200 years. There are two problems with this: it's magically coded to only open for Rainbow Dash, and even if LP could get inside, it takes a pegasus to operate it. However, since these are the kinds of details kkat usually does think about, I'm assuming he will at some point pluck an answer from the cavernous depths of his well-traveled ass.

Page break. Someone nearby has a radio on, so LP is treated to another of her annoying girlfriend's silly broadcasts. It's the usual crap: Friendship City was blown up, the Enclave was responsible, Littlepoop saved the day, and the Steel Rangers are working to rescue the survivors. God is in his Heaven and all is right with the world. Except for all the blood and angst and dismemberment, that is.

Though it's still unclear how exactly Homage managed to recapture her broadcast signal, the fact that she was able to negates a potentially interesting plot development. The Enclave taking over the signal and using it to broadcast propaganda introduced a new narrative into the world; ponies who had previously gotten their information from "DJ Pon3" were now hearing an alternate viewpoint from a group of newcomers claiming they had come to save them. It could have made things interesting: ponies in the wasteland wouldn't know which side was "good" or who they should trust; in all likelihood, some wastelanders would believe the Enclave's propaganda and join up with them, which could make things potentially interesting.

This could have been made even more interesting if kkat had kept up the thread he introduced awhile back. You may recall that after LP slaughtered the Arbu poners, Homage made an apparently sincere broadcast denouncing her to the entire wasteland. If this were still in effect, there would be a significant contingent of wastelanders who mistakenly believed that the "light bringer" had gone rogue, and would be working against her. At this point, LP would be simultaneously dealing with the Enclave and Red Eye, both of whom would be fighting each other, with the various wastelanders beginning to take sides. About the only thing they'd all be united on would be a near-unanimous hatred of Littlepoop, which would make her adventure even more harrowing. On top of that, she'd have to contend with knowing that her girlfriend now hates her because of a misunderstanding, but she can't get back to her and explain it because she has to save the world first. On top of that, she would still have to deal with SteelHooves' death and fillies getting vaporized all over the place and all of the crap she's supposedly sad about anyway.

Sounds interesting, doesn't it? Unfortunately, we will never get to read that story, because kkat killed both of those threads almost immediately after introducing them, leaving us to wonder why the fuck he even bothered. I mean, action, adventure, suspense, a plucky heroine facing insurmountable odds? Pfft; not in this story, bub. This here's Mary Sue country.

In other news, it seems that Tenpony Tower has (somehow) managed to oust the Enclave from inside their walls. Whatever they did, it happened off-camera, and thus far it's looking like none of the central characters were involved. Once again I have to ask: why the fuck even bother? Nothing that happens in this story ever conveys any real suspense or excitement, and nothing ever seems to be actually at stake. This story falls into the same trap as a lot of amateur fiction: the author has no flair for the dramatic, and the story is more of a record of various events happening in sequence rather than a properly-built story, leaving the reader bored and wondering what the point of all this is supposed to be.

Kkat, however, is unique in that he's almost an expert at failing. While most amateur writers might struggle with how to order the events in their tale, or which events to focus on and which ones to skip over, they would probably have enough sense to realize that if you introduce a problem for the hero to solve, then the hero ought to actually solve it at some point. Or, if it's not a problem meant for the hero, then the problem should at least be important somehow, and be solved in a way that affects the outcome of the rest of the story. Here, we have Tenpony Tower becoming suddenly occupied by an enemy force, and then being suddenly liberated by a mysterious friendly force. At no point is the hero's intervention required, and apart from the minor inconvenience of having to sneak past some soldiers, at no point does the occupation of this tower even affect Littlepoop in any serious way. So I ask again: why the fuck even bother?

Anyway, the rest of this is mostly just a recap of stuff we already know. Homage covers Derpy's rainboom of course, and also mentions some random acts of heroism that have been popping up here and there. Two characters named Lion and Mouse are mentioned by name, which I suspect may be early foreshadowing of some quasi-significant characters. A significant chunk of her broadcast is spent pointlessly eulogizing SteelHooves, because Lord knows we haven't had enough of that by now. If only kkat had paid him this much attention while he was alive, I might actually give a shit.

Homage also "accidentally" drops her location, but it turns out that this was a ruse: she prerecorded her show, and left the running tape recorder and a bomb for the Enclave soldiers to find.

