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Glim Glam Steams Up Edgequestrian Style Hams, Part IV
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
a95e3fa
?
No.311564
311585 311622 311701 311813 314691 322378
For anyone who stumbles across this thread and is wondering what it is, this is a literary review thread for pony fanfiction. We take an MLP fic, read through it, and shit all over it discuss its literary merits.

We are currently reading Fallout: Equestria by kkat.

Thread number four. We are nearing the end of the tunnel, thank God.

Previous thread: >>304714 →

Currently on Chapter 38: Peace in Our Time
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/119190/40/fallout-equestria/chapter-thirty-eight-peace-in-our-time

Continuing from previous post.

>>311555 →

Page bweak. Littlepoop falls unconscious, has a flashback, and drones on about how shitty she thinks her life is for literally eleven paragraphs. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Littlepoop wakes up in a filthy, unfamiliar bed in some abandoned cottage somewhere. I'm sure kkat is writing from personal experience here. She whines for several more paragraphs about how miserable she is, even claiming to have PTSD from losing a rib, even though she stated earlier that it had been healed with magic and she will sustain no permanent injury other than a scar.

>The heart-rending blow of watching Applejack step out of that elevator… and realizing that Applesnack had intended to propose to her that very night, and she was anticipating it… oh Goddesses.
This is another continuity error along the lines of what I pointed out in the previous chapter. By her own admission, she did not view the orb whose events she is referencing here until after Canterlot, and unless she's been losing herself in orbs during battles again, she would not have had time to view it between their escape from Canterlot and the present. She should not have witnessed these events yet.

LP can hear her friends talking in the next room. Apparently they found some new armor for SteelHooves from somewhere, or found some armor they could use to repair his existing armor, or something along those lines, because they are discussing rehabilitation for him. He can't move properly at present, but should be fine in a bit. Also, Xenith is there, so presumably they are back at Glyphtown or whatever that place was called.

Anyway, SteelHooves gives a schmaltzy speech about how Applejack learned to love zebras, and so he figures he could learn to love them too. You may or may not remember that SteelHooves doesn't like zebras, or doesn't trust them, or something. At least I think that was a thing with him. Anyway, the significance seems to be that he's over it now, and he and Xenith can be friends I guess. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Littlepoop is still sick or injured or something, so is Velvet, and SteelHooves presumably hasn't learned to walk again yet, so it seems they will need to rest for a couple of days. Xenith comes in and rubs ointment into Littlepoop's horribly painful bum-wounds, and tells her that she is not allowed to get out of bed until she is rested enough to stand on her own and keep down solid food.

For some reason, LP is in a huge hurry to resume her mission all of a sudden. It's been about twelve chapters since Red Eye first gave her the task of killing the Goddess, and told her that there was a bomb in Tenpony Tower that would explode if she didn't do his evil bidding incidentally, how is that situation coming along, anyway? bomb still tick, tick, ticking away?. Since that time, LP has done nothing but goof around and go on side missions, stopping to help every random pony she bumps into, no matter how trivial and mundane their problem is. She's still done absolutely fuck-all in terms of progress on this mission, though to her credit she did finally complete the mission the Goddess tasked her with, when she agreed to do a mission for her instead of killing her, which was the original mission.

So, what's the big hurry all of a sudden? Why not rest, take a few days off, heal your injuries, which for some reason you can't just shrug off by downing a potion this time around? You were willing to spend several days goofing around in Tenpony immediately after Red Eye gave you this assignment, so what exactly is the issue?

Anyway, they talk about Xenith's daughter for a bit. Seems like she's being basically written out of the story so that Xenith can rejoin the party. Since she wasn't much of a character in the first place, I don't think anyone is really going to miss her that much. After this, Littlepoop proceeds to mumble to herself about the usual nonsense until eventually the scene ends.

She embarks on one of her annoying little self-doubt episodes, bemoaning that she is about to lead her friends on a mission but she doesn't even know what the plan is since she erased her own memory. Then, she remembers that she is Mary Sue, the Chosen One, and nothing bad could ever possibly happen to her.

>I’ve told everypony their parts, and just their parts.
>Every pony...
>Oh!
>…because the Goddess couldn’t read zebra minds.
>A smile broke across my muzzle. Ooooh, I was a clever pony!
Has it been established that the Goddess can't read zebra minds? This is actually a serious question; I really can't keep track of even half of the ridiculous rules that have been introduced into this story thus far, but kkat is generally more less consistent when it comes to these kinds of details. Anyway, it looks like LP's plan is going to revolve around Xenith somehow.

Page break. It looks like someone else might have pointed out the continuity error with the memory orbs to kkat, because this scene starts with an angry rant from Calamity about LP viewing a box of memory orbs while he was off getting the Fart Cruiser. If I'm interpreting it correctly, the idea is that LP watched all six of the orbs while she was in the warehouse, sometime between Calamity's exit and the basement explosion.

This one is a draw, as far as I'm concerned. +1 to kkat for recognizing and correcting a continuity error, -1 for doing it in an idiotic, clumsy and illogical way.
Anonymous
513e7d6
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No.311568
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
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No.311571
311576
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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
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No.311576
311578 311581
>>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.
Anonymous
fa2c4ec
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No.311578
311581
>>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.
Anonymous
82ee6ce
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No.311581
311596
whydonttheyjustpickuplittlepipandsmashherthroughawall.gif
>>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.
Anonymous
6e09e90
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No.311585
311596 311640
>>311564
>Little pip being sodomizedby futa dash
Anonymous
513e7d6
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No.311596
311597 311599 311640
>>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.
Anonymous
19f8cd0
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No.311597
311640
>>311596
Idunno that sounds pretty based to me. Unity-mandated big futa cock alicorn gf
Anonymous
6e09e90
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No.311599
>>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%
Anonymous
513e7d6
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No.311603
311609 311813
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.
Anonymous
fa2c4ec
?
No.311609
311613
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
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No.311613
311615 311628
>>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?
Anonymous
fa2c4ec
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No.311615
1538339733285.jpg
>>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?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
a95e3fa
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No.311622
311638 311813
1624963568884.jpg
>>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.
Anonymous
6e09e90
?
No.311628
311636 311813
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.311636
311637
>>311628
If Kkat didn't write his story this way we wouldn't know he's a faggot. Checkmate atheist.
Anonymous
6e09e90
?
No.311637
311643 311813
>>311636
>Faggotry apologism
Oswald Moseley would be ashamed
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
a95e3fa
?
No.311638
311642 311813
JlrdMRDWB1U5MzljRQlmQveIUTMUjal0pVrIRayNWNU.jpg
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.311640
311648 311813
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.311642
311644 311645 311646 311813
3000.jpg
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.311643
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.311644
>>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?
Anonymous
933b4dc
?
No.311645
>>311642
>Homage: "Congratulations."
>Calamity: "Congratulations."
>Velvet: "Congratulations."
Littlepip: "Thank you all."
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.311646
311647 311813
its shit.png
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.311647
311650 311813
ec1 (1).png
>>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.
Anonymous
ad8a369
?
No.311648
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.311650
311654 311658 311813
02d.png
>>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?
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.311654
>>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?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.311658
311701 311702 311813
90e784c5-d81b-4a17-9ca7-1b46a808458b.jpg
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
c76475e
?
No.311701
311709 311711 311720 311732 311813
1625101025401.png
>>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."
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.311702
311764
>>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?
Anonymous
19f8cd0
?
No.311709
311724 311766
>>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.
Anonymous
1b9d9f0
?
No.311711
311766
>>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
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.311720
311723 311766
whytho.jpg
>>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.
Anonymous
6e09e90
?
No.311723
>>311720
Is that a legit Chris drawing?
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.311724
311766

>>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."
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.311732
311754 311814 311978
1625100800250.jpg
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.311754
311766
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.311764
311765
>>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.
Anonymous
03fa350
?
No.311765
311768 311780
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.311766
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.311768
311811
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.311780
>>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.
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.311791
meanwhileinthealternateuniversewherefoeisntshit.jpg
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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.311811
311815
>>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.
Anonymous
608eb01
?
No.311813
311857 319417
>>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.
Anonymous
608eb01
?
No.311814
>>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.
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.311815
311857
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.311857
311863 312038 319417
>>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.
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.311863
311869
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.311869
311871
>>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".
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.311871
311876
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.311876
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.311964
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?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
a797cb6
?
No.311978
311988 312038
06yn-1545469861-427913-medium.jpeg
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
a797cb6
?
No.311988
311992 312024 312038
ca6.jpg
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
a797cb6
?
No.311992
312008 312038 312051
7b6.png
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312008
>>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.
Anonymous
19f8cd0
?
No.312024
>>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.
Anonymous
608eb01
?
No.312038
>>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?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
a797cb6
?
No.312051
312054 312213
f10f6563274d6db1cb9a1fd658afeca9.jpg
>>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?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
a797cb6
?
No.312054
312055 312060 312100 312213
Spoilered
>>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.
Anonymous
19f8cd0
?
No.312055
312106 312213
118249.png
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
a797cb6
?
No.312060
312088 312213
a58238_149506.jpg
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
a797cb6
?
No.312088
312136 312213
iXRCNWJ.png
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312100
312101
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312101
>>312100
*readily
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.312106
312120 312213
43293481F54BB4F25402BA117345475B-3611959.png
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312120
4p0fms0w2c971.png
>>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".
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312126
312142
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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
741ba48
?
No.312136
312152 312154 312213
2508331.gif
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
741ba48
?
No.312142
312145
>>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.
Anonymous
aa97fc4
?
No.312145
StalkerFilly.png
>>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.
Anonymous
19f8cd0
?
No.312152
312164
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
741ba48
?
No.312154
312166 312213
over-a-barrel-of-fireworks.png
>>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?
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312164
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
741ba48
?
No.312166
312169 312213
7068eec1188c2523515535a5c5fc935b--man-room-big-macintosh.jpg
>>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?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
741ba48
?
No.312169
312173 312175 312213
trannies.png
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
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No.312173
312176
OWOWOWO IM OWOWOWO IM RADIOACTIVE RADIOACTIVE I FEEL IT IN MY BALLS.png
>>312169
I forget, why is Derpy radioactive?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.312175
312213 312359
scootabuse.jpg
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.312176
312183 312205
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312183
c2a.gif
>>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
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312205
312214
quality.png
>>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."
Anonymous
608eb01
?
No.312213
312214
>>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.
Anonymous
4549685
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No.312214
312285 312343
6122794.png
6167914.png
1306243.jpeg
6204227.jpg
6202949.jpg
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312241
312245
this map got me banned from a worldbuilding discord.png
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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312245
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312268
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.
Anonymous
608eb01
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No.312285
312304 312343
one must wonder if the end result tastes like shame, guilt, humiliation, and pathetic tryharding, or is simply too disgusting and needs to be nuked from orbit.png
>>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.
Anonymous
bbb9129
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No.312304
312349
1579243740090.jpeg
>>312285
>kill ten kikes
Anonymous
513e7d6
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No.312343
312344 312348 312349
image.png
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312344
>>312343
>analyze the oast failings
*analyze the past failings
Anonymous
38b63d1
?
No.312348
>>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.
sage
sage
608eb01
?
No.312349
312350
>>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.
Anonymous
7cb25f3
?
No.312350
312367
>>312349
Why are you saging?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
7323aa0
?
No.312359
312382 312759
1625366583201.gif
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312367
312369 312370
>>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.
Anonymous
f26f3ce
?
No.312369
312370
>>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.
Anonymous
f26f3ce
?
No.312370
312371
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312371
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
7323aa0
?
No.312382
312385 312759
1595191529352.jpg
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
7323aa0
?
No.312385
312394 312484
1585422702394.png
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312394
312395
>>312385
I think I remembered something about this story that pissed me off long ago. Who was the guard working for Raspberry Tart?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.312395
312396
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312396
312400
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.312400
312452
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312452
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312459
Littlepip be like
>"I have decided to stop using Party-Time Mint-Als for good! Now, I will use them for evil!"
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
96591c0
?
No.312484
312486
1585349755738.jpg
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
96591c0
?
No.312486
312494 312497
1585272487913.gif
>>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.
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.312494
312499 312618 312633
evilspaceshipbirdhorses.png
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
96591c0
?
No.312497
312498 312499 312530
1587381642968.png
>>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?
Anonymous
b8dbaab
?
No.312498
>>312497
N
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312499
84kf87ogb5v01.jpg
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
96591c0
?
No.312530
312555 312618 312761
84b.jpeg
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312555
ISW7W-H4Y1YeBPj0K36QuBqUCpp-YFR14jFBq3W2C30.png
>>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.
Anonymous
94451fa
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No.312615
312619 312627 312640
Serious question should I read Fallout: Equestria is it pozzed as fuck or is it a good read?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
96591c0
?
No.312618
312633
1586419992218.png
>>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?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
96591c0
?
No.312619
312664
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312627
312664
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
96591c0
?
No.312633
312638 312641
1586794246235.jpg
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312638
>>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.
Anonymous
fa2c4ec
?
No.312640
312664
46447.jpg
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
96591c0
?
No.312641
312668 312746
1586793855585.jpg
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312661
statwal.jpg
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!
Anonymous
94451fa
?
No.312664
312665
>>312619
>>312627
>>312640
Are there any good fallout type fanfics? Also Any recommendations
Anonymous
94451fa
?
No.312665
>>312664
Also thanks to anons responding
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.312668
312671
glowingone.jpg
dozensofpegasicryinagonyastheirskinfallsoff.jpg
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312671
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312672
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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
96591c0
?
No.312746
312754
John_Jonah_Jameson.jpg
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
96591c0
?
No.312754
312764 313365
maxresdefault.jpg
>>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?
Anonymous
19f8cd0
?
No.312759
312760
Save_Killians_life.png
Gizmo.jpg
Capture.PNG
Capture1.PNG
>>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.
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.312760
>>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.
Anonymous
19f8cd0
?
No.312761
312762
Fallout3GlowingOne.jpg
>>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.
Anonymous
19f8cd0
?
No.312762
>>312761
Ignore me i'm retarded and missed the huge autism post explaining this already, I was still reading through your backlogged posts.
Anonymous
513e7d6
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No.312764
WOW SUCH DEEP QUEST DESIGN WITH MEANINGFUL CONSEQUENCES.jpg
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.312872
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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313037
6213503__safe_artist-colon-dummyhorse_imported+from+derpibooru_princess+celestia_alicorn_pony_bed_existential+crisis_female_lying+down_mare_solo_text.jpg
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".
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313160
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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
3c5b325
?
No.313365
313367 313374
1626333806248.png
>>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.
Anonymous
b8dbaab
?
No.313367
5o8g54e0a.png
>>313365
>pic
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
3c5b325
?
No.313374
313386 313387
1626333827278.png
>>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.
Anonymous
999ece3
?
No.313386
313408
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
3c5b325
?
No.313387
313394
1626356213182.gif
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
3c5b325
?
No.313394
313402 313405
1626341019387.jpg
>>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.
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.313402
313408
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.313405
313407 313420 313446
1626371030123.png
>>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.
Anonymous
999ece3
?
No.313407
313409
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.313408
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.313409
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313420
313476
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313439
313476
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?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
3c5b325
?
No.313446
313465 313468
File (hide): C52D8A613A380065B7E1C1B3ABC0FF2A-3078684.webm (2.9 MB, Resolution:600x450 Length:00:00:27, 1626718055004.webm) [play once] [loop]
1626718055004.webm
>>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.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313465
313476
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
3c5b325
?
No.313468
313473
1625194823777.png
>>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.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.313473
313474 313480 313502
Starlight_Glimmer_is_Back!.png
>>313468

Anyway, there's no point in going over the rest of this conversation, since I'd just be reiterating complaints I've made a thousand times before about Velvet and Littlepoop. They swap platitudes back and forth for awhile, and then yada yada yada they're friends again.

There is, however, one minor detail that probably bears mentioning:

>After a pregnant pause, she let out a trembling whinny. “It’s my fault SteelHooves is dead.”
Basically, Velvet blames herself for SteelHooves' death because she insisted they stay camped where they were so that Littlepoop could find them again, or something. This made them an easy target for the hellhounds. Also noteworthy is that a character finally made a horse-noise that wasn't a nicker.

I could probably point out that the hellhounds are supposed to have super-acute hearing and could probably have tracked them down no matter where they were camped, but it feels like a waste of time. At this point I am sick of hearing about SteelHooves and how he died and how sad everyone is about it. Kkat completely ignored this incredibly boring character for 3/4 of the story, and then suddenly he gets decapitated and everyone is incapable of shutting up about him.

Anyway, long story short, Velvet has rejoined the party. Once the maudlin waterworks are out of the way, Calamity shows up and plays kissy-face with her, and this breaks the tension. The scene ends on what kkat likely considers a bittersweet note.

Page break. We rejoin the party at some indeterminate point in the future. They are approaching Manehattan; an unknown distance from New Appleoosa. Last time they made the journey it took them several weeks, but at the same time they kept making side trip. Who knows how far it actually is? It's as far as kkat wants it to be.

>“Ever consider mounting a magical energy turret on the top o’ that thing?” Reggie called up to Calamity, eyeing the Sky Bandit’s rack where SteelHooves had stood in past battles.
>Calamity wasn’t quick to answer. Like me, I think he felt that mounting a weapon would be too much like we were replacing SteelHooves.
Plus, imagine if it fell off the roof.

>Kage flew close on the other side, talking to Velvet Remedy. “So, you follow the pony who all the medical supply boxes are made to look like?”
This may be the most awkwardly worded line of dialogue in the entire text so far.

>“Yes,” Velvet Remedy stated, beginning to get her hooves back under her. “Her name is Fluttershy, and she was the best pony.”
>Kage considered that. “But… you said she was the one who created the megaspells?” Velvet Remedy had been surprisingly forthcoming with that bit of information. A reaction, I suspected, to our attempts to keep it a secret. “Which caused the apocalypse,” Kage added. “So… you’re a follower of the apocalypse?”
>Velvet Remedy needed only a heartbeat to answer. “If that is the name ponies want to use for anyone who aspires to the kindness of Fluttershy, then I will own that title. Without reservation.”
Scratch that, this is the most awkwardly worded conversation in the entire text so far. Seriously, nobody fucking talks like this, and the discussion is pointless. Why is this even in here?

Anyway, they are not long in Manehattan before they are set upon by ruffians:

>About ten minutes later, as we crouched in the cover of a broken sales bench, the pale grey light from the clouds was blotted out by the massive form of a black, anvil-shaped Enclave mobile fortress. Four great thunderclouds spanned out from it, two on each side. The ruined Manehattan street was rendered in stark black and white as massive bolts of lightning arced between them. Attached to each storm cloud was a Raptor. On each Raptor, one of the clouds holding it aloft had merged into one of the flying fortress’s broiling thunderclouds. The undercarriage of the massive ship bristled with weapon turrets. I could make out several large doors capable of dropping war chariots or bombers or troops by the scores.
Kkat clearly has some interesting visuals in his head, but unfortunately he provides too little information for us to see what he sees. This is the first we've heard of any "flying fortresses" in this story; at first I thought he was talking about the Raptor battleships we've seen before. However, the fact that Raptors are also present indicates that they are a different type of thing. So the flying fortresses are...bigger than the Raptors? Smaller? We've had absolutely zero description of these vehicles; presumably they're a direct ripoff of something from Fallout, and kkat simply assumes that we've all played the games and know what he's referencing.

Anyway, it sounds like whatever these things are, they're pretty big. Also, they don't seem particularly interested in harassing the party; Calamity informs us that this is part of the larger operation we've heard about before. The technical name for this is "Operation: Cauterize," and it refers to the systematic removal of all pegasi technology from the surface world, as well as hunting down the various Dashites (I don't remember if I've mentioned this or not). It doesn't seem like either of these tasks would really require this much firepower; however, it sounds as if what's mostly going on here is internal Enclave politics. The higher-ups need to claim some kind of big showy victory in order to impress the other higher-ups and retain their positions, or get reelected, or something. As usual, kkat's ideas are not necessarily bad, but they are half-formed and poorly explained.

>“By the vector, I’d say they’re aimin’ fer Fillydelphia,” Reggie suggested. “Assumin’ they don’t plan t’ park that thing over Tenpony Tower.”
>Fuck. Dammit, dammit, dammit!
What is LP's concern here? If the Enclave is busy fighting Red Eye in Fillydelphia, it means their main force will be distracted, so the party can...wait a minute. What exactly is the party supposed to be doing right now again? Bringing back the sun, or something?
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.313474
313476
>>313473
>Scratch that, this is the most awkwardly worded conversation in the entire text so far. Seriously, nobody fucking talks like this, and the discussion is pointless. Why is this even in here?
Ham-handed Fallout reference. In Fallout, the Followers of the Apocalypse are a (nominally) pacifist organisation that tries to provide charity and medical aid to those in need. I wouldn't be surprised if Velvet and Fluttershy's entire convoluted path through this story was intended to lead up to this one specific name drop.

>So the flying fortresses are...bigger than the Raptors? Smaller? We've had absolutely zero description of these vehicles; presumably they're a direct ripoff of something from Fallout, and kkat simply assumes that we've all played the games and know what he's referencing.
Surprisingly, Fallout has no equivalent to the airships used by FoE's Enclave. The only thing vaguely comparable are the Enclave's vertibirds, which are effectively just small helicopters. Fallout 4 gave the Brotherhood of Steel *an* airship, but that was years after FoE was completed.

The raptors and flying fortresses (which, if I remember correctly, are called thunderheads) are entirely original to FoE, so the fact that they're poorly described stands out even more. Fallout's Enclave have nothing that even comes close to this level of air superiority.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.313476
>>313465
>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.
No idea; I found it on 4chan and it made me chuckle. I assume it's just someone fucking around with SFM or something similar, but it might be a real game.

>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.
This is a pretty good point. It doesn't particularly make sense that the pegasi wouldn't be able to develop new technology, just like it doesn't make sense that the wasteland would have failed to redevelop at least some rudimentary level of civilization over the course of 200 years, and it doesn't make sense that so many ponies would randomly transform into sadists who decorate their bedrooms with entrails and make children fight each other for no reason. At a glance, kkat's world seems pretty intricately put together, but it's mostly just because it's so large and complicated. As soon as you start examining things closely you see that large portions of the way this world works have not been properly thought out.

>>313439
>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.
How in the world would this improve anything? The prologue is already a long infodump about PipBucks; I fail to see the benefit in adding an even longer infodump about a bunc of even more trivial subjects, none of which will matter until 400 pages into the story.

>>313420
>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".
I didn't go over it, but the text actually somewhat addresses this:

>Calamity leaned close and whispered, “The Wonderbolts are the stars of the Enclave. Spend as much time putting on shows at patriotism events as they do actually hunting.” He added, “Probably more.”
>Celebrities. The best hunter-killer pack in the Enclave… they tracked down and murdered ponies for a living, and they had fans. They put on shows. Ponies lined up for their autographs. There were press releases whenever they had a roster change. How fucked up was that?
It doesn't make a ton of sense, but the Wonderbolts in this story seem to be similar to the Wonderbolts in the show, in that they seem to alternate between being a troupe of entertainers and some kind of paramilitary force. They are one of many areas of the show where worldbuilding was handled rather clumsily, and I've never been 100% clear on what their role is supposed to be exactly. I know this is a subject of debate within the fandom, so I assumed that kkat was just tossing this in for the bronies, as you point out. I don't remember how they were portrayed at the time this story would have been written, however.

>>313474
>The raptors and flying fortresses (which, if I remember correctly, are called thunderheads) are entirely original to FoE, so the fact that they're poorly described stands out even more.
Huh. Literally everything in this story I take a guess at turns out to be a football pull one way or the other.
Anonymous
fa2c4ec
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No.313477
313478
1026445.jpeg
>Fallout Equestria in a shellnut
Anonymous
b8dbaab
?
No.313478
l3tYkBG.png
>>313477
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313480
>>313473
>follower of the apocalypse
nyrheheh Lois he said it! He said the thing!
But for real this is the most hamfisted title drop I've seen since "What are we, some kind of Suicide Squad?".
Anonymous
fa2c4ec
?
No.313482
313488
File (hide): 9F0CD9A621D94E2F1673C36ED40339D3-664965.mp4 (649.4 KB, Resolution:1920x1080 Length:00:00:02, YOU DON_T SCARE ME (MLP ANIMATION).mp4) [play once] [loop]
YOU DON_T SCARE ME (MLP ANIMATION).mp4
>Twilight seeing the news of mega spells being sent to the ziggers.
>Colorized
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313485
313487 313491
Twilight Sparkle, who was "absorbed into Trixie's alicorn hive mind just like two twin unicorns good at telepathy and shield magic" except she also just became another random Alicorn in the middle of nowhere who shows up for maudlin bullshit after Trixie's death...

Man... Imagine if for much of the early story, Twilight Sparkle the terrifying all-powerful invincible Alicorn assassin-slave was sent after LP who is constantly forced to evade her and flee from her. Fights with Twilight aren't fights, they're struggles to survive and sometimes delay her until you can escape from her for a while.

That'd be sick, especially if life is suffering for enslaved Alicorn Twilight who cries silently when not screaming.

Fucking epic, like the Man On Fire from MGSV/Arnold Terminator/That invincible suit from Metroid. It could add tension to every scene. Is LP fucking her GF or taking a shit or shooting raiders? Twilight is coming. Could give her an edgy rename like Midnight. Or maybe The Nightwalker or The Midnight or Midnight Malady or Midnight Doom.

Also...

The Watcher, a mysterious entity that sometimes possesses (hacks into) Spritebots like Ulysseys from FNV's Lonesome Road.

Revealing it was Spike all along seems kind of lame. This huge dragon could start a nation to defend the Gardens Of Equestria better than the Steel Brotherhood of Applejack's Rangers ever could. Instead he just waits and sometimes hacks bots with his giant claws and a tiny computer keyboard, borrowing eyebots aka spritebots.

Also, there are Crusader Maneframe supercomputers that contain living AIs and can simulate copies of brain-scanned ponies. And you can split a chunk of your soul into an item to make it invincible or shove all of your woul into it to possess it. At some point an old guy wanted to live forever in this way, but it never went anywhere, right? Just shit that became a red herring when Kkat decided simply making LP live forever in one Crusader Maneframe wasn't Sue enough.

Why didn't Equestria win the war with steel pony animatronics brought to life with fragments of the souls of fatally wounded soldiers or the terminally ill for maximum invincibility? Nopony thought of that in time. Not even Twilight or Rarity.

However... What if a pre-war pony tried to upload her brain and soul into a Crusader Maneframe supercomputer and then tried to spread her soul out across all the robots under her command to make them invincible... only for the tech to fuck up and split chunks of her brain along with the soul, resulting in a shitton of retarded invincible robots roaming around (LP could get one of these quirky little bots as a friend) until Littlepip figures out what's going on and fixes everything, resulting in the pre-war pony of choice with a split brain being healed and remembering all her pre-war knowledge?

It's a twist on Mr House the bot-controlling guy since he didn't lose his mind and can't literally split his soul across bots to make them invincible.

And if this was done to an interesting pre-nuking pony it would be a great way to turn one obligatory quirky robot fren into a major player in the lategame. At first it justifies making the occasional roaming Spritebot help the player out. Then once something special is done to one Spritebot so it can remain mentally awake for longer without sleeping and roaming at random playing polka tracks, it justifies adding an ED-E or Mr Gutsy or Claptrap kind of character to the party for comic relief and hacking and lockpicking (LP would be slightly less of a sue if she wasn't a hacking and lockpicking god and a telekinesis and sneak and gun god).

Sending LP on a mission to grab the important machine part would justify one of the story's many unjustified dungeon crawls.

Any type of robot would do for this scenario, but keeping this a Spritebot/Eyebot thing just seems right. And since Pinkie is an incredibly entertaining character and she was canonically the inventor of the spritebots (because Kkat wanted the Cartoon Militarist Radio-playing bots from F3 and thought making them the eyes of Pinkie's 1984 ministry and making them play pinkie polka music would make them fit better into Equestria) what if Pinkie survived the war by putting her mind and soul into a Crusader Maneframe and getting split across her Spritebots? In the lategame LP could help "The Watcher" aka Pinkie Pie put some upgrade onto DJ Pon3's tower that unites the bots back into the hive mind they are meant to have, restoring Pinkie's once-fragmented mind back to peak Pinkie. Then if Alicorn Twilight wasn't already beaten, they could talk.

Hey, trying to bring the Mane Six back to life would be an awesome main quest for the heroes! Better than trying to fuck with the weather. Gathering the Statuettes to revive Rarity, finding ghoul survivalist bitter RD somewhere in buttfuck nowhere and reigniting her heroism, healing Pinkie's fractured psyche, breaking Twilight free from Trixie's control (then Twi creates a megaspell nuke grenade on the spot for LP to sneak into Trixie's home while living in Canterlot and repairing it), doing some other thing with AJ and Flutters... It could be great. It would help the old Equestria feel connected to the new Edgequestria. Because right now Edgequestria is just foreign bastardized Fallout 1-4 crap sprinkled on the corpse of an Equestria killed by ideals it simultaneously sometimes forgot...

Plus if LP heard Goddess Trixie loses control of the Alicorns in Canterlot it would give LP (pursued by Twilight) a better reason to go there than "muh black book". Just put the Black Book in Twilight's Treebrary and make it bond itself to LP when she picks it up so nopony can read it but her until she dies and she never wants to read it because it's evil. This justifies making her hyper important to the world without her needing to be some OP storm of death. Just like making Commander Shepard read Important-Ese and giving PMD2's hero Future Sight.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313487
>>313485
>Enslaved Alicorn Twilight nicknames
How about "The End of Days"?
It sounds incredibly spooky, but not cheesy like Midnight Doom.
It sounds like something Edgequestrians might actually name some mysterious horrifying unkillable force of nature. You know if they didn't feel like naming everything after slightly ponified Fallout elements or tossing out shitty names like Gutterville.
And best of all...
It references the Twilight period at the end of day and the start of night in a geniusly subtle way. As long as the Alicorn's a black silhouette with glowing white eyes and flaming black (or white?) hair instead of visually looking exactly like Twilight but bigger, I bet 99% of all Fallout Equestria readers would literally never guess The End of Days is a mind controlled Twilight Sparkle until enough big reveals make it increasingly obvious. Even then, I bet actual theoretical money the chapter that spells out "The End of Days is Twilight" and Twilight regains control in Canterlot in a big dramatic moment would have shitloads of comments gasping. For every one "I knew it!" comment there would be two "I didn't see that coming!" comments.
Anonymous
c535168
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No.313488
>>313482
>Ziggers
>Colorized
Heh.
Anonymous
b161896
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No.313491
>>313485
Feel like that alicorn Twilight could have been the Frank Horigan reference in the story. Be this super powerful entity hunting down LP and the gang like you mentioned. Have it so Twilight's love of knowledge and protecting others get corrupted (fits into kkat's whole moral dilemma of corrupted elements of harmony) so she wants to assimilate more ponies and take over the Wasteland to preserve pony life and to add more knowledge and experience to the hive mind.

For a name I liked one I heard in a fan song where she was named Eclipse. Fits for her being the student and in the case of a corrupted version the usurper of Celestia and Luna while having knowledge she learned from both so has eclipsed their power and the power of the sun and moon.

Mentioned revealing Spike later so could have had a thing where LP kills Trixie and now Alicorn Twilight is freed from the hivemind. Has a dilemma where she knows she isn't the original Twilight since she became part of the flesh blob the Goddess was and also dealing with the trauma of only having her own thoughts now and missing much of what the hive mind provided. Maybe a part of her remembers a memory Twilight had about the Garden of Equestria. A last ditch plan Incase any of the Mane 6 were killed or incapable of using them.

Alicorn Twilight in a daze finds herself drawn to there and LP follows her trail or maybe travels with her and they trek up the mountain and find Spike hibernating outside the enterance to it. Have an emotional reunion where Spike is excited to see Twilight again but realizes this isn't really her but she has a part of Twilight inside and helps her come to terms with her identity. LP can help right her element where before she was a drone forcing ponies to become alicorns so their minds can be preserved in the hive mind can now use the technology at the Garden of Equestia and the sprite bots to guide LP and others around the Wasteland and share knowledge freely like the original Twilight would.

Rather then the radio being Homage talking about scissoring LP and playing the same music over and over got alicorn Twilight sharing stories of the Mane 6 and Equestria before the war. Gives hope to ponies where rather then sitting around munching on 200 year old beans they can hear how good ponies used to be and hear about the history of the ruins they are squatting in. Make them motivated to improve themselves and honor the ponies of yore and return Equestria to how it used to be.

Not sure how they could do Red Eyes in this version of the story but maybe have a conflict where LP and Twilight want to help ponies return to the old Equestria but Red Eyes sees the way the world is now and rather then cling to old hope he wants to bring everypony under his hoof to forge a new nation and belief where ponies are hardened to conquering the Wasteland. Makes it a tough dilemma for LP since Red Eyes plan is the easy solution, everyone join in one massive totalitarian faction and fight everything around them. Then there's Twilight's plan to have everyone work together but by their own volition. It'll be tougher, take longer, many ponies are going to die from faction conflicts, monsters, and famine/disease, but if they can succeed it'll be an Equestria where ponies are free and the elements can live on in all their hearts.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
3c5b325
?
No.313502
313508
1 Magician Pepe .gif
>>313473

Anyway, it seems that whatever the fuck is going on, LP has yet another plan. In her own words, this one involves "making this all better" and "making the loss mean something." I Ii II I_ It seems that this plan is really just an extension of her existing plan, which has presumably been running in the background all this time. Meanwhile, she assures Calamity that they will, in fact, still be executing his plan alongside this new plan. So, all in all, it's a good day for plans.

As usual, what they actually intend to do or what they hope to accomplish by doing it is about as clear as mud, but the basic idea seems to be that they need to find whatever building the Enclave is using as a communications center. Littlepoop suggests Horseshoe Tower, which you may or may not remember is that place where some griffons were being pinned down by some alicorns like 40 eternities ago. So, I guess that's where they're heading.

Page break. We rejoin the part at some indeterminate point in the future, and they appear to still be talking about plans. Velvet seems surprised that Calamity would have a plan, because usually it's not his style to have a plan. However, he assures her that he does, in fact, have a plan, and it's a good plan. Plan, plan, plan.

Anyway, they have returned to Tenpony Tower. For some idiotic reason or other, Calamity intends to have Life Bloom erase his memories, the same way that Littlepoop had hers erased. Velvet thinks this is a stupid idea, and for once I agree with her. However, apparently Calamity's plan involves "saving" the Wonderbolts instead of just defeating them, and for some reason he needs to have his memories erased in order to do this.

Page break. They meet up with some unnamed character within Tenpony, who is apparently the same unnamed character who explained Monterrey Jack's legal affairs to Littlepoop like 20 or 30 eternities ago. He seems impressed by Derpy's sonic rainboom, and for some reason connects this event to Littlepoop's party, even though they basically had nothing to do with it. Anyway, he is a member of the Twilight Society, which you may or may not remember is the fruity little club that runs Tenpony behind the scenes.

Also, for whatever its worth, it seems that Homage's broadcasts are now being called "Resistance Radio," because that's not corny as all fuck or anything. I'd actually like to reference one of my earlier comments, because it applies as much here as it did earlier:
>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.

Anyway, the unnamed pony agrees to help them in whatever way they might need. Littlepoop also says she has a legal matter that she wants to ask him about whenever it's convenient; however, we do not learn what it is just yet. Once this is settled, they are all shown to a fancy suite, and Velvet suggests a trip to the spa. However, Littlepoop wants to infiltrate Horseshoe Tower first, because it turns out they did a flyover of it during the ether space between scenes, and confirmed that yes, the Enclave is using it as a communications tower or something. Then, Velvet and Calamity start making out, so Littlepoop and the two griffons excuse themselves to go sneak into the tower or whatever.

Page break. We rejoin Littlepoop and possibly the two griffons at some indeterminate point in the future. They appear to be inside Horseshoe Tower. How they got there does not seem to be important, even though there was supposedly a Raptor circling the roof and a bunch of guards surrounding the place.

>It was just as I remembered it. As I looked down into the pit of rubble, the little pony in my head reminded me that somewhere down there was Pinkie Pie’s last party, lost forever in an orb.
I don't entirely understand this comment. I know that we've been inside this building before, and I remember that there was a memory orb in which Pinkie Pie was coked out at a party and had a fight with her friends, which I assume is the one LP is referencing here. However, I don't remember what the connection is. Did that scene take place in this building? Or is she talking about the orb itself being buried here? I remember she tricked a couple of the alicorns by throwing some memory orbs at them, but I don't know if it was ever mentioned which orbs she threw, nor do I recall where she was when she threw them. Anyway, it probably doesn't matter.

>Getting this far had been… um, damn. Why was my mind searching for a metaphor for “easy” that involved muffins? Ditzy Doo was rubbing off on me. (No, not in an icky, flesh-rotting way.)
Kkat, I'm tired. I'm so very tired. Could you please just slap your own fake tits off this time? I don't think I have the energy to do it myself.

Anyway, they are poking stealthily through the building, all stealthy-like, when suddenly they are set upon by ruffians.

>Multi-colored light sprayed across the void, striking parts of the broken ceiling as well as a desk that had been hanging precariously over the drop. The desk melted into goo as it dripped down into the rubble below.
>Okay, that was new.
Is it? Seems to me that shit like this happens all the goddamn time in this story.

It turns out they're being attacked by some Enclave troops, who I guess have some kind of magic weapon that can melt rocks and stuff. Kage manages to kill one of them, but he takes damage to his wing, and meanwhile another soldier throws some grenades at them from an upper floor. LP levitates them back up, but this turns out to be one of those rare moments where explosions actually cause environmental damage. The ceiling crashes on top of her and pins her down underneath some rubble.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
3c5b325
?
No.313508
313515 313516
1301182 - Friendship_is_Magic My_Little_Pony Princess_Cadence arareroll.jpg
>>313502

Page break.

>“Section Twelve clear!” the pegasus barked through my earbloom. “Cauterizing in ten minutes.”
>With the Thunderheads in play, this place had become redundant. The Enclave had already been clearing out when we arrived. The Raptor above hadn’t been here for protection.
I think what she means to say here is that her task in this place has become redundant. Anyway, it seems that the Enclave intends to blow this place up, so there's really no reason she needs to be in here. Too bad she's trapped under all that rubble. Should have gone to the spa instead, eh LP?

>The last room before the roof was a two-level executive bar and lounge. That was where they had their equipment set up. The good news was that our infiltration sped up their evacuation. They were no longer trying to pull out all their equipment, just their personnel. They would let the Raptor’s massive guns take care of the rest.
How does she know this? Isn't she still trapped under a bunch of ceiling rubble?

>The bad news was that the room would be a killing zone. All the soldiers left in the building were either on the roof or inside that lounge.
>I made sure Little Macintosh was loaded with armor-piercing bullets. Calamity had bought up all the ammo for Litte Macintosh that Ditzy Doo had, but already I was almost out of armor piercing rounds again. Part of me hated the Enclave for using magical energy weapons; their ammo crates never had anything I could use.
>I nodded to my two companions. “Here. We. Go!”
She is still trapped under ceiling rubble...right? I mean, kkat wouldn't just end a scene with his characters in some kind of dangerous situation, and then start a new scene with them in a completely different situation, and not bother to explain how they managed to extricate themselves from the dangerous situation he left them in...right? I mean, that would just be shitty writing, and kkat's too much of a consummate professional for that...right?

>I telekinetically threw the doors open, my targeting spell locking on to each soldier as I saw them. An Enclave maneframe dominated the room.
Nope; unless she's doing all of this while trapped underneath a pile of rubble, it seems that once again kkat has magically teleported his characters from the middle of one scene to the middle of a new one.