>>313394
>As far as I can tell, LP intends to somehow take control of the weather towers, and use them to remove the cloud cover over Equestria. This would have the dual effect of eliminating the clouds and making agriculture possible (presumably), as well as reconnecting the pegasi to the rest of Equestria, thus negating the Enclave's power over them.
I don't recall whether this is directly addressed at this point, but there's two major problems here. First is that, at least as far as the story's established up to this point, the cloud cover isn't what's preventing agriculture. The land is terminally contaminated by taint and radiation, hence the need for the Gardens of Equestria to magically unfuck everything. Second, and this is a big one, the Enclave's cloud farms are the only thing even approaching industrial-scale agriculture in the setting. She's planning to turn the pegasus civilians against their own government by destroying their food supply.

To put it in terms of the already badly strained real world comparison, she's planning to make the US citizens rebel against the government that instigated the War on Terror by deleting all the breadbasket states and making the country dependent on food imports from the Middle East.

>>313394

For whatever it's worth, it's hinted that Homage's actions here might have more significance further on:

>From the cot in Ditzy Doo’s room, I had only the darkness and Homage’s words to hold me. I could not know that my love had struck the deepest, most vital blow to the Enclave yet. I did not realize Homage had pulled the entire power supply from that alien weapon and rigged it to a bomb. I did not see the brilliant blue explosion that obliterated more than just the base station and the dozen heavily-armed Enclave pegasi inside. For two hundred years, the nearly fifty towers of the Single Pegasus Project had stood, impervious to everything the enemy and the wasteland could throw at them. I was not a witness on that snow-swept ridge as one of those towers cracked, shifted, and came tumbling down.
Apparently, Homage took down one of the radio towers by somehow transforming that "alien weapon" she for some reason has into a bomb. It might have helped if the author had explained a little more about what this weapon is, where it came from, why she has it, and how powerful it is/was. It also would have been nice to actually witness this event, since it sounds a hell of a lot more exciting than anything that's happened to Littlepoop in the last few scenes. However, that would require a change in perspective, and when your entire massive epic is being narrated by a single whiny, irritating protagonist, changing perspectives just isn't possible.

Page break.

>I awoke, disoriented by the sense of having lost time.
Welcome to my world, Littlepoop.

Anyway, Littlepoop wakes up several hours later. She is magically cured of all her wounds once again, and finds that while she was out, most of the wounded poners have been cleared out of Derpy's store. Also, the place is full of griffons now, but they don't seem to be hostile, as they are Gawd's troops. Also, Derpy repaired LP's police barding while she was asleep.

We are introduced to two new griffon characters: Kage and Regina, both of whom turn out to be Gawd's children. Kkat attempts a bit of humor by having Littlepoop eye-hump Regina, and then lose her spaghetti when she finds out who her mother is. Like most of kkat's jokes, it goes on way too long and isn't particularly funny. If he really wants to make people laugh, he should stick to tragedy.

Page break.

>I leaned against the train engine that made up part of the hodge-podge construction of Absolutely Everything. It was the dark, dead hours of the early morning. That hour where the darkness lays most heavily on the soul and the hungry monsters outside claw at your door.
Oh, kkat. How long did you have that line rattling around in your brain, just waiting for an excuse to be written down?

Anyway, after the hilarious exchange between LP and Regina, LP goes outside to take a piss, when she is suddenly approached by one of Spike/Watcher/Frank's sprite-bots. The bot informs her that the Enclave has been tracking her movements and has sent a hit squad after her, made up of their most elite fighters. Unsurprisingly, this squadron is called the Wonderbolts, and unsurprisingly this pisses off Littlepoop, even though there is no reason that I'm aware of for this name to even mean anything to her.

In any event, Frank has dropped by because apparently the Enclave came to visit him and "interrogated" him somehow. Seeing as how the last time they came after him he melted a couple of their soldiers quite effortlessly, it's unclear how they might have accomplished this. Also unclear is why they left him both alive and free once they were finished with him, seeing as how warning Littlepoop would be the most logical action for him to take as soon as he was out of their custody. But we'll put a pin in that for now. Point is, they interrogated him and learned that LP had visited Ironshod Firearms way the fuck back in Chapter Four or thereabouts. This is not vital information in and of itself, but apparently Littlepoop was not quite the super-1337 h4><0RR that she is today, and she was clumsy in her hacking of the computer back there. So, they managed to get hold of her PipBuck's signature, and can now track her wherever she goes.

It's a pity there wasn't anything on that computer except some long-dead pony's 200 year old diary, and if she hadn't bothered to hack the terminal to obtain this useless information, she wouldn't be in this mess. Gee, it's almost like there's a lesson in here for her; something about curiosity killing the cat, perhaps?