For clarity, here is how the last scene ended (important parts bolded for emphasis):

>Maybe not my brightest idea, I realized as the explosion not only killed the pegasus above us, but sent the ceiling crashing down on our heads. My magic imploded as the room above fell on me. Something heavy and searingly hot shoved me to the floor. Pain sprouted from my hindlegs.
>I was pinned underneath jagged floorboards and the melted remains of a filing cabinet.
>Kage had taken cover in the doorway. I had lost track of Xenith. Fortunately, I was still invisible as the trooper across from us started filling our room with magical energy. The debris was ablative cover at best.
>I whipped my head around, desperately looking for where Little Macintosh had fallen.
>The spray of rainbow light stopped as the trooper reloaded. My revolver dropped to the floor next to me, a gift from an invisible zebra. I magically snatched it up and locked my targeting spell onto the pegasus again.
>BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

Here is how the next scene begins:

>“Section Twelve clear!” the pegasus barked through my earbloom. “Cauterizing in ten minutes.”
>With the Thunderheads in play, this place had become redundant. The Enclave had already been clearing out when we arrived. The Raptor above hadn’t been here for protection.
>We had seven minutes before the Raptor opened fire, eradicating Horseshoe Tower.
>“Section Thirteen clear!” another voice replied.
>My StealthBuck was drained. But we were almost at the end.
>The last room before the roof was a two-level executive bar and lounge. That was where they had their equipment set up. The good news was that our infiltration sped up their evacuation. They were no longer trying to pull out all their equipment, just their personnel. They would let the Raptor’s massive guns take care of the rest.
“Section Fourteen clear!” the first voice responded. “Cauterizing in nine minutes.”
>The bad news was that the room would be a killing zone. All the soldiers left in the building were either on the roof or inside that lounge.
>I made sure Little Macintosh was loaded with armor-piercing bullets. Calamity had bought up all the ammo for Litte Macintosh that Ditzy Doo had, but already I was almost out of armor piercing rounds again. Part of me hated the Enclave for using magical energy weapons; their ammo crates never had anything I could use.
>I nodded to my two companions. “Here. We. Go!”

I know I've pointed this kind of thing out many times before, but kkat does this shit all the time and it drives me up the fucking wall. This guy has no idea how to begin and end a scene; he just plops you into the middle of an event, ends it abruptly, and then plops you into the middle of an entirely different event, usually without providing any points of reference for understanding what happened in between, and he does this over and over and over. If you took a DVD box set of a TV series, made a playlist out of random isolated chapters from random episodes, then randomized the playlist, the result would be a lot like kkat's writing style.

Anyway, whatever. LP kicks open the door to some room she's suddenly in for some reason, and starts shooting. She kills a bunch of the Enclave guys; BANG BANG BANG! But oh noes, one of them fires a missile at them! FWOOOOOSH, BOOOOOOM!!!1! Apparently we're back to massive explosions not causing any environmental damage, because the building still seems mostly intact.

>Xenith, goopy-hooved, charged across the ceiling.
Xenith can walk on the ceiling now? Has she done that before? If that's a thing she can do, it might have been helpful to establish it earlier.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
3c5b325
?
No.313515
313520 313787
1604853154190.jpg
>>313508

They all fight for awhile. Kage takes a magic-energy blast in the chest as he's charging an Enclave soldier, which appears to kill him. Apart from that, nothing noteworthy happens. The scene ends abruptly in the middle of the fight.

Page break. When the scene fades in, the party is once again in the middle of a fight. It's not clear if this is the same fight from the last scene, or a different fight entirely. In any case, LP has killed all of the foot soldiers, and is now training her gun on what appears to be an officer.

>I’d led Gawd’s son to his death. I didn’t know how I was going to break the news to his sister. I’d never be able to face Gawdyna again. But right now I didn’t blame myself. I blamed the Enclave.
Is the sister not here? Since both she and Kage said they planned to come along with LP on her next mission, I was assuming they were both present. As usual, kkat's random scene jumps combined with his autistic narration style makes it difficult to keep track of what exactly is going on and who is present in each scene. I've been working from the assumption that the group consisted of LP, Kage, Regina and Xenith this time, but it seems that Regina is absent for some reason.

>“Give me one reason not to shoot you,” I growled. “Make it good, because I really want to.”
>“Way Ah see it,” the pegasus said, smiling annoyingly, “Y’all c’n kill me, or y’all c’n win.”
Personally, I'd consider his atrocious accent reason enough to shoot him.

>“What do you mean?” I asked, leveling Little Macintosh at the Enclave officer’s face.
>“Well, Ah reckon y’all didn’t come all this way jus’ cuz ya like bein’ shot at,” the officer reasoned. “I’m guessin’ what ya came fer is in that maneframe. But now, ya only got ‘bout four minutes left t’ get yer tails outta this building, an’ yer down the only person ya had who coulda accessed it.”
Is that what they came for? The "maneframe?" I still hate that word.. I thought they were here because they wanted to disrupt the Enclave's communications tower, or something. I'm honestly starting to feel like my summary of this story might not even be reliable anymore, because I can't even keep track of what's going on half the time. This really is one of the most convoluted, absolutely ridiculous things I've ever read. If I miss something important or forget something important from before, by all means correct me.

Anyway, the pegasus officer turns out to be one of Calamity's brothers (his father is a high-ranking officer in the military, and most of his family has followed that career path; don't remember if I've mentioned that or not), and he offers them a deal: let him live, and he'll download whatever information is on the maneframe into LP's PipBuck. He also mentions that a bunch of Calamity's other brothers occupy other various important positions in the invasion, so presumably we'll be bumping into more of them. This guy's name is Windsheer, if anyone cares.

They have roughly four minutes to escape, but they waste most of that time by having a rather silly conversation about the internal affairs of Calamity's family. Then, Windsheer finishes downloading all of the Celestia rule 34, or whatever LP wanted, from the maneframe onto LP's PipBuck, and he flies off. Then, with one minute left on the clock, LP uses her goddamn Mary Sue levitation powers to lift both herself and Xenith out of the tower just before it explodes.

Page break. They are back at Tenpony Tower now. LP goes over the shit that Windsheer gave her from the maneframe, and learns the Enclave is focusing most of its firepower on taking out what they consider to be the two biggest threats. The first, unsurprisingly, is Red Eye; they have a couple of battleships en route to Fillydelphia, and they plan to pretty much bulldoze his entire operation. The second biggest threat, believe it or not, is Homage and her stupid radio show.

It actually makes more sense after she watches a video that explains it. You may or may not remember that earlier, Homage blew up one of the big-ass weather towers using some kind of bomb she somehow managed to make out of that weird outer-space plasma cannon that she has for God only knows what reason. The Enclave seems to have interpreted this to mean that Homage is in possession of advanced weaponry, and plans to blow up the rest of their towers as well. So, understandably, they are treating her as a major threat, and have sent the Wonderbolts after her. The Wonderbolts are apparently attending some kind of meeting or briefing or something that is due to end in roughly 6 hours, and after that, they have 32 hours to complete their assassination mission. It's not clear if they are still supposed to assassinate Littlepoop or not.

Anyway, once all of this is explained, LP and Xenith return to their hotel suite to break the news about Kage to Regina.

Page break. Predictably, Regina reacts to the news of her brother's death by vowing to get revenge on the Enclave, because clearly this was all their fault and not the fault of the annoying little dyke who dragged Kage off to the gallows on a completely pointless mission. Meanwhile, we learn a little more about Calamity's plan, and how Life Bloom's memory technology factors into it.

Apparently, Calamity wasn't having his memories erased; he was having them recorded. The plan is to abduct the Wonderbolts, hook them up to recollectors (you may or may not remember that "recollectors" are devices that allow non-unicorns to view memory orbs) and force them to sit and watch all of his memories. The idea is that this is supposed to make them see how great and wonderful and totally-not-deserving-of-death the good ponies of the surface are, but considering that they will basically be watching all of the fucked up shit Calamity has done since he teamed up with LP, it may end up having the opposite effect.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313516
313527
>>313508
Do you like Kkat's sound effects?
On one hand it means Kkat can sometimes write bang bang bang instead of writing properly.
On the other hand it sounds incredibly juvenile for an author to drop his fancy author prose and start yelling "BANG BANG BANG! FWOOSH! WHOOSH! KABOOM! ZAP! POW!" as if he's Deadpool reading the comic sound effects out loud again.
What's next, is Kkat going to get halfway through the next batch of sound effects only to start dropping Betty Hutton lyrics on us? Bam pow zing zap wham bam Kkat will never be a ma'am.
Anonymous
19f8cd0
?
No.313520
313527 313787
021.jpeg
>>313515
>Watching memories

Don't they take about as long to experience as the original moment? I would assume so since time seems to lurch forward a decent amount, and these scenes are implied to be experienced in their entirety. At least, as a reader they are written to us fully. Would Calamity then have to create a sort of smash cut or montage of top 10 wholesome moments of his life on the surface?

Would these moments even matter to the Enclave? They basically spent their entire life as hypernationalist soldiers. The civvies earlier seemed to be much more okay with dirty wasteland folk, but would members of an elite government killsquad be so easily swayed after a lifetime of indoctrination by showing them "see, some wastelanders aren't so bad!"? The vast majority of the wasteland is fucking horrible, barring a few pockets of friendly life. As far as "friendly" goes, the commoners aren't exactly saints in themselves, and have been hardened by a lifetime of survival and conflict
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.313527
313534
>>313516
The sound effects in that post were actually mine. I was making fun of kkat's handling of action scenes more than his sound effects, although he does use "Bang!" a lot when guns are going off. I'm basically neutral to it as a writing technique; in a certain kind of story I think it works, and this is the kind of story it usually works in. However, it's not something you want to overuse.

>>313520
I hadn't thought about the length of time it would take to view the memory orbs, but that's actually a very good point. Depending on how kkat ends up handling it it you might have found a legit continuity error. As to the stuff about the wasteland being horrible, that had occurred to me as well.

What's odd about this latest storyline is that kkat has dedicated most of the book to presenting the wasteland as this awful place, populated by monsters and these cornball raiders who dress up in Mad Max armor and run around committing comically sadistic acts for basically no reason. One of the latest "plot twists" involved Velvet temporarily leaving the group because she had finally become convinced that the ponies of the wasteland weren't worth saving. Yet...Calamity now intends to convince the Enclave not to follow through with their attack by showing them these very same ponies, in order to convince him that the wasteland isn't so bad after all.

Another thing is that the Enclave is being presented as this goofy military bureaucracy that just suddenly decided to invade the wasteland because reasons, and everything that's happening is somehow the fault of these war-hawk Senators and whatnot, because something-something-America-Iraq. The implication seems to be that the civilians of Pegasus-Land kkat still has not provided us with a name for the non-Enclave portion of the pegasus nation are just decent ponies who have been fed propaganda about how the surface ponies want to kill them, but if they are allowed to meet them and interact with them on their own, they will realize that they aren't so bad.

The problem with this is, as you've pointed out, kkat himself has gone pretty far out of his way to establish that the wasteland ponies actually are pretty bad; in fact he's stretched plausibility with how bad they are to such a degree that it's basically comedy. Meanwhile, these pegasi have presumably lived their lives in peace and relative security. They're the closest thing to a functioning nation state that seems to exist in Edgequestria, they have agriculture so food shortages probably aren't much of a thing, and they don't have to worry about the day to day survival issues that plague the surface ponies.

What's ironic is that you can actually take kkat's hamfisted Iraq war analogy and push it even further here. The wasteland is probably comparable to a place like Iraq in that its residents are accustomed to a harsher standard of living than the pegasi, who have led mostly sheltered lives. The naivety of the pegasi probably would lead them to be more initially accepting of the wastelanders, especially when they realized that the propaganda they'd been told about them was clearly exaggerated or inaccurate. However, after some of them venture out into the wasteland to try and make friends, they would learn some very hard lessons very quickly, and would probably come to see that however distorted the Enclave propaganda might be, there's actually a nugget of truth buried inside it. This is assuming they even survived long enough to learn a lesson My guess is that if enough pegasi keep wandering out into the wasteland and end up having to fight their own children to the death in a cage match, the remainder would probably return to the sky and reseal the cloud cover of their own volition.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313534
313785
>>313527
Why do you think the story's love of spelling out sound effects helps this story?

Also I think the author shot himself in the foot by trying to make the Edgequestrian wasteland so much edgier than fallout 3's wasteland. the result is a cartoonish shithole few would want to save. This is a world where survivalists rig baby strollers with bombs hoping to kill random travellers and take their loot. This is a world where there is something or someone that needs killing around every corner and inside damn near every building. This is a world where stumbling upon a random building will involve you in some bullshit dungeon full of enemies to shoot and maybe some NPCs to save and probably some memory orbs/lore diaries/terminal entries to give this session of bloodshed the illusion of a story with a beginning and middle and end.

Once I saw a naruto fic that made the Bloody Mist Village deep and likeable, a shithole of a nation in poverty full of good people struggling to survive while helping their friends. Everyone pulls together and has pot lucks every week even though times are tough. The bloody mist military might be cunts but the civilians are good, and the author had to say this or else nobody would root for the heroic OC's desire to improve things for "The Bloody Mist". Is any reader actually rooting for Edgequestria's ponies right now when so much of Operation Cauterize is an accelerated version of what LP or a settlement she's protecting would eventually have to do to the Raiders here and there upon growing enough and wanting nearby raiders gone?

I think Kkat should have tried harder to include more scenes where ponies are fundamentally good, especially to other fundamentally good ponies. Tried harder to include more scenes where violence is the imperfect easy way out and the harder method of talking things out is the better one. Tried harder to say the bad ponies are not the type to rape and decorate houses with gore for fun, but instead they are forced into their evil deeds by the Raider Gangs they joined or were born into or kidnapped and PressGanged into. Say the Raider gangs do edgy shit to intimidate other raider gangs into not attacking and nearby settlements into paying tribute because these Raiders hate combat and violence but only know violence because they never learned useful survival skills yet still want to provide protection for payment for any pony who could be a customer of theirs. Maybe LP should be hunted constantly by a stereotypical edgy "evil Bounty Hunter" character like that guy from the Spongebob movie only darker and edgier. DJ Lesbianigger could say "he used to be a hero but then he lost his virtue. He is a bad guy now so kill him!" but then LP investigates and it turns out this edgy bounty hunter started taking high-paying morally-questionable jobs because his baby daughter is dying from tubercolonsis and the only cure for potato AIDS or whatever wacky cartoon ponyland virus she catches is a hyper expensive medical treatment. Littlepip gets Velvet to save the day with her medical skills and this turns edgy bounty hunter guy into LP's new best friend and obligatory 11th hour party member. Bonus points if LP has to go and beg Velvet to help after Velvet says "you are too violent fuck you I quit" and this convinces Vulvat to return to team LP and admire LP for making a nice choice.

Kkat's Edgequestria is a shooting gallery full of monsters to kill and some look like ponies and dress like bandits or Raiders or slavers. Nopony on team LP blinked when Steelhooves risked their right to remain in the tower (and LP's right to see and shag her girlfriend without forcing her to leave her ivory radio tower) by killing the chief of security for the non-crime of killing evil invasive ghouls even though Steelhooves could have also helped Monterry Jack escape while LP was going through Instant Therapy to cure her crack mint addiction. What moments of goodwill have the ponies of the Wasteland shown to LP or Velvet or Steelhooves or Calamity? Calamity's desire to involve himself and his squad in a battle on the ground that didn't concern him didn't come after some ground pony showed kindness and affection towards him. He just felt like "playing the hero" even though his whole life, he was raised to think a hero is a patriot who kills for the state, not some twat who feels like forcing himself and others into the businesses of others.
Anonymous
fa2c4ec
?
No.313537
1626683570303.jpg
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/7746720/1/Chaos-and-Harmany
So first true foray into mlp fanfiction way back when addicted to reading schlock just for the hell of it.
Without actually seeing the show.
At the time the fever dream like anti-understanding seemed to behold a new frontier of possibility.
The described reality was floaty for me at the time.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313562
313785
Fimfic recommendation: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/755/on-a-cross-and-arrow

One of the most popular fanfics in the early days of the fandom, though swiftly forgotten.
80k words of a fanfic where Twilight Sparkle and friends go to the Rule63 dimension where they're all dudes.
This fanfic concept is kind of gay but seeing it disected in these threads would be interesting.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313591
313625
Isn't it weird that Team LP want to "redeem" the Enclave with their wacky plans for either forcing their killsquad to see Calamity's nicest memories or taking away the race's ability to provide food for itself? When it came to RaidersTM and SlaversTM and BanditsTM and AlicornsTM and Red Eye's people and some random doctor experimenting on random poners, she wants to gun them down harder than she guns down mutated wildlife. But these guys, the ones well-fed and well-trained and raised in relative comfort for over 200 years with a liberal's idea of military propaganda forced into their brains their whole lives, these are the fuckers LP and Kkat want to "redeem" with big absurd plans that will likely require countless Enclave deaths along the way.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313625
>>313591
It seems weird to me because if this fic was made today I'm sure the Enclave would be presented in a worse light than the Raiders who decorate their homes with gore and rape for fun and make kids Death Battle for fun. Hell, maybe the barbarity and harshness and cruelty of the Wasteland's inhabitants would be blamed on 200 years of Enclave power-armoured professional-cunt soldiers taking potshots at middle eastern children- I mean Edgequestrian Wasteland poners.
Think about what a bizarre race fantasy this Enclave is in its current state. When war with Ziggers was killing Equestrians, almost all Pegasi decided to fuck off into the sky. Not just all the ponies in one town. Not just all the ponies in one city-state. Almost all Pegasi fucked off and abandoned Equestria for their own Enclave. When the world needed Pegasi most, they vanished. How useful would Pegasus rescue teams be when everypony's trying to get into their Stables? If only Rainbow Dash can fly faster than sound and everyone else sucks balls only she would be useful in Hurricane Fluttershy.
The Pegasus race practically betrayed Equestria, except some betrayed the enclave over the years to become "dashites". Rainbow Dash barely inspired anypony to rebel.
And because LP wants the Pegasi back, she's going to try and "fix" them. LP wants them economically dominated once she siezes the weather towers and the means of food production, Calamity wants to show them his top 10 wholesome moments videos with MLG gamer editing, Steelhooves is fucking dead, and Velvet... Well, despite what the war with Ziggers taught her about the futility of healing and arming the enemy, Arcade Ganon from FNV spent the game's final battle healing people far away from the main battle in one optional route so it wouldn't surprise me if Velvet abandoned her closest friends and "Equestria's best hope at survival" to be one of many medics trying to heal poners during the final battle. Maybe she'll even heal enemy poners, hoping to show them ground poners "aren't so bad".
But because this fic was made in the early 2010s, the liberal fantasy isn't for everyone they deem right-wing to be tortured in Room 1984 just yet. For tranny degenerates like Kkat who only joined the left because they enable and normalize his crossdressing fetish, the liberal fantasy of the time is for the "inherent obvious goodness" of liberal ideas to effortlessly cure a lifetime of "militaristic right wing indoctrination" as whites who hate niggers and civilized people who hate the uncivilized actually meet niggers for the first time and love them and realize their govt lied to them.
Ironic, considering exposure to uncivilized niggers naturally makes whites hate niggers. The left had absolute control of academia, courts, hollywood, the biggest companies, and most governments for decades, maybe even centuries. They're the ones propagandizing people about what whites and niggers are like with their stupid fucking black-white buddy cop films.

Damn, it'd be funny if Kkat used "Calamity shows the Wonderbolts his memories" as an excuse to do a clip show episode where random scenes from older episodes are repeated to artificially inflate the story's word count. Especially if the Wonderbolts could also get him to show the memories they wanted to see like memories of enemies Calamity faced.

If Calamity accidentally showed them the memory of that time in the rock-breaking prison when he leapt for cover under a cum stained blanket to hide from foes that had already spotted him and it fucking worked I don't think they'd ever stop laughing.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
8b3f4b1
?
No.313785
>>313534
>Why do you think the story's love of spelling out sound effects helps this story?
I don't necessarily; as I said, I'm basically neutral and consider it a non-issue. This particular story doesn't overuse them or use them inappropriately, so I have no strong feelings on the subject.

>>313562
Sounds interesting, I can take a look.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
8b3f4b1
?
No.313787
313793 313795
download (25).jpeg
>>313515

It looks as if the issue that >>313520 brought up occurred to kkat as well:

>The problem was, it takes as long to experience the memories in a black opal as it took for the person to live them. And Calamity wanted to feed several days’ worth of memories into the Wonderbolts. Keeping them safe and hydrated was a big enough concern, but if we didn’t have enough recollectors to trap them all at the same time…

It is immediately addressed in the next paragraph, however:

>“Fortunately, I have a better way,” Life Bloom claimed. “There’s a memory spell, one created by Twilight Sparkle herself, which will allow me to cram all those memories into their heads in minutes. It won’t be pleasant…” The white unicorn shook his head. “But it will work.”
Welp, that answers that. Magic solves everything.

The next few lines of dialog are a little difficult to follow, but from what I gather the plan is for Life Bloom to tag along with the group so he can administer whatever spell he needs to perform in order to cram Calamity's memories into the Wonderbolts' minds. I was initially under the impression that the plan was to kidnap the Wonderbolts and bring them back to the tower, but apparently they're doing it this way.

With that matter settled, they now need to plot their next move. As usual kkat's reasoning is autistic and impossible to follow, but as far as I can tell they intend to lure the Wonderbolts into a fight so they can subdue them and have Light Bright brainwash them. For some insane reason, they decide that the best place to do this would be the Everfree Forest, because the Wonderbolts can't fly in there. Or something. I guess. Last I heard that place was still on fire, but whatever. On to the Everfree Forest.

Page break. The next morning, they set out for the Everfree. Xenith is opposed to going there, not because it's on fire, but because of something she read in a book recently. The book in question is some kind of ancient leatherbound volume that her daughter had; apparently it once belonged to Zecora or something. It describes how a meteor fell into the middle of the Everfree Forest; apparently, this is the same meteor that came up earlier in the Midnight Shower chapter, the one that Nightmare Moon's armor was made from. The long and short of it is that the meteor contained some kind of spooky space evil that took root in the Everfree and was kept at bay by the Elements of Harmony. Then, the Elements were removed. Then, the world blew up, and now the forest is even more evil than it was before. I guess. It's pretty vague, and I'm not sure how much of this is meant to be taken as gospel and how much of it is just Xenith's screwy zebra religion anyway.

Page break. They pass over the town of Hope, and LP tells everyone that if they get separated during whatever the fuck they are planning to do in the Everfree, the plan is to meet up back at the haunted farm that was mentioned before (it was earlier in the chapter; Railright brought it up because there's some kind of special item hidden there or something).

>I had stopped staring out the window. I didn’t really want to see the distance between us and the forest being eaten away. Looking in my companion’s eyes, I could see everyone was feeling the same thing I was. A sense of wrongness and inexplicable dread, like our skin was too tight. I’d started feeling it the minute I started to smell the smoke.
>This was a bad plan.
This is one of LP's few incisive observations. Why exactly are they going into this burning forest again? I still don't entirely understand; most likely kkat simply had an Everfree Forest arc planned and this is the best reason he could think up to get them in there.

Anyway, the completely pointless side conversation about where to meet up if they get separated is followed by this completely pointless observation about their completely pointless plan, and after that there's some completely pointless sex banter thrown in for no reason. After that, they pass over the Hope solar array (basically a bunch of solar panels that the town of Hope has; I forget what the significance of them is), and then Calamity announces that they are approaching the forest.

This entire microscene was even more pointless than usual and could be chopped at no loss.

Page break. As they near the Everfree, the Wonderbolts suddenly appear somewhere behind them. They seem to be intentionally corralling them into the burning forest, which further emphasizes that this is a really, really dumb plan. They pass over that farm that LP wants to meet up at if they get separated, and she notices some kind of Enclave antenna array similar to the one that was on the roof at that building in Old Olneigh from a few chapters ago. This alarms her for some reason, but the text doesn't bother to explain why.

>The miles between us and the Wonderbolts closed rapidly as more of the forest shot past beneath us. I could see the orange of flames burning across the ground between the trees and along the shores of a river turned grey with ash.
>What the hell? Something was seriously wrong with this picture.
I can tell you exactly what's wrong with this picture. If you've ever been anywhere in the vicinity of a forest fire, you'd know that they are fucking huge and release so much smoke into the air that the surrounding area becomes uninhabitable for miles. You can't get anywhere near a forest fire just traveling normally, let alone fly directly over one in a low-flying vehicle. Even if you ignore the fact that they should all be dead from smoke inhalation by now, the heat from the fire should be roasting them alive. However, since forest fires probably don't occur that often in kkat's mother's basement, I'm assuming he probably wouldn't know any of this.

Anyway, next the Wonderbolts shoot their bus down, and they land smack dab in the middle of the Everfree Forest, which I will again remind you is on fucking fire.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
8b3f4b1
?
No.313793
313799
download (26).jpeg
>>313787

LP lands in the middle of a burning forest, and naturally her first thought is to feel sad that their bus was destroyed:

>Scattered around us were burning hunks of twisted metal -- the remains of the Sky Bandit. Seeing them drove a pang through my heart. Like we had lost a dear pet or treasured heirloom.
Yeah, it's almost as sad as that time SteelHooves died. Remember that time when he fell off of the roof of the Sky Bandit and went plummeting to his presumed death, and was lost for like three days and nobody noticed that he was gone, but then he got decapitated a few days later and you all acted like it was the saddest thing you'd ever experienced? Yeah, good times.

>I stumbled forward, my legs threatening to give out. My side protesting my every step. Just my luck that we had two healers with us now, and neither of them was with me. I just couldn’t win.
Yeah, she's got it rough. Imagine you live in a world where where virtually any wound except decapitation, apparently can be cured with magic elixirs that are just lying around waiting to be picked up, and on top of that you've basically become an immortal demigod whose severed limbs will just naturally grow back because of radiation or something. Then, imagine that your two healer friends happen to be a few feet away from you and you're going to have to wait like ten whole minutes to have all of the injuries you sustained while falling out of an exploding bus into the middle of a forest fire completely healed

God, doesn't Littlepoop just have the worst luck? Clearly, the Equestrian Wasteland just has it in for her.

>Xenith helped guide me forward, pushing through the foliage. The heat was oppressive. The smoke choked my lungs. But the fire hadn’t made it to this height yet. I was again struck by the sense that something was seriously amiss.
Again, what's amiss here is mostly just that kkat has no idea how fires are supposed to work.

Anyway, LP keeps walking and eventually bumps directly into Velvet Remedy's ass. This knocks her over, and she notices a stone bunny on the ground between her legs. Then, she looks up and sees that they have arrived at a huge weeping willow tree that, much like the rest of the area around them, is mysteriously unaffected by the gigantic fucking forest fire. The text hints that there is some connection between the tree and Fluttershy, though I'm not sure what exactly it is yet. The chapter ends abruptly.

Chapter Forty Two: Into Fire and Darkness

Today's Fortune Cookie:

>“Stay out!! The plants kill!”
"Stay out, you idiot, the goddamn forest is on fire" would have been equally good advice here.

For I think the second or third time in the entire book, the new chapter resumes where the previous chapter left off. Velvet is transfixed by this weird tree.

This scene is extremely bizarre, and I don't quite understand what's going on, but the implication seems to be that the tree actually is Fluttershy. Fluttershy becoming a tree must have been some kind of early fandom meme, because I've seen this joke being made elsewhere. If I remember correctly, there's some line of dialog in one of the early episodes where Flutters says something about becoming a tree, or being a tree, or something to that effect, but I don't remember the specifics.

>Xenith, crouching low, her belly against the grass, crept up to the stone bunny. She reached out a tentative hoof and touched it, her hoof pulling back instantly as if she had reached out to touch molten lava. The fierce stone bunny statue remained a fierce stone bunny statue.
Oh yeah, zebras are supposed to be afraid of "Doombunny." Presumably, this stone bunny is meant to be Angel, which Xenith just instinctively realizes. Obviously, the possibility that it's just some random rabbit who ran afoul of a cockatrice is just way too farfetched.

I am a bit confused, though, as I thought that Angel Bunny had been mutated into some kind of huge, terrifying creature, who was also a meth cook or something I guess. Maybe I'm remembering it wrong, but I thought I remembered Xenith telling Littlepoop something to that effect. If not, then I don't understand where the "Doombunny" moniker came from. The idea of the entire zebra tribe being terrified of a little bunny is amusing in that sort of Jim-Davis-Garrison-Keillor-force-yourself-to-laugh kind of way, but if there's no actual reason for them to be terrified it doesn't make much sense.

>I brought up my Eyes-Forward Sparkle. It flashed a notice at me: new transmission detected. My eyes fell to the compass, which was glowing entirely red. It was as if the entire forest was hostile.
Apparently Littlepoop's PipBuck can tell that fire is dangerous, which seems to be more than its owner can do.

>The wind picked up. The rustling through the leaves was a haunting sound. It made the weeping willow sound like it was sobbing.
>“How… how can this… be you?” Velvet asked, her voice almost childlike now.
>Xenith stood up, approaching the fallen bunny statue. With a strangely sad look on her face, she leaned her head down and picked it up in her teeth, setting it back upright. “Doombunny,” she said finally. “Turned to stone by a cockatrice. A worthy end for a worthy opponent.”
It's worth emphasizing that there is really no reason for either of these assumptions to be made. We don't actually know what happened to Fluttershy or Angel; all we know is that Rarity teleported them to the Everfree Forest. Both rabbits and cockatrices are probably common enough in the forest, and Xenith wouldn't know "Doombunny" on sight; this could be pretty much any rabbit as far as she's concerned.

As for Velvet, there's no reason whatsoever for her to just see this tree and assume that it's Fluttershy; that doesn't even kind of make sense. Dropping references to the show or its memes is fine, but you can't sacrifice plausibility just to make a stupid joke. If the "Fluttershy is a tree" meme didn't exist, how much sense would this scene make?
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313795
6c1.jpg
>>313787
fluttershy tree fluttershy tree https://youtu.be/y1V7utCUmS8
thanos car thanos car fluttershy tree fluttershy tree

Also, don't you just hate when Kkat uses what he remembers from videogames to fill in the blanks whenever his knowledge of the outside world (which has more holes than ripped stockings) fails him?
>Sonic wasn't hurt when Eggman carpet-bombed much of Angel Island and set its forests on fire, so fire is clearly just a cosmetic aesthetic unless someone's spitting it from a unicorn horn or flamethrower or dragon. Then it's dangerous.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
8b3f4b1
?
No.313799
313803 313805
1626691104469.gif
>>313793

Anyway, the maybe-Fluttershy tree is sentient or evil or something, and it attacks Velvet and tries to tentacle-rape her. Xenith pushes her away and gets mangled by it.

>I had no time to think. I acted instinctively, in desperation drawing on the darkest strings of power. Xenith’s blood pulled itself from the grass, dripping upwards, swirling. If I could form a blade, I could form a cast. I spun the blood about her, hardening it into a full-body cast, leaving only her flayed muzzle exposed so that she could breathe.
Looks like we have a new frontrunner for the coveted "Most Implausible Use of Bullshit Mary Sue Magic in All of Fallout: Equestria" award. Seriously; it takes a special kind of autism to even think crap like this up in the first place, let alone to have the temerity to actually write it down.

Anyway, thanks to Xenith we learn that the tree is made out of something called "killing joke." LP has one of her flashbacks where she remembers some random line of dialog that appeared in the story 30 chapters ago and has basically fuck-all to do with anything. This time, she remembers that Homage said something about some friend she had running afoul of something called "killing joke" eons ago. Now, LP is face to face with that very thing, and can connect the name to the particular wasteland monster it is associated with. Glad we got that all sorted out.

However, I hope you haven't had your fill of obscure references to random snippets of dialog from 30 chapters ago, because it turns out there's more:

>Xenith had seen the threat and understood it. Sometimes, I feel as if I am an earth pony and that my stripes are really great wounds.
Yeah, that was a memorable line all right. I totally remember exactly where and when she said that. Don't even bother placing it in context, kkat; you can just dump this line in here and I'm sure everyone will immediately just connect it to whatever you're thinking.

>The plant had somehow taken some random thing Xenith had said and turned it against her. Suddenly, I understood the plant’s name. It was a joke -- a sick, twisted, malevolent joke. The Everfree Forest was home to a mobile, aggressive, sadistic plant filled with transformation magic.
I'm not sure I get this, honestly. Is this saying that the tree can somehow read Xenith's mind? That it plucked this random observation she made about herself eons ago and made it literally happen? Kind of interesting I guess, but it would help if it were a little clearer how it worked.

Anyway, they fight the killing-joke-tree for awhile, and then they get away from it. Xenith, I guess, is still flayed and wrapped up in a body cast made out of her own blood; not sure if they're supposed to be carrying her or if she's walking or what. Also unclear is whether or not LP needs to concentrate in order to maintain this blood-cast; it stands to reason that she would. As usual, kkat's explanation of things is rather spotty.

>And Fluttershy (for I was now convinced that the butter-yellow weeping willow was indeed the Mare of the Ministry of Peace) was its lure. And, more hellishly, its victim. Did Fluttershy ever say something about being tree-like? Or maybe joked about having a bark worse than her bite? Fuck, maybe she just said she wanted to leave.
Once again, I must protest that there is no reason for them to know this, and it's not insinuated strongly enough that any of the characters should automatically guess. Once again, Littlepoop is using her Mary Sue powers of divination to make connections that don't necessarily connect.

Even assuming divination powers, it's not at all clear what is supposed to have happened. Fluttershy somehow became fused with poison joke and became some kind of tentacle rape monster, and this happened because at some random point decades in the past she made some random offhand comment about being a tree? Is that what I'm supposed to take away from this? Or is the killing joke a separate entity from the tree? As usual, none of this makes a lick of sense.

Anyway, they manage to get away from the killing joke I guess, but then the Wonderbolts show up.

>The smoke was like tiny daggers in my eyes. Life Bloom coughed again, a bad rattle in his throat. We couldn’t keep running much longer, and we couldn’t outrun the Wonderbolts anyway. But the idea of fighting them in this accursed forest seemed more insane every minute.
I'm still not clear on why they even thought that luring the Wonderbolts into a burning forest full of giant mutated plants was a good idea in the first place.

>The Wonderbolts were being forced low by the smoke, flying at tree-top level.
Why would the smoke force them low? It's not like it matters since the heat from the fire should logically roast them alive in those stupid armored Gundam suits anyway, but if anything the smoke and the fire should be forcing them upward and away from it, not downward and towards it.

>They could trace my tag, but that wouldn’t help them track any of the rest of us. And even their armors’ targeting spells were virtually worthless in the Everfree Forest. At any distance, my companions just melted into the sea of red lights that was our entire damn environment.
Was this supposed to be the plan? Lure the Wonderbolts in here because their targeting systems won't work, because the entire forest is one giant enemy? That...kind of makes sense I suppose, but by the same logic, Littlepoop's targeting system shouldn't work either. However, the Wonderbolts still have the rest of their weapons and combat training, while Littlepoop is basically crippled if she can't use her magic spell that aims her gun for her. Plus, the forest would be as dangerous for the party as it is for the Wonderbolts; more so even, since the party is on the ground, while the Wonderbolts can just fly away if things get too hairy. I must once again protest that the party really did not think this one through.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.313803
313880
1627229934276.png
>>313799

Some kind of unidentified bat-like creature emerges from the forest and attacks the Wonderbolts.

>One of them flew right at one of the Wonderbolts. Like it was playing chicken. The elite Enclave flyer didn’t flinch, didn’t veer off. Neither did the creature. But at the last moment, instead of the two colliding, the thunder cloud contrail stopped, the Wonderbolt falling out of the sky as the creature flew past. Turned to stone.
Well, on the bright side that's one less Wonderbolt you have to kidnap and stuff full of Calamity's memories.

Anyway, LP identifies the bat-things as cockatrices. It's not clear where she would have picked up this term or how she could identify this type of creature, but we can put a pin in that for now. There's kind of a free-for-all in which everyone is fighting everyone for awhile, and then Velvet tearfully asks that they go back and save Fluttershy from being a tree, despite the fact that they have considerably more important shit going on right now and despite the fact that there is still no reason why they should even be aware that the tree is, in fact, Fluttershy.

Suddenly, a couple of hellhounds burst out of the ground and start attacking them. The fight rages on a bit longer, and then, using some process of autismo reasoning that would only make sense in kkat-land, LP suddenly figures out that there are also landmines buried in the forest for some reason.

Quite a bit more confusing shit happens; at this point the action is damn near impossible to follow. Finally, though, the group seems to have realized that coming into this forest was probably the dumbest thing they have ever done (and that's saying a lot), so they decide to leave. However, before they can, Calamity gets shot down by one of the Wonderbolts. In a hilarious double-blow to Velvet Remedy's already taxed emotions, her pet bird gets turned to stone by one of the cockatrices a fraction of a second later.

While all of this is going on, the killing joke is apparently still a factor. At one point it seizes hold of one of the hellhounds and turns it into a pony, which causes the other two hellhounds to attack it. Instead of just letting these three enemies take each other out, LP decides to intervene with her telekinesis and saves the "pony," and the hellhounds crash into each other but are otherwise harmed. The "pony" goes scampering off into the (burning) woods.

Anyway, blah blah blah. The Wonderbolts apparently decide that the fight is a little too intense for them, so they retreat for the time being. Meanwhile, Velvet captures the cockatrice that turned her bird to stone and forces it to reverse the spell. Also, Calamity is a little banged up but is basically fine.

>The heat was draining our strength almost as much as the fighting. The smoke was burning my eyes and throat, making it hard to breathe. Our struggle against the Wonderbolts had become a three-way battle, and the Everfree Forest was winning.
Literally anyone with half an iota of common sense could have predicted this outcome before even coming in here. I'll ask again: what was the point of this excursion supposed to be?

Anyway, they decide, finally, that they should probably get out of this stupid burning murder-forest. However, their stupid bus has been blown to smithereens and the guy that normally pulls it for them is too badly injured to pull it anyway. So, they have to walk.

Page break. They appear to have more or less escaped danger for the time being, but Velvet won't shut up about the stupid Fluttershy tree.

>“They trapped her up there, h-high on the h-h-hill where she could see what happened to her Equestria. As it was p-poisoned, and destroyed…” Her tear-filled eyes stared into mine. “Pip, they made her watch!”
You don't know any of this. The only reason you have to assume that the tree is even Fluttershy is its coloring. For all you know, Fluttershy got tentacle-raped by a beanstalk, and that tree is their unholy offspring.

Anyway, Velvet still wants to go back and save Fluttershy, but LP is skeptical that there would be anything they could do for her. Meanwhile, Calamity is still injured and Xenith is in a coma. There's a bit of dreary conversation about how dreary everything is, and Reggie eventually interjects that her brother Kage had wanted to go to the Whitetail Woods. Since this is a name we haven't heard before and the author goes out of his way to infodump about it, I'm assuming this is going to be the setting of yet another tedious side-quest that we will be subjected to in the near future. Apparently it's the "most poisoned place on earth."

While chopping up the body of a dead hellhound sacrebleu! le edge!, Littlepoop observes a weird noise coming out of the helmet the creature was wearing. From this, she deduces that the Enclave is using sound waves to make the hellhounds do their bidding.

To kkat's credit, I think I actually see his logic for once. Earlier, LP noticed some kind of Enclave radio dish similar to the one they'd seen at Old Olneigh. Now that the bit about sound signals has jogged my memory, I think I do remember something about the radio dish at Olneigh being used to control the hellhounds or something. So, technically, kkat did this right. The earlier scene establishes that the Enclave can direct the hellhounds this way or that using sounds, and the dish they passed on the way here foreshadows that this technique might be used here. The trouble is that the reference is too vague; Old Olneigh was eons ago, and a lot of shit has happened between then and now.

Protip: you don't need to completely spoonfeed the reader, but it's a good idea to make sure they're at least on the same page as you. You don't want to just scatter breadcrumbs and expect the reader to put all the pieces together; outside of a mystery story, it's really a really obnoxious thing to do.
Anonymous
19f8cd0
?
No.313805
313806 313886
FO3_Tesla_helmet.png
>>313799
Wait, why are they forced to the ground? Take a good look at this Enclave(tm) Advanced Power Armor helmet from Fallout 3 (presumably what their armor is based upon) and tell me what you see around the mouth.

Power armor suits are completely sealed off and have an internal regulalation system. In-game they give you a rad resistance bonus.