Anyway, that's the end of the chapter.

Chapter Forty-One: Towards Hope

Today's Fortune Cookie:

>“For many of us, the road is a difficult one, but the path is always there for us to follow, no matter how many times we may fall.”
Apparently, kkat ran out of Fallout and MLP dialogue to plagiarize, and now has to resort to using platitudes ripped from Alcoholics Anonymous pamphlets.

Calamity appears to have laid out his plan for dealing with the Wonderbolts during the space between chapters, and Littlepoop stands aghast at whatever he told her exactly.

>Hell, it wasn’t even a plan. Plans have… plan stuff. Calamity had a bunch of ideas and vague hopes tied together by multiple points of “and then something happens”.
Calamity and kkat should collaborate on a novel sometime; it sounds like they have similar writing styles.

Anyway, absent a better plan, it seems that Littlepoop has little choice but to go along with whatever Calamity wants to do. Incidentally, are they still working through Littlepoop's plan? The one from before, that she can't remember because she erased her own memory? Or was that plan finished once she killed the Goddess? Kkat doesn't really conclude his storylines; he just stops writing about them and moves on to something else, assuming that we will just intuitively grasp whatever he has in mind.

Anyway, it seems that LP has some ideas for how to augment Calamity's plan. She will need both Frank and Gawd's help.

>>313405
>“For many of us, the road is a difficult one, but the path is always there for us to follow, no matter how many times we may fall.”

This one here was actually ripped from Fallout New Vegas with the Honest Hearts DLC with Joshua Gram. Think he's done it a few times now actually.

I remember you mentioned before about trying out the Fallout games to compare it to this story and see where kkat took insperation from and feel like you'd really like Honest Hearts.

https://youtu.be/kVPJ4rskpnI

Fallout never really address old world religion so makes Joshua and Daniel interesting characters carrying an Old Testament vs New Testament morality and many memorable quotes from him.

>>313386
>If they are written by straight or lesbian women, 38 year olds like kkat who are trannies trying to larp as lesbians, or sweaty fat guys or limp twisted soy boys role playing as them online, they are always written the same by being super horny and have to leer at everything with a vagina. He absolutely wasn't the first to do so but I noticed just about every Fallout Equestria story and most the art is over powered lesbian unicorns.
I've noticed this too. Kkat basically writes his "lesbian" protagonist the same way he'd write a man. In fact, neither Littlepoop's femininity nor her being a lesbian really impact the story all that much, so you could easily rewrite this with a male protagonist without having to change all that much.

I don't pretend to know much about lesbians, but I've never had the impression that they think about sex the same way a guy does, ie walking around checking out the ass of every girl they see. Littlepoop basically behaves like a horny construction worker: she doesn't vocalize her thoughts in an obnoxious way, but since we're privy to them we can tell that sex is on her mind quite a bit, and she doesn't seem too picky or too monogamous about it. Even though she's in a "relationship" with Homage, this doesn't prevent her from objectively sizing up each attractive female she meets as a potential sex partner, which again is closer to how a male thinks than how (I would assume) a gay woman thinks. It's not necessarily a condemnation of her behavior, but if she were written as a male it would change the audience's view of her. A man who thinks and behaves this way would come across as a horndog, but a "lesbian" gets a pass.

The reason for this is because it's basically considered normal for men to objectify women on some level, but since it's normal there's usually no reason to call attention to their doing it. For instance, one can probably assume that Hamlet, for all his moody bullshit, had the same impulses and attractions as any other guy his age; however, he doesn't spend every soliloquy talking about Ophelia's tits. If a male character is constantly talking or thinking about sex, the reader will generally take this to mean that he has an exceptionally strong libido that you, the author, wanted to emphasize for some plot-related reason.

However, when writing a character who has some kind of uncommon sexual preference, you need to find a way to let the reader know this; otherwise they will just assume that your character is probably straight, if they think about it at all. It takes practice to do this with subtlety, so a lot of writers end up doing what kkat does here: have the character constantly make references to their own sexuality or make it blatantly obvious that they are into women, men, sheep, coprophilia or any other sort of demented thing the author wants the reader to know they're into. The fact that the character has an abnormal preference that you want to emphasize is the only reason to do this; as soon as you remove the abnormality from it the character simply appears to be overly obsessed with sex.