Wait, during that encounter with Spike, where he roasted that mare alive... Did she remove her mask, or are Enclave helmets just open and completely unarmored in the mouth area? That's fucking retarded if so, but at least it explains the smoke inhalation issue that forced them to land.
Anonymous
19f8cd0
?
No.313806
313834 313886
>>313805
To add to this, the Enclave have a cartoonish fear of the surface and believe it to be toxic in general, right? So why is their armor, made for excursions on the surface (we haven't heard of inter-pegasus wars), unarmored around the mouth with no rebreather system?
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313834
>>313806
If the Enclave believe the surface to be poisonous, wouldn't it have made more sense for LP to lead them to some kind of special oasis zone without radiation? Nothing like that really exists in FE besides the Stables that weren't horrific pointless edgy experiments though.

Then again LP was taught her OP telekinesis by Crane from Old Appleoosa. She was OP before and after the training but presumably he has OP telekinesis too since he was able to help her. Why doesn't LP bait the wonderbolts near him so he can telekinetically grab the Sneedclave Wonderbolts and hold them down while the memory spell happens?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
efefced
?
No.313880
313884 313886
1626468152500.jpg
>>313803

Anyway, now that they know what the radio dish is for, they decide that the next step is to go back to the haunted farm and disable it. Also, I didn't mention this when it happened, but Littlepoop got shot in the flank, and she's been worried for awhile now that her cutie mark might have been blasted off. She keeps intermittently babbling to herself about how she wants to take off her armor and check. So finally she does, and it turns out that yes, about half of her cutie mark on one flank was blasted off by lasers.

>The Wasteland had attacked me, body and soul. Carved me up. The taint had twisted me up inside, changed me. I re-grew a leg! Then there was my PipLeg and whatever else the pink cloud had done to me. But more that that, the Wasteland had taking my innocence, my naïveté… had sliced away one piece of my soul after another. But this was something it had no right to take. The Wasteland couldn’t steal from me what made me special, no matter how insignificant that specialness often seemed -- and an attack on my cutie mark felt like exactly that.
I've been thinking for some time now that she seemed to be making a far bigger deal out of this than the situation warranted. It seems that this was intentional on the author's part; basically, this is a hamfisted attempt at symbolism. LP's cutie mark represents her individual uniqueness and personal identity, which despite all of her trials and travails she has managed to carry with her all this time. Now, the wasteland has finally taken that from her as well. Not a bad idea, but in order for that to work the author would have needed to assign all of that importance to cutie marks in the first place. Thus far, the subject really hasn't come up much; we know that ponies have cutie marks, and we have a general idea of what they signify, but thus far the story hasn't attached much significance to them. In this case, kkat seems to be relying on the reader's presumed familiarity with the FiM universe to understand why a pony losing her cutie mark would be a big deal.

Oh yeah, there's also this:

>the Wasteland had taking my innocence, my naïveté
The Wasteland had taken my innocence.

Anyway, Littlepoop throws a completely contrived tantrum here, gets angry at Calamity for some reason, and threatens to punch Velvet if she doesn't perform surgery on her to restore her mark. At this point, Life Bloom traps her in some kind of magic bubble and puts her on time out. Yes, this autism is actually in the text.

>Everyone stared at me. I felt even more angry. Now I wanted to buck even more of them. In the face. (With radishes, my little pony suggested bizarrely.)
I'm not sure what the "radishes" thing here is all about. Most likely it's a reference I'm not catching; it sounds like something from the show.

Anyway, the scene ends with Littlepoop crying like a little bitch.

Page break.

>My anger had dissolved back into that wounded, hollow feeling. The transition was enough to allow the more rational part of my head to take over. Yes, my cutie mark was gone. Well, gone-ish. But I had never understood it or cared for it. It was, after all, not much better than a cutie mark of a cutie mark. And I still had its twin.
>I felt ashamed. Reggie was dealing with the loss of a real twin, real family, better than I was dealing with the loss of a stupid picture on my flank.
So, I guess we're back to cutie marks not really being that important in this story. That was a fun little side trip.

>I also felt woosy, lightheaded. I was dehydrated. My vision was still blurry, even though I had stopped crying -- I couldn’t move my forelegs to wipe my eyes. The heat of the burning forest was drying my tears, turning them hot and extra salty.
Suddenly, I have the strangest craving for peanuts.

>(And, of course, there was a tiny, lingering embarrassment over having laid helpless as Velvet Remedy re-dressed me.
At having lain helpless.

>She and Calamity weren’t about to let me lay around in the Everfree Forest unprotected. It was not enough for them that I had been armor-adjacent.)
Weren't about to let me lie around.

Anyway, at this point Life Bloom floats over the stone statue of the Wonderbolt who was taken out by the cockatrice, and Velvet orders the cockatrice to undo the spell. I'm not sure if this is the same cockatrice who had also turned Pyrelight to stone, or if she managed to somehow capture both cockatrices. Either way, it seems like an implausible stroke of luck.

As soon as the Wonderbolt is no longer stone, Life Bloom moves in and casts the memory-spell on her. A concentrated dose of pure autism is now beamed directly into her brain. When the deed is done, the Wonderbolt (whose name is Jet, if that matters) gives them a confused look and then flies away.

It is around this time that they realize that if the Wonderbolts can track LP by her PipBuck signal it's a pretty good bet they can track each others' locations as well. They decide to clear out, but before they can, the other Wonderbolts show up and start shooting at them. Pew pew pew! Reggie gets shot down, but Littlepoop can't do anything about it because she's still being held in Life Bloom's anesthetizing magic force field. He and Velvet gallop off, carrying LP and Xenith in their respective magic auras. LP manages to punch the location where Reggie fell into her map, so she can come back and look for her. I will again note that is more than she did for SteelHooves that one time.

>I twitched. Life Bloom’s spell was fading; I was beginning to feel my body again. I swung my PipLeg, my movements less like a pony and more like a ragdoll (the sort that would come with its own notepad and quill, a little voice told me).
Again, this seems to be an outside reference to something from the show; Twilight's Smarty Pants doll is my best guess. It's not clear if this is meant to have any actual significance or not. If not, I would say chop this; it's confusing and doesn't add anything.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313884
>>313880
Missed opportunity: back when the SteelCunt Rangers of AppleBrotherhoods were raiding LP's vault and interrupting some fully's Cutiesinera with bloodshed, one or two lines could explain Cutie Marks and why they're a big deal. Calamity, an Enclave Pegasi with RD's mark branded over his own, could have no idea what cutie marks are or a low opinion of them since he lost his. Then again his cutie mark (is it shooting?) doesnt seem to have been affected by the ritualistic Enclave branding of RD's mark onto him.

LP and Calamity should bond over having their Cutie Marks burned. Maybe in the moment LP should say "haha lmao we match now" instead of throwing a pathetic tantrum and threatening her medic and needing a time out. Some good old gallows humor about the clusterfuck world they live in. Then when the adrenaline wears off LP can be sad about it once the fighting is over.

Man, it would be sick if getting shot in the "Fallout Item that does many things" Cutie Mark actually damaged her ability to do all sorts of fallout things like lockpick and track enemies with the HUD. Since Fallout Stuff is what she did to get her Cutie Mark after all. This could be a major disability until LP can get to safety and end up forced to literally have her damaged ass cut away and peeled off so a health potion can regrow her ass chunks complete with Cutie Mark.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
efefced
?
No.313886
313895
1627143346021.png
>>313880

They run for awhile, until they are suddenly ambushed by an albino hellhound armed with one of those big laser guns that they have. Life Bloom crashes into it and knocks it off balance, and LP manages to get a shot off into its gun. The gun explodes the next time it tries to fire, and the hellhound tosses it off into the woods. The hellhound seems to mysteriously disappear at this point.

There is some kind of explosion from one of the Wonderbolts pulling some kind of aerial maneuver; I'm not clear on what exactly happened. The explosion seems to do all of them quite a bit of damage, however. LP is now coughing up blood, and Xenith seems to be all fucked up again.

>Shakily, I got onto my hooves and limped towards the crumpled mess of Xenith. Her scabs had all broken and she was bleeding horrifically again. I drew on the Black Book’s spell one last time in a desperate bid to quell the blood loss.
Wait a minute, what the hell is this bit about the Black Book? I thought that book blew up. Did she get some kind of magic from it? I don't remember that ever happening. Has she been drawing magic from this thing the entire time? There is so much wacky nonsense in this story that the author hasn't even attempted to clarify.

Anyway, Littlepoop wanders around, coughing up blood and trying to find her friends. Eventually, she stumbles across Velvet Remedy giving medical treatment to the albino hellhound, who I guess has mysteriously reappeared now that he is relevant to the action again. Meanwhile, Life Bloom manages to trap one of the Wonderbolts in his anesthesia spell. That's two of them down. For whatever it's worth, the second Wonderbolt's name is Gutshot; from some autism that LP rattles off, it seems he was mentioned somewhere earlier in the story, though I'll be damned if I can remember where or in what context. Anyway, he's another of Calamity's acquaintances.

The other Wonderbolt, whose name is apparently Skydive, does that same maneuver she did before, and there's a big ass explosion again. Fwaboom! Everyone is badly hurt; Xenith seems close to death.

>I coughed, blood spraying on the ferns and grass. My body felt torn up inside. My E.F.S. was sending me severe internal injury warnings.
Oh no, not more internal injuries! Is it your organs again? I'll bet it's your organs. You should down one o'them magical healing potions; those things always do the trick for me when my organs go on the fritz.

>“Dammit, Li’lpip!” Calamity scolded, fishing out a healing potion. I downed the potion, feeling the warmth of its magic spread through me. There was a slight hint of peaches and alcohol, telling me that Calamity had purchased this bottle from Candi in New Appleloosa. As the potion started to work, I quickly felt less gruesome inside.
Ah, there we go! Doesn't that just hit the spot?

Anyway, Jesus H. Christ, this scene just keeps going and going. This is probably the closest thing to a complete fight scene that kkat has ever bothered to write, yet he still manages to bore me out of my skull. There's something about plant spores that doesn't really go anywhere; I'm not 100% sure what's happening with that, and then some kind of missile-type thing flies down from the sky and embeds itself in the ground. The Wonderbolts seem as surprised by this as the party. Some kind of diamond-encrusted turret pokes out of it and takes aim at the sky. Then, Velvet screams, because some kind of pony-shaped plant monster just detached itself from one of the trees. A bunch more of these things also detach themselves from other trees and start lumbering towards them. Calamity shoots at them with a magical energy weapon that he picked up somewhere I guess.

Meanwhile, that diamond-encrusted-turret-thing that's poking out of the missile projects some kind of hologram of Red Eye. Red Eye explains that he has enjoyed watching the fight, but he's bored now, and also he has "plans" for Littlepoop, so he can't let the Enclave kill her just yet. The Wonderbolts apparently decide that is is getting too weird, so they attempt to retreat. However, they are smacked down by some alicorns that suddenly show up. I guess Red Eye controls them now. Not quite sure when that happened, but whatever; let's just roll with it.

LP has a telepathic conversation with one of the alicorns, in which it explains to her that Red Eye offered to make male alicorns for them in exchange for serving him, and about half of them accepted. Guess the alicorns just wanted some dick; maybe that's why Trixie was so crazy. After this, they take control of LP's brain and make her aim her gun at Velvet. A short mental battle follows, in which the alicorn hivemind, which still exists without Trixie for some reason, tries to get her to kill Velvet; don't ask me why. Long story short, she resists, and shoots the alicorn instead.

>The alicorn was dead by the second shot, but I didn’t stop until I had completely unloaded the weapon. Turns out, if you pour enough bullets into a creature’s brain, it really is almost like decapitation.
Ah, cool. That's two things that are actually fatal in the wasteland, then. I'll make a note of it.

With this matter concluded, the alicorns all fly away. One of them leaves LP with this cryptic mental message:

>Tell Red Eye she passed.
Not sure what this means, but I'm sure we'll find out. I'm assuming the implication is that this was some kind of test for LP. Anyway, finally, the scene ends.

Page break. Apparently, the alicorns erected some kind of shield to keep everyone contained, and for some reason it's still up even though the alicorns have all gone. It seems that Regina was on the outside of it when it went up, so she has been separated from the group.

>The Wonderbolts had rebreathers in their armor, but we were dying of smoke inhalation.
This seems to answer the question that was brought up by >>313805 and >>313806 . However, this means that their reaction to the smoke makes even less sense.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
efefced
?
No.313895
313900 313901 313902
1509006087314.png
>>313886

As is usually the case during action scenes, Littlepoop's (kkat's) narration is erratic and difficult to follow. However, as far as I can tell, here is the current situation:

Red Eye was keeping an eye on this fight, and decided to intervene when it looked like LP and her friends were about to get killed. So, he sent in some alicorns to btfo the hellhounds and make it so the Wonderbolts couldn't fly. Why he chose to intervene on LP's behalf remains a mystery. Also mysterious is why he chose to erect a large shield over the combat zone, trapping everyone inside. More mysterious still is why he chose to erect the shield over a burning portion of the forest, since now everyone inside, including LP, is slowly dying of smoke inhalation.

LP instructs Regina, who is outside the shield for some reason or another, to go around killing the alicorns, presumably in order to take the shield down. While she is doing this, one of the Wonderbolts lands and begins threatening LP. LP pulls her gun on her, but she bats it away. Meanwhile, those weird plant-monster things are still wandering around; it's not yet clear what the deal with those things is.

>A splash of icy horror trickled down my spine as I realized the moss-monster was vaguely manticore-shaped. These… these plant-things had once been living beasts, many of them ponies. This black moss infected them somehow. Consumed them. Became them.
Righty-o; I suppose that's as good an explanation as any. In addition to radiation, taint, pink cloud, killing joke, and all the other weird crap in this story, there is also some kind of evil moss that turns creatures into...evil moss. Got it.

Anyway, they fight a few of these things, Pyrelight sets one of them on fire, and then Life Bloom traps the Wonderbolt in his anesthesia spell and does the memory-spell on her. That's three out of...five? Seven? I forget how many Wonderbolts there are supposed to be exactly. However, one of the plants spits some kind of spore-cloud into Life Bloom. I'm not sure if the spores are from one of the moss-monsters or a different kind of plant-monster that's also in here.

At this point, the shield abruptly drops.

Page break. We rejoin the party at some indeterminate point in the future. It is apparently night now, and they are a couple of miles away from the burning forest. Logically, there should still be a great deal of smoke around, but again, kkat doesn't seem to understand how forest fires work, so I guess we can just ignore that for now. It's not clear what happened to the Wonderbolts or the alicorns or Red Eye or any of the other hundreds of thousands of random forest monsters that were harassing them; apparently, we are just supposed to assume that LP & Co. somehow vanquished them and got away. For some idiotic reason, Velvet is carrying that albino hellhound who tried to kill them but was wounded by an explosion or something.

>We had managed to pull off Calamity’s plan with three of the Wonderbolts: Jet, Skydive and Strafewise, their heavy gunner. None of them had joined up with us, although Strafewise at least admitted it was “a lot to take in and a lot to think about” before she and Skydive left us. If there was a truce, it was unspoken.
Well, that explains what happened to the Wonderbolts at least.

Anyway, they come across a field of some kind of glowing green flower. The hellhound wakes up and explains to them that this type of plant is called a "phantasmal flower" and it is apparently deadly to killing joke. And that's the story of why there is no killing joke around here. A short, predictable conversation with the hellhound follows:

>“Pony,” the hellhound started, addressing Velvet as she floated him back off the ground. He was still bound, but I couldn’t help but notice he hadn’t really tested his restraints yet. Hell, he hadn’t even tried. “Why save me?”
>Velvet Remedy replied without even having to think. “Because you were hurt.”
>“Ponies don’t heal,” the hellhound countered. “Ponies kill, destroy, take.”
>“Strange,” Velvet retorted. “That’s what ponies say about hellhounds.”
Friendship is magic, etc etc.

It is at this point that they come across a large hollowed-out tree that appears to be a residence of some sort.

Page break. The tree turns out to be an abandoned zebra residence (it's implied to be Zecora's place from the show), and they decide to rest there. Velvet continues to nurse the hellhound. The fate of Xenith, who was badly wounded and on the verge of death last time we saw her, is still unknown, but it doesn't seem like the group's resident healer is all that interested in her one way or the other.

>There was an old terminal, long dead, amongst the rotting boards that had once been a desk. Or possibly a bureau. The spark battery still had some magic left, and I was hoping I could jury-rig a way to reboot my PipLeg from the remains of the arcano-tech device.
Apparently LP's PipBuck is out of order. I'm not quite sure how it happened, but it was mentioned earlier that it had stopped working.

>“So, what all d’ya know ‘bout these here phantasmal flowers?” Calamity asked. Velvet Remedy hissed at him, eyes narrowed. Talking hellhounds weren’t drinking hellhounds. “What?”
I'd like to once again point out that the last time we saw her, Xenith was comatose and near death. Velvet and Life Bloom were debating whether or not it would be necessary to cast some kind of spell to drill a hole in her skull to drain fluid. We still have no idea what happened to her; she hasn't been mentioned since the fight.

At any rate, it doesn't seem to matter; the group is apparently more interested in these glowing flowers. All Velvet seems to care about is providing first aid to this hellhound. This is SteelHooves falling off the roof all over again. For all the pontificating about friendship that goes on in this story, none of these characters seem to actually give a rat's ass what happens to any of their friends.
Anonymous
b442047
?
No.313900
313901 313904 321499
>>313895
You don't have care but I think you could use some more appropriate images with your posts. Like F:E images or something else that makes sense in context some of these latest posts have been lacking in that department. Uhh, it's not a big deal though.
Anonymous
208c4cc
?
No.313901
313907 321476 321499
>>313895
>>313900
>Twilight Glimmer
Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
efefced
?
No.313902
313965
213-2137909_gouhlsrule-equestria-girls-ponified-ponified-pony-wallflower-blush-pony.png
>>313895

The hellhound explains that the glowing flowers have some kind of magic property and the hellhounds use them to make illusion spells to scare ponies. Apart from this, he just explains what we already knew: the Enclave came in, put helmets on a bunch of hellhounds, and made them do their bidding. He also mentions that the exception to this was an old hellhound named Barking Saw, who is apparently deaf and thus immune to the Enclave's mind control. He may or may not show up in the story later.

Littlepoop, meanwhile, gives up on whatever she's trying to do with the old broken computer, and decides to break open the lock on an old chest she found instead. Still no word on what's become of Xenith, who was comatose and bleeding to death the last time we saw her. If Littlepoop or any of her other so-called friends actually give a shit or are at least a little worried, they don't express it. If anyone cares, the chest contains the usual assortment of worthless junk: an audio recording, some kind of carved stone disk, and a weird-colored rock.

Finally, Life Bloom brings up Xenith:

>“Velvet,” Life Bloom said, gently putting a hoof on her shoulder. “We need to talk about Xenith. She hasn’t woken up yet. The swelling is getting worse. If I’m going to use my trepanation spell, I should do it now.”

Unfortunately, that's about as much attention as anyone in this scene wants to pay to poor ol' Xenith. No one answers him; instead, they all gather around Littlepoop and gawk at the idiotic stone thing that she just pulled out of some 200 year old chest. Life Bloom, who was the one who brought up Xenith's condition in the first place, apparently decides that translating the ancient zebra glyphs inscribed on the disk are a better use of his time than casting his trepanation spell. If anyone actually gives a shit, the inscription relates to the Elements of Harmony, and translates as follows:

>“When the Five are present, a spark will cause the Sixth to be revealed.”
Well, isn't that just the bee's knees.

Anyway, they yak about Zecora's old dinner plate for far longer than the subject deserves, and eventually Life Bloom asks if he can have it for the Twilight Society, because I guess they collect old useless crap like this.

>“Pfft,” Reggie pffted, “What would I want with a dumb rock?” To bad there isn’t an Element of Snarkiness, the little pony in my head snarked back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyH6vOMYSnY&t=29s

Since no one else seems to have any particular desire or use for it, the old stone plate becomes the property of the Twilight Society. Glad we got that all sorted out. Meanwhile, LP has one of her autismo moments, where she suddenly remembers some obscure random thing that has nothing to do with anything currently going on, and connects it to some other obscure random thing that has nothing to do with what's going on. She informs Velvet that she has suddenly thought of a way to save the Fluttershy tree.

Incidentally, how is Xenith doing these days? Still teetering on the brink of death I suppose? I mean, I know she's not as important as rescuing some tree in the fucking woods that may or may not contain the soul of a complete stranger who died 200 years ago, but this pesky business about draining fluid from her skull to relieve pressure seems like something that ought to be dealt with in the fairly near future.

In any case, if anyone actually gives a shit, whatever solution LP thought up involves a book called Supernaturals, which I faintly remember being mentioned once in passing like 40 forevers ago. She has a copy of this book back at Junction R7. Apparently, it discusses killing joke in pretty extensive detail, and even describes a cure; funny that LP is only just now remembering that she read this, as it would have been highly relevant at multiple points in the recent past.

Anyway, they yak about Fluttershy for a bit longer, and then, with literally 5 short paragraphs left in the chapter, Velvet finally remembers that one of her closest friends is just moments from death, and she, as her physician, has an important decision to make regarding her treatment.

>A realization passed over Velvet’s face. She turned to Life Bloom. “Now it’s not just my friend’s life you hold in your horn, but the life of the greatest of ponies too.” She bit her lower lip. “Xenith is the only one who knows enough about herbs and alchemy and magical plants to know how to create a new recipe from Littlepip’s old one. Do what you have to do. And may the Goddesses’ hooves guide you.”
Yes, you read that correctly. She literally makes this life and death decision about Xenith's treatment on the basis of how it will affect goddamn Fluttershy. Not even Fluttershy; a goddamn tree that she thinks might be Fluttershy. Velvet orders Life Bloom to drain the fluid from Xenith's skull not because she wants to save her friend's life, but because Xenith is the only one who knows enough herbology to fix the damned Flutter-tree. That's literally all she gives a shit about here. This is the compassionate, selfless pony who supposedly fled the idyll of Stable Two because she wanted to become a great healer.

Anyway, that's the end of the chapter.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
efefced
?
No.313904
313907
>>313900
Honestly I'm not putting too much thought into the images these days. If I can think of an image that relates to the content of my post I will use that; otherwise I just grab something at random, either from my hard drive or off page 1 of /mlp/. After three of these threads it becomes a little difficult to come up with a relevant image for every post.
Anonymous
b442047
?
No.313907
313909 313966
6216586.jpg
6221522.png
6221696.jpg
>>313904
That's fair. An advice in that case would be to have a tab open to some F:E on some poner booru.
But you don't even have to have an images attached to your post in the first place so, you do you it's best so.
>>313901
I agree, why not just post Glimmer. It's disgusting to see Twilight stealing the colors of best pony. UwU<3
Anonymous
208c4cc
?
No.313909
1627314713.gif
>>313907
>I agree, why not just post Glimmer. It's disgusting to see Twilight stealing the colors of best pony. UwU<3
Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313921
313923
6ow0rm5pjkd71.jpg
Why don't LP and pals try using the Black Book's soul spell to put FlutterTree's soul into something useful that can move around and talk like a stuffed ragdoll or a mannequin or Twilight And The Mane Six-themed pizza place animatronic?

Twilight was an evil alicorn, Fluttershy is here... What's the status of the whole Mane Six again?
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.313923
313946 314036 314101
>>313921
>Twilight was an evil alicorn, Fluttershy is here... What's the status of the whole Mane Six again?
Off the top of my head:
Twilight - Got pulled into the Goddess, fate ambiguous after Maripony was nuked.
Fluttershy - Became a meme tree.
Rarity - Died by sticking her hoof into corrosive death gas to protect Fluttershy.
Pinkie - Died in a fire when Manehattan got nuked.
Rainbow - Ambiguous, may have been murdered by Gilda or died of exposure.
Applejack - Died naturally in the relative safety of Stable 2 a few decades after the war.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313946
477B3B8D9CE4CA521CD03CDB35D25D3B-67552.jpg
unnxeqdpjkd71.jpg
j2xaora1toc71.png
>>313923
Looking back at the text I think Twilight was pulled into the Alicornification vats (since that's how it worked in Fallout 1, enter vat and become SuperMutant) and Trixie's "hive mind" but not pulled into Trixie herself. Even though Fallout's The Master is many people and a computer combined, and his voice glitching out and being ten dudes and a chick sounded awesome, Trixie's just a massive cunt with a massive cunt and no other poners have any influence on her mind. After Trixie died, Giant Alicorn Twilight showed up just to stare at LP, listen to Pinkie's sad audio file too late while controlled once more (by who? the rest of this story implies the Alicorns are making their own decisions now and chose to serve Red Eye) and fuck off stage left.

We know where the Mane Six are (mostly), and we know where Spike is. We saw Luna's skull worn by some Alicorn like a fucking necklace but I don't remember seeing Celestia's corpse or a corrupted Celestia anywhere. Trixie's the new The Master and died, Derpy's a ghoul, and most other popular FIM characters weren't added to the show yet.

If LP and pals are going to save some poners but not others, that's stupid. This whole thing is stupid. It's not like Equestria died because it lacked something Edgequestria has in spades. Edgequestria faces less severe threats compared to the invasive Ziggers and their nuclear aloha snackbaring. Some of the canon characters faced obnoxious "ironic" deaths and some just died without any deeper symbolism behind it.

Wouldn't it improve the story if Team LP's goal was to save every member of the mane six from what their failings/edgequestria/their best efforts to stop edgequestria from happening did to them? Then the Mane Six, after recovering from the shit they've been through with the help of Littlepip's LittleShits, the mane six could rev up those friers at the Gardens Of Equestria and un-crash this Edgequestrian Wasteland with all survivors.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
ad6447a
?
No.313965
313969 313974
1170_e54e75fba103cc64.png
>>313902

Chapter Forty-Three: The Kingdom of the Blind

Today's Fortune Cookie:

>“Are you not happy that your quest is complete and you can return to your studies in Canterlot?”
>Implying that there actually is a quest, and that it will ever be complete. This story really is just one long, pointless, grueling, tedious dungeon grind.

Anyway, we're nearing the end of our journey. This chapter and the one that follows it are both about 30,000 words long; after that we're basically home free.

The chapter opens with a long, italicized blurb that appears to be a transcript of the recording found in Zecora's trunk. The speaker is Sweetie Belle, and the contents are mostly just more of kkat's trademark stream-of-consciousness rambling about everything and nothing. In the interest of being thorough, here is a short summary of the topics she covers:

>rocks
>rocks
>more rocks
>rocks from space
>a rock that Twilight Sparkle once gave her when she was a kid
>remorse over the gradual deterioration of her relationship with her sister and her sister's favorite rock
>some "experiments" the stables have going on, which may or may not be rock-related
Before it became clear that it was Sweetie Belle speaking, I was beginning to wonder if this was supposed to be Maude Pie's cameo, but I don't think her character existed when this story was written.

For some unknown reason, the recording is addressed to Zecora. I think the implication is that Sweetie Belle came here to pay her respects because Zecora had been killed recently, so she left this recording and some rock that she had a sentimental attachment to in the trunk. It might be almost a touching scene, if I could actually muster any fucks to give. At this point, the only characters in this story I don't outright despise are the ones from the show that weren't created by kkat, and most of them are dead now anyway.

Page break. At a warning from Calamity, the party goes outside and observes that an Enclave airship called the Overcast is moving overhead.

>This was a day too soon. Goddesses damn him, Colonel Autumn Leaf was jumping the whistle on his own attack plan!
Disclaimer: by now I am completely sick to death of this shitty world and its horrible characters, and I admit that I am kind of half-assing my own critique at this point. Ordinarily I would at least make an effort to keep track of important plot points and details discussed in previous scenes (even in a story as complicated as this one), but I've basically lost all motivation to do this with FoE. If this were a movie, I would be the guy in the theater playing games on his phone and absent-mindedly glancing at the screen every couple of minutes. I am just plodding through this story scene by scene, and trying to get through it.

As such, I will acknowledge that I am no longer 100% reliable when it comes to keeping track of this story's many, many convoluted details. It's entirely possible that LP's comment here pertains to something that was quite clearly discussed at some point, that kkat did a first-rate job of setting it up, and if I had been properly engaged and paying attention I would have no trouble remembering it. Now, if you will all please bear these things in mind, I would like to pose the following questions:

1. Who in the name of everloving fuck is Colonel Autumn Leaf?
2. What in the goddamned seven hells is his attack plan?
3. At what cunt-molesting point in this bowl-full-of rancid-donkey-shit story were these matters discussed?

Anyway, it sounds like one of Calamity's many brothers is on that ship, for whatever it's worth.

As usual, it seems that Littlepoop has some kind of ridiculous plan in mind for dealing with whatever this most recent development entails. She now proposes that they all split up: Velvet and Life Bloom will stay behind in this tree and look after Xenith and this hellhound that they're taking care of now for some reason. The remainder of the group (which I believe consists of LP, Calamity, and Regina at this point) will head to the Cathedral, because apparently that's where this Autumn Blaze fellow is headed, and I guess they need to intervene in whatever he is planning to do.

Calamity doesn't want to go. Apparently, Autumn Blaze actually is his brother, and he doesn't know if he could shoot his own brother, even though he has like fifty brothers, all of whom seem to be his mortal enemy, and I'm fairly certain he's shot at least one of them. But whatever; he doesn't want to kill his own family. Understandable. So, Regina decides to step up and be a pal, and offers to shoot his brother for him. Friendship is magic, amirite?

>Calamity watched her check the load on her guns, guns he had custom made for the adolescent griffin. “If it helps at all, you’ll be puttin’ a stop t’ his murderin’ ways even still.” It struck me that Reggie viewed those guns as a stand-in for Calamity -- a way for him to be part of what he needed to be but couldn’t -- much in the same way she carried Kage’s blades.
This is a perfect example of why I can't be fucked to even keep track of things in this story anymore. I think I vaguely remember something about Calamity assembling some custom guns or something for Regina at some point, but if it was indeed mentioned, it was just something incidental that received a sentence or two of attention at best. Now, kkat is attempting to assign symbolic significance to these guns: Calamity gave a part of himself to his friend Reggie, and she will use that part of him to accomplish a grim task that he doesn't have the heart to carry out himself. She will do this while still shouldering the burden of her own remorse over her brother's death; she's going to be strong for both of them. It would be ripping good stuff if the guns had actually been given this significance; as it stands, most of my energy is spent trying to figure out what the fuck these characters are even blabbering about half of the time.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
ad6447a
?
No.313966
313967 313984
>>313907
>But you don't even have to have an images attached to your post in the first place
I guess it's not entirely necessary since it would still be easy enough to follow my posts through the reply chain, but the informal system I've worked out is that I attach images to my official "story review" posts, whereas posts like this one, where I'm simply responding to something someone else posted, don't have images. I forget at what point I started doing it this way, but I've been adhering to this format for awhile now. I suppose you're right; I don't really need to use images at all, but at the same time, I'm rather set in my ways.

>I agree, why not just post Glimmer. It's disgusting to see Twilight stealing the colors of best pony. UwU<3
You're absolutely correct. Going forward, I will try to mainly focus on using images of Best Pony.
:starlight-glimmer: :eqg-starlight-glimmer: :starlight-glimmer-leader: :starlight-glimmer: :eqg-starlight-glimmer: :starlight-glimmer-leader: :starlight-glimmer: :eqg-starlight-glimmer: :starlight-glimmer-leader: :starlight-glimmer: :eqg-starlight-glimmer: :starlight-glimmer-leader: :starlight-glimmer: :eqg-starlight-glimmer: :starlight-glimmer-leader: :starlight-glimmer: :eqg-starlight-glimmer: :starlight-glimmer-leader: :starlight-glimmer: :eqg-starlight-glimmer: :starlight-glimmer-leader: :starlight-glimmer: :eqg-starlight-glimmer: :starlight-glimmer-leader: :starlight-glimmer: :eqg-starlight-glimmer: :starlight-glimmer-leader: :starlight-glimmer: :eqg-starlight-glimmer: :starlight-glimmer-leader: :starlight-glimmer: :eqg-starlight-glimmer: :starlight-glimmer-leader: :starlight-glimmer: :eqg-starlight-glimmer: :starlight-glimmer-leader: :starlight-glimmer: :eqg-starlight-glimmer: :starlight-glimmer-leader: :DDDDDDDDDD
Anonymous
b8dbaab
?
No.313967
55.png
>>313966
>I will try to mainly focus on using images of Best Pony
Anonymous
19f8cd0
?
No.313969
>>313965
Colonel Autumn Leaf is an antagonist shunted into the story at the last moment. Colonel Autumn was the main antagonist in Fallout 3, who appears at a few key story moments throughout the storyline and confronts you. He is also the driving force behind the Enclave in the setting, but he's pretty poorly-developed and shitty. Kkat just wanted another reference. Not only that, but this Cathedral they're heading to is a reference to the, well, Cathedral in Fallout 1. Except in Fallout 1, this location is where the Master resides, the antagonist that Trixie is based upon.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
ad6447a
?
No.313974
313976 313982 314008
6222018__safe_artist-colon-blah23z_imported+from+derpibooru_princess+cadance_starlight+glimmer_pony_unicorn_female_mare_palette+swap_recolor_simple+background_s.png
>>313965

Page break. The plan, apparently, is to use the two zebra stealth cloaks that they now possess (don't even ask me where they found them; all I know is that one was on the hellhound they just captured) and LP's stealth buck to become invisible and sneak aboard the Enclave's airship. Once there, they will get hold of some Enclave armor and disguise themselves as common foot soldiers. Pretty standard adventure story plan, really; though I seem to remember something about them attempting this sort of thing before, and something about it not working very well.

Anyway, Calamity reluctantly leaves his hat with Velvet, and dumps out most of the junk he's carrying with him. Reggie stands by smoking a cigarette and trying to look edgy, and Velvet tut-tuts her about it, because Velvet is just so gosh-durned worried about the well-being of her friends. Except for Xenith, of course. Incidentally, how is she doing these days? Did you guys ever get that life-threatening brain-swelling issue taken care of?

>Reggie just lifted an eyebrow then waved a wing the direction of the ponies she had chosen to assist, particularly me. “Yeah. Cuz I’m well known fer makin’ healthy choices.”
Hate to tell you this, Reg, but you're not really known for much of anything. You're basically just a background character that kkat tossed sloppily together at the tail end of the book to fill in for SteelHooves. You may want to look into what happened to him before you sign on with this crew permanently.

>But Velvet wasn’t talking about Reggie’s life choices. She turned to me with a horrified look. “Littlepip… please… be honest…” Her voice was fragile. “The fire… how long before it reaches Fluttershy?” She swallowed hard. “It’s already there, isn’t it? She’s already dead. Or… or…” My lovely unicorn friend could not bring herself to say that Fluttershy was dying. But it was clear from the pain in her expression that she was imagining Fluttershy, burning alive slowly in utter agony. It was too cruel an end for too cruel a life. I couldn’t bring myself to say that, by my best estimate, the fire had been there since nightfall. Maybe it was corrupted kindness to be dishonest about this, but I just couldn’t tell her the truth. It would destroy her.
If this is true, then what the hell was the point of even bringing up all that nonsense about that book, and Littlepoop's plan to save the Fluttertree? Even if the fire hasn't burned it down already, the party is certainly not going to have time to run back to Junction Whatever and pick up the stupid book in between all the other crap they have to do. Why even put this in the story at all? The longer this schtick drags on, the more I feel that Fluttershy's meme-death is on the short list of kkat's dumbest ideas.

However, it seems kkat has an answer to this, albeit a completely idiotic answer as usual. Reggie apparently observed, at some point during their escape, that the fire that Red Eye set in the forest isn't actually burning the trees. No, I am not making this up, and yes this is as good an explanation as I am able to give. LP, naturally, uses her Mary Sue divination powers to ascertain exactly what this means:

>“Yes,” I murmured, my eyes going wide as the gears in my mind started turning again. I had seen the reports of Red Eye’s research into Bypass Spells. His scientists had been working to apply a bypass to some sort of weapon effect. The full details had been redacted after the research had been successful. Xenith had told me she had worked in one of the buildings where they were creating flamethrower fuel, but I’d never put the two together.
So, basically, Red Eye invented some kind of magic flamethrower fuel that selectively burns plants but not trees. Only kkat could think up something like this.

In short, the situation seems to be that Red Eye intends to burn out all the plant monsters in the Everfree, leaving the trees intact so that he can harvest them for lumber later on. So, it looks like the party can still save the Fluttertree after all. Well yay-bob; add that to the 20 mile list of ridiculous shit they still have to do.

Once this is settled, a new snag in the plan reveals itself: the hellhound refuses to let them use his zebra cloak unless Regina hands over her brother's knives, which incidentally happen to be made from hellhound claws. His position here is actually quite reasonable, since the ponies were rather presumptuous in assuming that they could just help themselves to his cloak, and as the hellhound himself points out, the claws belonged to one of his brothers before they belonged to Regina's brother. Predictably though, Regina doesn't see it this way, and the situation goes downhill fast. The party soon finds itself in a standoff against the hellhound that Velvet idiotically insisted on rescuing.

>Astonishingly, the crippled hellhound stared down the five guns pointed at him and didn’t blink.
So far, I'm actually liking this hellhound better than I like any of the principal characters. He's worth the whole damn bunch put together, as far as I'm concerned.

From a tactical standpoint, though, it was still a dumb move to bring him along. If Velvet felt sorry for him, she should have just given him first aid on the battlefield and let him be; his comrades would either take it from there or they'd leave him and he'd be on his own. I also maintain that it's yet another example of Velvet's trademark hypocrisy for her to show this much concern over a wounded enemy, while at the same time all but ignoring her own comrade who is close to death. Seriously, she's shown more concern for that stupid tree than she has for Xenith. Friendship is magic, my ass.

Anyway, the rest of this goes about as you'd expect. The hellhound takes Velvet and holds a claw to her neck while the rest of them train their weapons on her. The hellhound makes it quite clear it has no compunctions about killing her. I find I'm liking this guy more and more.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313976
>>313974
Velvet idolizes Fluttershy. In this story, both of them have often fucked themselves and others with their moments of "pathological kindness no matter the cost". Flutters healed ziggers with a bomb on a battlefield Equestria won because Flutters wanted to help the wounded flee but this just prolonged the fighting. Flutters gave both sides megaspell technology thinking war would end if anyone could fire a healing nuke (even though building one giant permanent regeneration megaspell to end death would make more sense for that) but the zigs made balefire bombs and smuggled them into Equestria's practically open borders.
And now, Velvet healed a Hellhound instead of looting his corpse Wastelander-style and she's suffering for it. This hellhound doesn't currently feel grateful enough to give away his invisibility cloak, not when he could get some sick claws out of the trade made from his species.
Anonymous
fa2c4ec
?
No.313977
313979
2161123.png
The real shame of the story is that ponks didn't make ultra crack mints when on crack mintals to make better ones to be more effective.
Have to go the distance and make ponkers candy for the semi-precognitive 'boose for everypony.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313979
>>313977
>taking drugs to boost your stats to make better drugs that boost your stats to take them and make better drugs
>30 goto 10 until godhood is achieved
This isn't a Skyrim fanfic!
*laughtrack*
Anonymous
2b8ca18
?
No.313982
6210240.png
>>313974
>pic
Anonymous
08e93c5
?
No.313984
1627412916.png
>>313966
>You're absolutely correct. Going forward, I will try to mainly focus on using images of Best Pony.
Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313985
Everything involving LP and Velvet's backstories are retarded and aside from LP's pipbuck, those two don't add anything to the story by being Stable Ponies.
The Stables are retarded and add nothing to the story besides a fallout reference.
The Crusader maneframe supercomputer Zax shit is retarded and adds nothing to the story.

What if it was all cut and LP was the daughter of a mechanic at some starter town (could be new Appleoosa or some other town) who is inspired to start roaming the Wasteland and killing baddies one day when she meets Velvet the cute daughter of a travelling daughter and Red Eye's slavers take over the town? She starts off doing rebellious things in Old Appleoosa including attacking a supply convoy containing one of the world's few pipbucks that still work. It leaps onto LP's limb omnitrix style and won't come off unless she dies. Anyway all this chaos draws the attention of Calamity who saves her and says "here's how we REALLY do damage to Red Eye and his friends" and takes her under his wings. He trains her and unleashes her potential and uses her to attack all the wasteland shit he hates like Raiders and the Alicorns, subtly working for the Enclave right until a last minute twist where his bond with LP convinces him to betray the enclave and help LP save Equestria. Steelhooves also joins the story when they start killing Alicorns I guess, he and his Brotherhood Of Applejack Rangers never really mattered much to the plot beyond the Fallout 1 and 3 references.