>>313402
>To put it in terms of the already badly strained real world comparison, she's planning to make the US citizens rebel against the government that instigated the War on Terror by deleting all the breadbasket states and making the country dependent on food imports from the Middle East.
What's interesting here is that even if you set aside all the moral questions, this would probably produce the exact opposite of she wants. She's trying to bring about peace by eliminating the Enclave's hold over its people, but forcing a massive number of ponies used to living in relative plenty into competition with the already-stressed wastelanders would be a recipe for disaster. If resources are already scarce, then making them even more so certainly won't reduce conflict.

What would probably happen is the pegasi would stop hating the surface ponies they've never met because the Enclave told them to, and start hating the surface ponies they have met, because those 200 year old cans of beans are now the only food on the planet, and suddenly there are many thousands more mouths to feed.

If kkat understood concepts like this he could probably do something interesting with it, but...well, obviously.

>>313407
I'm planning to play them once I've wrapped this story up. I actually think not playing any of the games before delving into this was the right choice; if I knew what was being referenced my mind would automatically fill in the blanks. Coming into it blind, I have nothing but kkat's narration to inform me of what's going on, and that really makes it clear just how nonsensical this story really is. If there was a way I could have selectively erased my memories of MLP before reading, so I would be prevented from also using that knowledge as a crutch, I think I would have opted to do that as well.

>>313405
>the Enclave named their elite killsquad The Wonderbolts
MORE FUCKIN BRONYBAIT but WAIT A FUCKIN SECOND...

The Wonderbolts were a bunch of circus performers until later-season retcons added more military shit to them. The wonderbolts in this story were (as was established 50 chapters ago) used as an elite squad of fliers by Equestria and many died trying to same some ponies from Zigger pirates. Rainbow Dash founded the Shadowbolts, a dedicated military force of elite fliers (I think) working for her "Ministry Of Awesome". It makes no sense for the Enclave to name their elite fliers "The Wonderbolts".

This would be like if America got nuked and 200 years later, a fragment of America that seceded on racial grounds and once tried turning the Denver Broncos into an elite rescue unit (only for them to underperform in their new role) decided to call its own elite killsquad Manchester United just because they were founded by someone they now hate who also loved Manchester United and founded the Denver Broncos hoping to replace them.

Mr Krabs! I had an idea!

What if at the story's start, Littlepip had to complete a multiple choice quiz with questions about history and science and theoretical questions about how you would act in assorted extreme scenarios? LP could go out of her way to pick the nicest sounding theoretical options while thinking "lmao this is retarded a smart hero like me would never do this" even though ironically she becomes a total goody two (four?) shoes outside the Stable. Also the questions regarding Equestria's history could be used to establish what LP actually knows about old world history and what she has to lie about on her test if she wants a passing grade. Correctly answering that Pinkie invented crack and AJ invented guns, incorrectly claiming the Battle Of The Bulgey-Wulgey was fought over economic reasons when it was really fought because ziggers were raping there, writing some short essay to be pure cumsucking asskissing faggotry designed to pleasure a teacher she hates for being a blunt obvious one-note living representation of the shitheads that let Equestria die, and so on.

It could be like the G.O.A.T. test from Fallout 3 only instead of "penguin of doom lolsorandum" bullshit, it's used for characterization. Maybe mix in a little of the personality quiz from Pokemon Mystery Dungeon and Kris's quiz from Custom Robo Arena.

By establishing LP as one who hides her true self to fit in inside the Stable, it makes for a more shocking moment when she reveals her true self outside the Stable, or something right?

>>313405

LP and Calamity are standing around on the porch of Derpy's store. LP is asking why the Wonderbolts haven't tracked her down yet, which is actually a pretty good question, when they bump into Railright. They discuss the fate of the pegasi from earlier. Apparently, the two bumpkins that wandered in are still hanging around; Railright put them to work doing something or other in return for food and shelter. The military one that Calamity was arguing with answered some kind of summons from the Enclave to return to base.

As ever, it's unclear what the Enclave's motivations are, but they seem to have some kind of taboo about returning to the surface world. Any pegasus who comes into contact with any of the ground ponies is considered unclean or infected or something. In this case, it appears the Enclave made a broadcast inviting "misplaced citizens" to return; from Calamity's reaction, the implication seems to be that the summons is a ruse, and anyone who answers it will be killed.

>“Cuz that place needs t’ be more toxic,” Calamity nickered.
Seriously; go through the text. Every goddamn time a character in this story makes a horse noise, it's always a "nicker." These ponies don't neigh, and they don't whinny; neither do they whicker, grunt, or snort. No, the only sound kkat's horses are capable of making is the eternal nicker. Its phonetic similarity to "nigger" aside, I'm really getting tired of reading this word all the time.