What do you think? Mechanics are cool and making LP specifically a mechanic in the wasteland would make her absolute knowledge of sneaking and guns and lockpicking and repairing and science and hacking and her telekinetic godhood less retarded. Why does she lift boxcars? Because she's used to lifting them and helping to repair them. She wasn't just born with absolute power, that would be retarded.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.313991
Some of this story's stupid inconsequential bullshit really should have been replaced with marginally more consequential bullshit where LP's companions become the main character for a story arc and LP becomes either the random nobody along for the ride or the incredibly important person whose offhand comments during the story arc shape how the companion in the spotlight for thus arc decides to grow and change. And at the end the companiom gets sick loot and a buff that depends on the choices LP makes during the story.

For example Velvet could say "I heard a rumor that at the top of this mountain there is a plant that can cure anything!" and they go there but it's a wasteland mountain full of threats and Velvet reflects on what a shit killer and shit friend she is. LP says something smart to make Velvet a better friend and pony now. Then it turns out there is a vault at the top of the mountain and Velvet charms her way in because these faggots focused on physical health while ignoring mental health. Velvet goes in and psychologinates them to make them not suicidally bored any more and convinces them to open their vault up to become a bigass hospital. and Velvet gets a cool medical gun that shoots medicine at her friends to heal them.

Or Calamity could say "I want to get the band back together. Let's spend a week zooming around the Wasteland befriending all my old Ex Enclave Dashite friends who quit for assorted reasons. I will spell out what you must know about each dashite. Then once they are all together I will decide whether I should be aggressive like my old friends or nice like my new friends based on whether you, Littlepip, say my old friends are kek or cringe. Come on it'll be fun. Some dashites will be heroic and some will be cunts who quit to become cuntier. It can be a fascinating deep look at the kind of person my society produces and how they responded to their first contact with the Edgequestrians. Then I'll get a cooler gun and stronger Enclave armour now plus new bodyguards who follow me around during the final hattle."

Xenith could get a mission involving her family. Or a mission that sends her to places important to Zebras and the war around Equestria so Xenith and LP can comment on history and deep environmental storytelling. Xenith will eventually see enough and say "oh geez LP we zebras really were the worst huh? I should commit toaster bathtub" and then LP reassures her that being a good Zebra who's nothing like the evil ones means she's a good girl who should live. This convinces Xenith to be a reforming pro-pony influence for ziggerkind in her "what we did after the story" endpitapth and she invents something useful like a potion to make herself and her party even more OP somehow. Maybe while miserably moping through a zebra rapefugee camp she finds some sick prototype (and therefore superior to normal ones) invisibility cloaks.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
ad6447a
?
No.314008
314009
6049074__safe_princess+celestia_starlight+glimmer_pony_simple+background_transparent+background_vector_recolor_palette+swap_artist-colon-cirillaq.png
>>313974

>We had used up all the healing bandages and potions that we had. There was nothing left to aid Velvet with but the dark spell I had been granted by The Black Book. Once again, I let myself draw on that knowledge to create a cast from Velvet’s own blood, wrapping half her head in a ruddy mask.
Where the fuck did she get this spell? When did she get it? I thought the whole point of the Black Book storyline was that LP ultimately refused to accept whatever Faustian compact the book was trying to offer her. Kkat did a whole half-assed thing about it, as I remember: the book gave her dreams and hallucinations in which it offered her great power, but she called on the power of those Mane 6 statues to resist its influence, and ultimately turned it down. Did I misinterpret that? Did she actually get some kind of permanent power from the book that I didn't notice?

Also, I thought the whole deal with LP's magic is that she is only supposed to have the one spell. She's always making this huge deal about how tragically underpowered she is, because the only magic feat she's capable of is the single most bullshit piece of Mary Sue ridiculousness ever conceived. Now she's suddenly got two spells? Gee, Bill.

Anyway, Velvet continues to idiotically plead with her friends not to shoot the creature that is threatening to rip her throat out. Calamity comes very close to ignoring her wishes and shooting it anyway, but once again Velvet's moronic faux-Fluttershy attitude saves the day, after a fashion:

>“I completely agree with how abhorrent it is that some ponies have made weapons out of your kind’s body parts.” She looked at us with the one eye not hidden under solidified blood. “And anypony here who doesn’t should try to imagine seeing a creature wielding a weapon made of pony hooves!”
>Addressing the (extremely pissed-looking) albino again, “So in trade for the use of your cloak, we are giving you this…” Her horn glowed again, and Xenith’s hellhound-claw helmet floated over and rested upon the albino hellhound’s chest (ignoring the strangled sound of protest from Calamity). “… but you will not be taking Kage Grimfeather’s blades from Regina,” she added sternly. “I am sorry.”
So, to summarize: Velvet's on-again, off-again moral objection to violence precludes her from allowing the hellhound to be killed; however, she agrees that it is abhorrent for ponies to use the body parts of hellhounds as a weapon. Funny she never raised any strong objections when her friends were chopping up hellhounds in order to make these hellhound weapons in the first place, but we'll put a pin in that for now. At any rate, she will not allow the hellhound to take Regina's hellhound claws away since they belonged to her brother. So, in what she seems to regard as a fair trade, she offers up Xenith's hellhound-claw helmet instead, since Xenith is conveniently still in a coma and is in no position to object.

Velvet, the compassionate healer of the group whose love for all living things is surpassed only by her love for her friends, has shown more interest in the well-being of this hellhound than she has for her friend Xenith, even though the hellhound, as far as I can tell, only needed minor first aid, whereas Xenith is currently teetering on the razor's edge between this world and the next. As if this weren't enough, she is now offering to trade away her unconscious friend's possessions without asking in order to save the life of an enemy, whose life she has already saved once and who is now threatening to kill her in return. As usual, neither Velvet nor any of her friends see anything wrong with this.

Don't get me wrong, though; I'm completely on the hellhound's side here. As far as I'm concerned, he should just kill the lot of them and then go have lunch. And I'm not just saying that because I lividly hate every single one of these characters, either.

The hellhound's attitude here makes perfect sense. He's not trying to make friends with these ponies or reach an understanding with them; he cares about himself and his tribe, and treats his enemies as enemies, even if they show him compassion. With the exception of liberal White Westerners, this is the natural attitude of most sentient creatures. By contrast, Velvet, whose actions we're supposed to admire, has all but ignored her friend who is close to death, but keeps sticking her neck out for this hellhound that has tried to kill her multiple times.

>She frowned. “And for your aggression, you will be spending the rest of our time together under the effects of this spell. It is never intelligent to attack your doctor.”
You want to know what else isn't intelligent? Bringing an unconscious enemy back to camp with you, and then sending the competent fighters away on some ridiculous unnecessary mission, leaving the healer and the unconscious coma patient alone with a hostile creature many times their size, on the naive assumption that it will be grateful for your help when it wakes up. This is quite literally what the party was planning to do before this hellhound woke up.

Anyway, it seems like Velvet's offer is accepted, because the hellhound lets her go. Meanwhile:

>The scarlet glow faded, and Life Bloom staggered, slumping to the floor next to Xenith. Pulling her muzzle out of Calamity’s orange mane, Velvet Remedy immediately bombarded Life Bloom with questions about how it went; the only answer he could give was a weak, “We shall see. It’s up to her now.”
Apparently, Life Bloom was performing the vital life-saving operation on Xenith the entire time this shit was going on. Now that it's over and done with, Velvet suddenly cares and is interested.

>“Then she’ll pull through,” Velvet proclaimed, her breathing still a little shaky. She seemed to draw strength from caring for her friends. “Xenith’s a fighter. A survivor. More than you could know.”
C:\Velvet_Remedy\dialogue\responses\general\platitudes\random_response.exe
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
ad6447a
?
No.314009
314022 314025
2020646__safe_starlight+glimmer_braeburn_solo_pony_simple+background_smiling_earth+pony_transparent+background_edit_hat_vector_cowboy+hat_teeth_fusio.png
>>314008

Page break. One of Frank's sprite bots suddenly shows up, and informs LP that he has summoned all of the characters she instructed him to summon. I have no idea if this is something we're supposed to be in the dark about or not; my best guess is that this is another part of the convoluted plan LP cooked up and then erased from her own memory.

Apparently, one of the ponies Frank was asked to summon was Homage, and Frank informs her that he was not able to accomplish this. There is an obligatory "oh noes, she must haev dieded!!1!" moment from LP, and then it turns out that no; Homage is perfectly fine. Basically, she is busy doing some kind of bullshit with the radio towers, and I guess Frank can't find her, or get hold of her, or something.

>A huge part of me wanted to dash off to her aid. But doing so could lead the enemy right to her. And I knew she would not approve of me abandoning the good fight just to make it to her side.
I would just like to state for the record that I have completely lost track of what "the good fight" is even supposed to be. Seriously; I'm not even sure who the enemy is anymore. Is it the Enclave? Red Eye? The 1981 Denver Broncos? Chef?

>We had to win now. We always had to, but now it was for more than just the wasteland. Now I was fighting to keep Homage safe. I realized how horribly selfish it was of me to place the safety of one pony as equal to the needs of tens or even hundreds of thousands of ponies. But I didn’t care. Homage was… Homage was Homage, and I was allowed to be just a little selfish when it came to her, wasn’t I?
Again, stating for the record: I have no idea who these characters are fighting, why they are fighting them, what is at stake should they lose, or what conditions would signal a victory. At any rate, LP's demented worldview places herself squarely at the center of the universe, so she can pretty much be as selfish as she likes wherever Homage or anyone else is concerned. I am completely powerless to stop this character from doing any insane thing she wants.

>“Homage herself insisted she can’t make it. She doesn’t want to risk drawing the Enclave to the rest of… the Resistance is what she’s calling all you guys.” Resistance Radio. That’s what the Tenpony residents had taken to calling DJ Pon3’s broadcasts. Clearly, she’d adopted the moniker.
I'll ignore the corniness here and zero in on the real question: what exactly is "the Resistance" resisting? The Enclave? Red Eye? The 1976 Denver Broncos? I will, for the third time, state for the record that I have no fucking idea what is even going on anymore.

Anyway, Frank eventually stops talking and the scene just sort of sputters out, but there are a few pertinent facts that I was able to more or less extract from this autistic conversation:

>whatever Littlepoop intends to do, she doesn't expect to live through it
>her plan involves some kind of gathering at Frank's house
>Homage won't be able to make it to the gathering
>this means that Littlepoop won't be able to see Homage before she goes on her final mission
>she is appropriately bummed out about this, because she was hoping to get her rug munched one last time before joining the choir invisible

Also, Homage is going to send them some "allies" I guess.

Page break. LP yanks the battery out of the sprite bot and uses it to reboot her PipBuck. While she's doing this, Life Bloom approaches and they talk about Homage. We learn that Jokeblue, the friend who has been mentioned sporadically throughout the text, was actually Homage's lover, and that she died. Neither of these facts is particularly surprising.

>I wasn’t going to be jealous. Not of Homage’s dead beloved. I refused to be that horrible.
Nice to know that there are at least some depths you won't sink to.

Anyway, we learn a few things about Life Bloom as well. Apparently he is a huge fan of cock, and was kicked out of The Republic because they don't allow poofters among their ranks. The Republic is that village that was mentioned once in passing, during the Friday Night Foal Fights at Fluttershy's arc. Life Bloom explains that The Republic is a small community that needs to boost their numbers as much as possible, so anyone who doesn't intend to reproduce is asked to leave. Calamity pointlessly interjects that the Enclave actually encourages faggotry for the same reason: Pegasus-Land incidentally, kkat still has not bothered to name this place is overpopulated, and they have strict population controls in place. Any pony who is willing to add +1 to their fighting force without having babies is apparently welcomed. Good to know, I guess.

Nothing else happens.

Page break. The party goes flying up to the cloud ship. It is not explained how exactly they manage this, but presumably since Reggie and Calamity can fly and LP can't, the two of them are carrying her between them. Some plants on the ground shoot darts at them, and LP appears to take minor poison damage. Apart from that, the trip passes uneventfully. LP falls asleep at one point, and has a dream about being Rainbow Dash on the day she decided to leave Pegasus-Land.

While en route, they observe a small pony-shaped creature colliding with the airship, and intercept some radio chatter about the ship being under attack from unknown hostiles. LP initially assumes that Red Eye is behind the attack, but it eventually becomes apparent that some entity the Enclave calls "the Demon" is the culprit. Whatever this Demon is exactly, it manages to turn the radio on board the ship into one of those haunted radios from Canterlot, and LP has to stop listening because her eyes start bleeding. I'll admit I'm mildly curious to find out what's going on here.

Page break. They fly up to a hatch in the side of the ship, but the lock is too complicated for either of them to pick. Then, it turns out that Reggie had already picked the lock. She lets them in.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314022
314023
>>314009
Do you think it would improve the story if "the best laid plans go wrong because of unforseeable bullshit" was a recurring theme? All of LP's plans work perfectly but every plan the mane six tried to save equestria failed for no reason.
Anonymous
47e689f
?
No.314023
>>314022
A recurring theme would be gay, but any good story has failure on behalf of the protagonists.
The fact that all of LP's plans go perfectly is proof that she's a Mary Sue.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
ad6447a
?
No.314025
314488
6035831__safe_twilight+sparkle_starlight+glimmer_pony_simple+background_transparent+background_vector_absurd+resolution_recolor_palette+swap_artist-c.png
>>314009

Page break. They sneak on board the Overcast. Their next task is to source armor they can use for disguises. A long and pointless conversation about the ethics of stealth-killing an enemy follows, and eventually they decide to simply steal unused armor without killing anypony. LP hides somewhere to take a nap, while Calamity goes and gets their armor.

Page break. LP has a nice, refreshing sleep, and when she wakes up Calamity has procured a suit of armor for each of them as well as a metric fuckton of medical supplies.

>I would have sworn one of the Goddesses had a love of ironic timing. Before Calamity could answer, we heard a door open several floors above us. Music flooded into the stairwell, hidden speakers coming alive at their entrance, pouring haunting orchestral music with an exquisite cello performance as its centerpiece.
>“Aw hell,” Calamity moaned softly. “It’s Autumn.” At my querying look, he explained, “Who else would have the whole ship rigged t’ pipe classical music wherever he goes?”
Who else? We've never met this character before, and neither have LP or Reggie. We know absolutely nothing about him. Yet the instant we hear classical music we're just supposed to assume it's Autumn Leaf? It could be Henry bloody Kissinger for all we know. For that matter, what exactly is classical music? Is that a thing that exists in this setting? How come we've never heard of it before? The only mention of music in this story has been the collection of five or six whiny emo ballads that Homage plays in endless rotation, and the martial music that the sprite bots play.

Anyway, Autumn Queef and some underling or other are discussing the attack earlier. From their conversation, it appears that "the Demon" is really just a couple of Red Eye's alicorns, the mind-reader ones. Too bad, I was half hoping it would turn out to be something interesting, but I can't say I'm surprised. In any case, it seems that Autumn has something up his sleeve. When he leaves, LP observes that Reggie has disappeared.

Page break. It turns out I misinterpreted the earlier attack slightly: it wasn't this ship that was attacked, it was one of the smaller Raptors flanking it. Apparently its radio system is still fucked up, and they've got some other ships flying around looking for it. Reggie is still missing, but for some reason they are just sitting around waiting for her instead of putting their dumb armor on and exploring the ship. They rifle through a bag of crap Calamity looted while he was out getting their armor, and LP notices a can of Poopy-Time Mint-als. Her old craving sets in, and she suffers a moment of temptation; you may or may not recall that she briefly had an "addiction" to these.

They apparently have their armor on now, because a soldier walks by and doesn't seem to notice anything out of the ordinary about them.

>“All right,” he said, alleviating another crate of its cargo (which in this case included somepony’s Wingboner Magazine collection, three hot plates, seventeen pre-war bits and a copy of the pre-war book Give Peas a Chance: the Vegetarian’s Guide to Cooking).
I'll actually give kkat a small amount of credit here: "Give Peas a Chance" made me chuckle.

Anyway, they sit around bullshitting for awhile, and LP accidentally lets it slip that her plan is apparently to sneak into the Single Pegasus Project command center, which I guess is in someplace called Neighvarro. I have no idea how that connects to the present task, which as far as I'm aware is still...ok, scratch that; I actually have no idea what the present task is. All I know is that the Enclave is attacking the Cathedral, and LP and the gang are tagging along for some reason.

After awhile, Reggie shows up again. Calamity asks her if she killed his brother, because apparently that's what she was supposed to have been doing. I guess. She says that no, she didn't, but she did find some prisoners, and would her friends like to come with her to free them? As a matter of fact, they would.

Page break.

>One pegasus in Enclave armor on a ship full of Enclave pegasi, flanked by two invisible and virtually inaudible companions. If we couldn’t pull this off, we didn’t deserve to win.
I'm confused. Was the plan for all of them to put on Enclave armor, or just Calamity? Or is it Reggie who's wearing the armor? Last I heard, LP's stealth buck had run out of batteries, so how is she still invisible? This plan seems overly complicated; it feels like the sane thing to do would be for all of them to just wear Enclave armor. Is there some reason why they can't? The author really doesn't explain shit like this very well.

Anyway, they go to the brig, and Calamity sweet-talks his way past the guard while pretending to be one of his thousands of brothers. Meanwhile, LP and Reggie sneak by while the guard is distracted, hack the door terminal, and enter the prison.

The prison looks like every other prison we've encountered in this story: cages filled with bedraggled, filthy-looking ponies who appear malnourished and neglected. One of them is cradling a dead foal that appears to have died in captivity. Sacrebleu, etc etc. The sight fills LP with the usual amount of murderous rage. She sates her current murderboner by throttling a couple of nearby guards with telekinesis. After that, they set about opening the cages.

>As Reggie and I began to work, I couldn’t help but comment, “If it makes any difference, I’m proud of you. You chose to help these ponies over your revenge.”
Is that what's going on here? I honestly would not have guessed. I know I sound like a broken record, but kkat really does a piss-poor job of explaining these things. Here's a quick synopsis of events: LP and Co. sneak onto the ship, LP takes a nap, Calamity steals armor, Reggie disappears for some reason, then reappears. At what point was it made clear that she was supposed to be assassinating Autumn?
Anonymous
4966760
?
No.314036
314042
1627493566.jpg
1627493373.png
>>313923
>What's the status of the whole Mane Six again?
>Pinkie - Died in a fire when Manehattan got nuked.
1st pic related. Anyway, here's a Fallout themed Ponk image in case it hasn't been posted ITTs before.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314042
314054
>>314036
I still think this story should have made finding and saving the Mane Six into something the heroes do during the story to show how far we are into the story. Like how you can tell how close a Pokemon story is to completion based on how many gym badges they have.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314054
314101
>>314042
Also a lot of post apocalyptic movies try to make a big deal out of "the folly of a past generation" and "the failures that made today's men walk in the ashes of the past's greatest works" and so on.
But this story can't make up its mind on whether Equestria died for being "mean and greedy and imperialistic" or for being too soft with rapey religious retarded ziggers.
Blaming Fluttershy might have been a shocking idea that got some laughs in the writing discords but when you write it down and ten years pass is it still funny?
Is it really the right fit for a world where ponies spontaneously started decorating their homes with gore and raiding isolated settlements for 200 year old cans of Beans And Cram?
If you want to imitate Fallout's admittedly retarded "we ran out of oil so america warred and eventually nukes flew. If only we embraced based perfect idealized solar power. Oh and plz ignore the plentiful Fission Batteries and radioactive cars" bullshit with fucking ponies, nothing harms your "equestria is racist and imperialistic and in this fic that kills it" stance quite like making Fluttershy's pussy idealism and belief in Mutually Assured Destruction/Communally Assured Reciprocal Existence the reason zigs got nuke bombs and open borders the reasons zigs got them into equestria.
Kkat is trying to make Iraq commentary involving the Enclave's attempted mass slaughter of damn near all Edgequestrian savages and raiders and settlement-dwellers and vault/stable-dwellers alike... even though if pre-war Equestria was genocidal like the Enclave they would have unleashed hell on the ziggers and solved the zigger problem long before Fluttershy somehow invented nukes.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314069
By the way have you ever heard the argument that post apocalyptic fiction, especially from Hollywood, tends to fetishize the idea that "without capitalism we'd be savages warring with sticks and motorbikes for beans"?