They talk about current events; apparently there has been an unusual amount of rain lately. This may or may not have anything to do with the Enclave. Incidentally, if pegasi canonically control the weather in this universe, and their society has chosen to completely forsake the ponies on the surface world, then why does it still rain in the wasteland?

Anyway, a town called Hope is arbitrarily namedropped, and LP inquires about it:

>“The town with that old weapons factory,” Railright clarified. Ironshod Firearms. I remembered walking through the playground of Hope. I’d seen my first Ministry of Morale poster there. I just hadn’t known the town’s name.
Oddly enough, I think I remember that place. I recall wondering why there was a playground out in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere. For whatever it's worth, here is what I had to say about it at the time:

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

Apparently, Hope was also the home of a large solar power array. Odd that LP didn't notice this while she was wandering around there before. Then again, she didn't notice the gigantic radio towers dotted about all over the place either, until they became relevant to the plot.

>“Hope Solar Array,” Calamity told me, sounding a little bored. “Big bunch o’ dishes pointed up at the clouds. Best Ah c’n gather, the ponies o’ the old world tried all sorts o’ crazy ways t’ get power when the coal supply got strangled.”
Yet another vague aspect of kkat's universe. How exactly are the various devices we've seen powered? We have technology like computer terminals, artificially intelligent mechanical owls, computer-guided targeting systems, and so forth and so on, existing side by side with spells and witchcraft. This is one of those sticky situations you can run into when you try to blend sci-fi and fantasy. What powers these devices? Magic? Electricity? Steam? It pays to put thought into stuff like this before you sit down and start writing.

While they are talking about this, the door to the store suddenly opens and Regina Grimfeathers (Gawd's daughter) appears. She pulls out a pack of cigarettes and starts smoking; that's how you can tell she's a bad-ass. She announces that Silver Bell has gone missing. Could this be the start of the team's next adventure? As it turns out, no; Silver Bell appears to have simply gone to the bathroom. The only reason the subject even came up was so kkat could toss in another cringe-worthy joke, this time about LP pissing outside when the town had public toilets all along.

Anyway, with that essential matter all cleared up, the conversation returns to its previous topic: the Enclave. The long and short of it is that the Enclave is the most technologically advanced civilization on the planet, due to their still having access to all of the pre-war technology that they had when they decided to seal themselves off. However, without unicorns, they are unable to develop new tech, and are reliant on what they already have. They have apparently been scavenging from mountaintops and warring with the griffins for the last two centuries in order to procure resources, but those wells seem to have finally run dry. Presumably, this is why they have decided to invade the wasteland. Also, it turns out that the sonic rainboom is like a weapon of mass destruction to them, and so Derpy's ability to pull one off has sent them into some kind of panic. So, in summation, that is why the Wonderbolts haven't come after them yet. This entire subchapter was just a long, meandering answer to this one simple question.

Page break. LP reenters the store and tells Gawd that she needs a favor. There is yet another cringe-worthy joke about LP's lesbian attraction to Gawd that goes on far longer than it has any right to, and then LP gets down to brass tacks: she wants Gawd to escort Derpy and Silver Bell to Spike's cave for protection. At this point, LP notices that Silver Bell still hasn't returned from the bathroom yet; she must be taking a pretty gigantic shit.

>>313446
>without unicorns, they are unable to develop new tech, and are reliant on what they already have
But Earth Ponies invented firearms and cyborgery in this setting. AJ and her ministry invented guns while the all-earth pony vault Red Eye is from invented the cybernetic enhancements he uses. If earth ponies can do that, Pegasi should be able to do more using their wings like hands cartoon-style. Sure they can't do any telekinetic unicorn shit or trap souls in objects or whatever, but you'd think after 200 years the Enclave would have some factories (possibly made from clouds or designed with the help of unicorns) designed to let pegasi build shit. Or maybe some hidden factories and work camps in the middle of buttfuck nowhere for any Unicorn or EarthPony kids/slaves of the Enclave to work for the good of the enclave in return for their protection and feeding.

Also
>video
Is that a real fighting game? Normally excessively-crippling/lethal throws like that do less damage than a series of boots to the face for balance purposes.

>>313446

Stiletto, who I think is one of Gawd's underlings, suddenly enters the store and informs them that Silver Bell is up at Railright's, and is in need of assistance. There's no implication that she is in any serious danger, but for some reason both LP and Derpy interpret it this way, and take off running. They arrive at the building Railright uses as his headquarters, and find it ominously dark. LP floats out her gun, and Derpy kicks down the door. However, before they can get down to the business of murdering everyone in sight, the lights suddenly pop on and balloons descend from the ceiling. A room full of the townsponies yell "surprise" in unison. Too bad LP didn't shoot first and ask questions later like she usually does; the results could have been hilarious.

Page break. Turns out that what started as Pinkie Bell going out to take a shit and nearly ended as a tragic bloodbath was actually a surprise party that Silver Bell had planned for her adoptive mother, to recognize her efforts in saving the town. They all stand around and eat cake, and LP catches up with Crane, the pony from way back who taught her how to use her bullshit telekinesis powers to the fullest. He is duly impressed by the feats of Mary Suedom she has accomplished with said power since she was last under his tutelage.

He casually mentions the existence of a potion that can cure magic burnout. This would be immensely helpful to Littlepoop, since her occasional bouts with light fatigue are really the last thing standing between her and godhood, but in a surprising twist she actually turns down the opportunity to go on a pointless side-mission. However, she promises to investigate the place later if she happens to be in the area.

After this, LP goofs around and enjoys the party for a bit longer, and then goes outside for some reason or other. Gawd approaches her, and tells her that she has decided to accept her offer to escort Derpy and Silver Bell to Spike's place, in exchange for 500 caps. Nothing else happens, really.

Page break. LP goes back inside and parties for a bit longer, and when things start to wind down she is approached by Xenith. They are eventually joined by Calamity and Regina. They sit around and bullshit for awhile, the played-out unfunny joke about LP wanting to munch down on Regina and/or her mother rears its ugly head again, and then they chat about guns and battles. It turns out that the Enclave has taken to hunting raiders as some kind of PR move to convince the Equestrians that they are the good guys. The upshot of this seems to be that the raiders have been mostly driven from the wasteland; fans of child gladiator battles will now have to seek amusement elsewhere, though.

Also, it turns out that Regina and her brother Kage are planning to come with Littlepoop on her next mission. Apparently, they have fallen into the inescapable black hole of hero worship that follows her wherever she goes.

Page break. The next day, Velvet Remedy shows up. Apparently, she saw Derpy's rainboom and came here to help the wounded or whatever; you may or may not remember that "kindness" is supposed to be her thing. She is escorted in by Crane, who has apparently been bragging to her that his powers of Mary Sue magic can outclass even Mary Sue herself. They all have a chuckle about this, and then Crane wanders off, leaving Velvet and LP to talk about feelings and stuff.

The conversation goes about the way you'd expect. LP apologizes for not leaving Velvet's room when she asked her to, and Velvet apologizes for being a cunt:

>Velvet Remedy shook her head, her striped mane flapping wetly. “No. They were cruel. And… hypocritical.” She shrugged off her medical boxes. The yellow boxes with their pink butterflies sank into the brown water. “I’m not worthy to follow Fluttershy. Or to be your friend.”
Once again, the characters in this story seem to always learn the wrong lessons. Or, in this case, reach the right conclusion, but for the wrong reasons. She calls herself hypocritical here, which is certainly true; I've said as much about her more than once. However, she doesn't seem to fully grasp why she's a hypocrite.

Velvet professes a vaguely-defined set of wishy-washy ideals about "kindness" and a desire to "help" ponies, but she only follows them when it's convenient for her, if at all. She left the stable because she wanted to be a doctor instead of a singer, then wound up working as a part time nurse/part time singer for a bunch of slavers. She didn't seem to have any objections to working for these ponies, yet she just as willingly teamed up with some psychopath who showed up one day and murdered them all. She followed said psychopath and her friends around, patching up their various injuries as they brutally slaughtered half the wasteland, and apart from the occasional arbitrary objection to some specific murder or other, she seemed to more or less condone the psychopath's behavior. Then, randomly, she gets mad at her and strikes off on her own; then, just as randomly, she reappears, wanting to make amends.

This character has no solid convictions about anything; she just does whatever she wants and leaves it to others to clean the mess up behind her, just like LP and every other character in this story. The only thing she cares about is that she can feel like she's doing good most of the time; the actual outcomes that her actions produce is irrelevant to her. That's what makes her an insincere hypocrite. However, that's not what she's apologizing for here.

>I’m not worthy to follow Fluttershy. Or to be your friend.
She's not apologizing for her own shitty behavior, she's just apologizing for momentarily forgetting that Littlepoop is the hero that Gotham deserves. As to her "following" Fluttershy, it's never been clear just what aspect of Flutters she's trying to emulate. She's as insincere about this as she is about everything else.