I think it's retarded. Black markets form in all sorts of nations naturally despite the potential punishments for taking part in them because the free market is the ultimate and most mutually beneficial way for everyone to profit from meeting the needs of the people. Even in communist nations where corrupt govts seek to control all, markets still function despite the best efforts of communists and their state and the terrorist tyranny of both. We all remember the stories of the government cracking down on egg-selling kids for creating wealth during the plandemic. If the supermarkets crumbled new markets would form quickly and those who know or can learn roles in society useful to the new society will do so. Exciting action stories exaggerate how many rapey bandits would exist in a serious post apocalyptic world so the hero can have cooler fights. But realistically everyone would want raiders and raider gangs dead, even amoral cunts who expect raider camps to have sick stolen loot to steal.

If anything, the post apocalyptic fiction I've seen tends to fetishize the idea that if we abandoned leftist principles like the fetishization of multiculturalism/"the other" and racemixing and the desire to put the survival of the disabled few over the survival of the whole tribe we'd be just like those "evil and savage" pragmatic scaaary white or white-analogue male villainous authority figures, whether they're a chaotic raider band or a cartoon-nazi new empire rising.
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.314101
314485
1825828.png
>>313923
In my estimation, there are two major problems that are badly hamstringing the story at this point. The first is one that's plagued the story from the start but is really starting to kick in here - the plot is structured like that of an open-world RPG. Kkat has created a(n allegedly) unremarkable protagonist, given them a big world with a ton of optional quests and encounters, and allowed them to wander around doing things in no particular order with no particular motive or time pressure. There's also a main quest that the "player", ie. Littlepip, can dip in and out of more or less at their leisure, which inevitably results in a great big fight against lots of bads. The story up until roughly this point has rambled and meandered and wandered from 'ooh shiny' to 'ooh shiny' without much care for pacing or structure. It's been a great big mess of maybe important maybe irrelevant events with no clear end goal, even though Kkat clearly had one in mind.

Now we're in the endgame, the climax of the narrative, and it's time for the final confontation between the forces of good and evil. The problem is that it has no firm foundation. The story up to this point hasn't done its job of giving these events weight, and there are loose ends everywhere. Whether or not he realises this, Kkat's written himself into a swamp. At this stage in the narrative, he's breathlessly trying to tie up plotlines he started much earlier but mostly neglected (Velvet's Fluttershy worship, Calamity's relationship with the Enclave and his family, the aftermath of Steelhooves' death, Littlepip fighting the influence of the Goddess and Black Book, the fate of the hellhounds and alicorns following the destruction of their home, etc), throwing in every unusued idea he still has (plant monsters! magical flamethrowers! fluttershy's a tree! reggie exists! something about solar power! rocks! much more yet to come!), and having Littlepip face her ultimate challenges (Red Eye, the Enclave, and the question of how to find new bearers for the Elements of Harmony, etc) all at the same time. Most of the things I just listed in brackets, in the hands of a capable writer, could account for novella-length stories all on their own.

It's a messy, confusing disaster that demonstrates, more than anything else, why planning and restraint are vital skills for a writer, and how large projects in particular suffer when they're neglected.

The second major problem, as >>314054 >>314069 implies, is that Kkat never actually managed to decide on a central theme for his story.
>It's not a story about friendship; the main characters are all varying flavours of murderhobo asshole who don't particularly care about one another.
>It's not a story about learning from the mistakes of the past; open warfare and superior firepower are presented as the only viable option to the great majority of problems.
>It's not a story about society clawing its way out of a dark age and aspiring to something better; the only consistent or well-defined long term goal on anyone's mind is sex.
>It's not a story of past heroes flinging a light of hope into the dark future; the main six are directly responsible for most of the reasons the setting is a shit place to live, and (for the most part) died miserable deaths alone and in agony. You could give Twilight credit for the Gardens of Equestria, I suppose, but for most of the story so far it's been a total non-factor.
This plot is the product of a manchild playing with his proverbial action figures while he tabs back and forth between TV Tropes and Fallout 3. And now we get to watch Kkat fumble his way through trying to wrap it up. Hope you're ready for some big resolutions to be abruptly skipped over in scene transitions...
Anonymous
a29e519
?
No.314164
314171 314404
d021290c6d133ca18448f2dbbab99dd6.jpg
After watching Total Recal (1990) I think this fic should have a scene where an antagonist (perhaps the Black Book?) tries to brainwash LP by saying this is all a dream.

Just imagine

>"You fell asleep at your job and electrocuted yourself by drooling on the opened battery pack of a pipbuck you were repairing. Now you're in a fucking coma and you need to wake up! Your medical bills are piling up and mom misses not having to pay them. She doesn't miss you because you're a faggot. Come on, think, Littlepip, think! Doesn't it seem odd that you're always good at everything and you never run into a lock you don't know how to pick or a computer you cannot hack? There is no Calamity or Homage or Steelhooves! And now I'm going to go full Ash Ketchum Coma Theory on your ass and spell out which character represents what part of your psyche and what desire you lock away! Calamity represents your repressed heterosexuality, that's why he is at his best when gunning monsters down and cannot betray his brothers yet he sometimes giggles over loot and bloodshed and guns like a girl! Like you, a girl, Littlepip! You're so girly, even your masculinity is often a pussy, often one who needs women like you and the Griffons to help him! Your lust for Velvet made her a main character but your disgust for the flaws you expect a spoilt rich bitch like her to have and your resentment for how she treats you and how she isn't already loving you convinced you to discard her, give her up to Calamity to represent how you've stopped pining for who you think she is as a person and started seeing her as nothing but a sex object for a real man to penetrate... and you decided to move on to the absolute fantasy that is Homage! A mare can see everypony at all times and out of the whole Wasteland she chooses you? Fucking wow, nice ego. Then again it's that ego that made Monterry Jack basically kill himself and abandon his family just so you'd have to feel bad when telling his kids what happened. Life in this stable made you feel unseen so these StealthBucks turn you invisible. You hate your mom for drinking wine that dulls her senses so in your fantasy your favourite drugs magically make you as smart and charismatic and perceptive as you wish you were. Your knowledge of the past has more holes than your mom and the fantasy you've constructed out of yout 56% complete historical knowledge disgusts me and all of ponykind. You resent ponykind for not saving you from zebras and wish we could all get along so your brain fails to find a happy medium between hating the supposed cruelty of ponies towards zebras and hating their cruelty for being insufficient. Your desire to have a Friendly Negro companion gave you FN-69420 I mean Zenith the Zigger. Wow, Zenith as in peak. You named your zebra companion Peak Zigger? Real fucking creative. Get the fuck out of your coma already so I can call you a faggot in real life. Or keep fantasizing about your magical wasteland adventures as your brain rots and muscles atrophy and motor cortex deteriorates, I don't give a fuck any more."

LP blabbers some bullshit about fighting for a better world except because I'm writing this it's genius so while on the surface she seems to be blabbering her usual Tea Gardener Friendship Speech(tm) bollocks about how this wasteland needs her, the sun will always rise no matter how much shit the world is in, hope will always triumph over evil because evil is gay, and so on...

She's actually subtly revealing her feminine boomilennial-style narcissism and dependence on fantasy by including something like the following in her speech about hope and friendship and destiny: "I want to live in a world where I'm special! I want to live in a world where I matter! Back when I was just a foal I thought I was going to be somepony but have you seen how I turned out? In your world I'm just some pipbuck repair pony who works nine to five and masturbates herself to sleep every night but in my world I'm a hero! A wasteland saviour! I've gunned down countless raiders! I've slain monsters! I will be the god of this new world! Hope and friendship will always triumph over tyranny and darkness! I don't care how often I get shot and eat canned cram and almost get raped in this world because in this world I've got the ultimate telekinesis and a spellbook that makes me an instant master of any spell I learn from it, and my book is made by zebras and it's full of spells your generation banned like dark magic and blood magic! I'm going to take control of this planet and make all its ponies get along and make my new Equestria for everycreature better than it ever was before! I'll be a better pony than all the mane six combined no matter what the Gardens Of Equestria says! In this world I can do anything; I'd rather die for the sake of this world than live another day in yours!"

From that moment on, even if her story is more gay ultra-basic cliche dogshit, it is suddenly a deep story that invites you to speculate on and discuss what you interpret what each and every cliche and symbol and action truly means from the enlightened "Littlecoma" theory while the plebian prolefags wank over how "cool" Littlepip sounded in chapter 69 paragraph 420 when she said "fucking die" and shot a rapist with a shotgun.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314171
314214 314331 314404
>>314164
Lol fuck I literally forgot steelhooves. Might as well add in Red Eye too.
>"Every time your consciousness abruptly cuts from one scene to another it is because you are dreaming and this scene bores you or you're so terrified at the thought of losing a fight you accidentally made unwinnable within your dream it causes you to black out and go to your happy place. But because this miserable wasteland where you are best pony by default is your happy place, you skip forward like a retard skipping over the rest of a chapter she doesn't like in the hopes that the next chapter will be easier to read. Red Eye is the man you secretly wish saved Equestria before you were born, he's a pre-war inventor of cybernetic enhancements and outspoken fascist in favor of pony supremacy who Twilight ordered magically silenced and forced to work on her Alicorn project. And while your crush on Velvet drives you to imitate her wishy washy pussy wussy values and religious belief that force and fascism are always bad, you cannot deny your nature. You cannot deny your lust for Red-Eye and violence and throbbing red naked force, you cannot deny your belief that he is a superior alternative to all realistic endgame scenarios for the ziggerquestrian war even as you reimagine him as a terrifying tyrannical slaver threatening your girlfriend with a nuke to make you kill The Goddess, only for you to instantly outsmart him into giving you said nuke offscreen because even you don't know how you did it. You were raised with a Liberal desire to oppose fascists but you cannot imagine how an idiotic weakling like you could possibly accomplish such a thing even when granted a greater mind by fictional drugs. And you know they're right about ziggers even as your self-loathing friend, the so-called Peak Zigger, admits she feels more like an Earth Pony with scars aka extra lines than a real Zebra. To escape from Red Eye you had to manifest godlike waterbending power and imagine his guards away and dream him into making you kill for him, kill a monster you already wanted dead, when he could easily have you killed. You saved your imaginary nice Peak Zigger from a slaver with an army of enslaved ponies and zebras but what has her family done in her absence? Zebratown is a shithole. Ziggers are fundamentally irrational pannicky greedy animals that lack the wholesome family values that make Equestrians great. You want to prove Red Eye wrong about his world in your own when everything he ever said was proven right in both worlds. Eat shit, Littlepoop."

>"And Steelhooves? Steelhooves is the name of the Applejack's Ranger toy you were given as a foal. Did you know those toys were renamed Action Stallion in Britanneigha, because they sold poorly when named after an Equestrian military unit the Brits didn't care about? Anyway fuck you. When you felt more vulnerable than ever before in the face of infinite unkillable regenerating alicorns with a hive mind you summoned him to protect you, like a pathetic twat imagining her stuffed teddy bear to save her from a dragon that represents the terror she is filled with like an apocalyptic bukkake blast every time she thinks of growing up and putting away childish things. You made up fanfictions in your head where your little Steelhooves was a family man in love with Applejack, who's nothing to you but a name in history books and a face on the photographs of your Overmare's wall. Whenever you try to imagine the two of them dating you fail because you don't know enough about either character to imagine how they would interact. Oh but I guess AJ must like playing with rope because she's a cowpony right? Give me a fucking break. You looked inside a memory orb he could have filled with his most precious memory like the first time he saw her or the first time he spoke to her or his first date with her or their wedding day or the first time they fucked or that time they took a trip to the Swiss Alpacapines and tried skiing only to twist an ankle, hide from a snowstorm in a log cabin, get snowed in for two weeks, and fuck all night each night. I know fuck all about these two by the way but I'm just pulling shit out my ass that would be a better fit for the memory he'd want to keep in his orb. What memory did you see in his orb? The first time Steelhooves interacted with the power armour suit he'd spend his life a prisoner of. A scene you once saw in a fucking classroom while half-asleep as your teacher showed you a wartime documentary and tried to snooze off her hangover."
Anonymous
bc4e55b
?
No.314214
314224
mlp reaction maud at first i was like.png
>>314171
I am amazed that you've kept up your hate wagon for this long, and for so many words.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314224
314404
>>314214
What can I say? When I get hard, I stay hard until the job is done.
Plus thinking about the story in a "LP is tripping balls and hallucinating everything. When shit gets really weird it's because something odd is happening to her body like medical drug effect or electrocution or somepony is crying on her or playing assorted music" perspective lets me creatively reinterpret everything uncreative that has regrettably and homosexually happened so far in this story.
I also resisted the urge to say something partly off-topic like "Asterix has the -Ix thing, Organization XIII are ex-human Nobodies who put X in their scrambled human names, Galvan names are science words spelled wrong like Azimuth and Zenith and Albedo (until they introduced blukich and dreeba named after show staff or something). That would be a more interesting naming convention than how Kkat decided all Zigger names must start with the Z letter or sound. Also fuck Kkat for the Griffon names. Gilda is a name that starts with G and the same goes for Gawd. But then we get Kage. Is it Cage spelled with le xxxtreme eckstra edje? Or Ka-gay the japanese word for darkness? That doesn't start with a G.

It's retarded when fans of anything look at one example of a species and assume the same must be true for all members of that species. Obviously some traits are going to be fairly universal due to speciation. Cats have four legs. Fish swim. Bulldogs have faces like that. All niggers are apelike beasts without souls, even the "good" ones that steal jobs they're underqualified for and do nothing to stop their brothers and sisters from hurting whites.

If Fluttershy was the only butterfly-winged pegasus in Equestria because she's foreign and FIM did an episode where we go to Flutterstan where everyone is Fluttershy that would be retarded. If Fluttershy turned out to be the least Fluttershyish Fluttershy that would be even stupider. Both would devalue her as a character even though we would probably get some top tier background waifus out of it. There is a whole universe of possibilities killed when an artist says "all lizardmen are exactly like this one" or "all lizardmen are like this guy but worse".

The Squidward Village episode was a joke for a reason. Squidward craves normalcy which is tedious meaning he can never truly be happy. Good writers don't copy this shit unironically without getting the joke. With a vague concept like "Saiyans are a warrior race" you can reinterpret that to mean different things for different characters, there can be physically competitive and intellectually competitive and economically competitive ones. Angry fuckers who love hurting others and masochist waifus who love being hurt and fun-lovers too invincible to see combat as anything other than a sport are all on the table. Ponies can be anything. Elves can be anything but when an elf character deviates too much from what an elf typically is that's unusual and exploring the reason for that can be interesting too. As an author it's your job to do interesting and creative things. Copying a canon character and making a tweak or two and using "well they are the same species/race/family so they must be similar" makes you a gay nigger of an author. Watching Gilda steal and then deciding "I guess all griffons are greedy money-obsessed twats to some degree with a name that starts with G" is retarded.

Edgequestria might seem like a big place. But really it's shallow. Snooty ponies live in Tenpony Tower. Faggots live in LP's vault. Slavers and slaves live in Red Eye's land. Hellhounds and Alicorns did live in Maripony but it was blown up. It's like Star Trek with its Planet Of Hats bullshit. Every location has its hat and the characters within are an extension of that and nothing more. Homage runs the preachy radio station and surveillance device maintained by a secret society in a tower full of rich cunts. The author intended Homage to seem morally superior to those around her but she personifies everything wrong with that tower. She could call out enemy locations and order any good faction around and play mission control for anypony she likes, especially if she teamed up with Giant Hacker Spike and his Spritebot Army. She and her secret society could help the wasteland grind enemy populations down over time but she would rather fuck lesbians and be gay and play shit music and lecture survivalists and pass judgement from on high and hoard her Space Laser Star Blaster for herself.

The one small mercy is that at least this fic hasn't mentioned the forced meme fortnite cringe moment that is the Gary Vault. ...come to think of it I'm surprised there wasn't a Gary Vault full of Pinkie clones. Was that episode a later season episode?
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314331
314404
>>314171
>Red Eye threatens LP's "new home" of Tenpony Tower and her girlfriend with a nuke, to make LP kill an Alicorn
>but not just any Alicorn, Trixie. Surrounded by Alicornified ponies from the past 200ish years and present. Twilight is somewhere in there too but is reduced to a cameo because Kkat couldn't think of anything smart to do there
>oh and she's forced to kill her way through Canterlot and various ministries for a magic spellbook
>LP is threatened by a nuke (ziggers and their megaspell bombs) and forced to serve Red Eye by turning on the Alicorns to sieze power for herself after killing her way through Canterlot and the ministries.
>Equestria's best hope forces LP to deal with the Fallout of the failings of Celestia and Twilight and pals and symbolically turn against Canterlot and the Alicorn bitch currently in charge of it, and if LP doesn't eliminate the ponies all that's left in the world for her to care about goes boom and ends up an irradiated shithole just like the rest of equestria. No more cheese stores. No more spa days. No more all-seeing lesbian waifu with a sick alien laser gun.
>LP can only get out of this scenario by fantasizing that Red Eye gave absolute power over the nukes to her so she can have Zebra blow up Maripony and eliminate all Alicorns and a fuckton of Hellhounds, snatching away his bargaining chip yet using it on enemies she wants dead anyway, symbolically turning the last remnant of pre-nuking Equestria in the form of its best military base and biggest attempt to rehash the past with overpowered selfish alicorn bitches to ash and rubble.
>and then the Enclave blows up Canterlot anyway because the author really wanted both to go boom.
Symbolic as fuck.

Initially my headcanon was that all of Fallouf Equestria is a DND game DM'd by Spike and played by the CMCs and pals. Littlepip is Apple Bloom's char because AB wants to win and made the strongest character she could think of despite being new at this game, Velvet is Sweetie Belle's because Velvet's retarded "lawful good cleric" act reminds me of shit roleplayers trying to be paladins whenever they remember paladins are supposed to roleplay, and Applesnack/Steelhooves and Calamity are both characters made by the incredibly bored non-roleplaying combat-loving Scootaloo.
But the more I look at this through the lens of the LittleComa theory, the more interesting this work becomes as an allegory for a narcissistic retard's delusional power fantasy dreamed up as a response to the powerlessness and rage LP feels at the world around her and the ponies and zebras (but mostly ponies because she knows more about their failed attempts to do good while zebras were mostly reliably savage and evil) who let her Equestria die.

It certainly explains why LP's response to learning there is a bomb at tenpony tower is to enjoy some spa days there.
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.314404
314405
>>314164
>>314171
>>314224
>>314331
You're pretty much writing your own FoE fanfic at this point. This thread probably isn't the place for it.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314405
v5te7t0idpd71.jpg
>>314404
At least I'm not trying to assign a meaning to absolutely everything in the story to fit the lens I'm viewing it through, from the random loot LP picks up to the minor locations she dungeon-crawls in and loots, instead of just mentioning the main villains.

But if you want me to stop, I'll get the final bits over and done with for good:

All monsters and environmental hazards are just things she read about. Or imagined killing ponies she doesn't like before she kills them.

The Enclave and Alicorns represent LP's conflicted view on pre-war ponykind.

The Alicorns? On one hoof she sees them as smart, powerful, unifying the best aspects of all three pony races and greater than any individual wastelander today in this shattered sham of a society as a result. On the other hoof, everything she wants to believe is "Bad" and everything she hates about pre-war Equestria like selfishness and drug-indulgence and war and pointless edge is represented in pre-war equestria to some degree, and amplified further in the Alicorns. How many ponies partied as Equestria burned? These openly-malicious Alicorns laugh like supervillains as they do nothing to save the world burning around them. These cheap imitations of Celestia, a mare who failed her civilization, crafted by an "intellectual" dumbass who sometimes forgot safety rules(gooped trixie) and sometimes went overboard on them(twilight getting trapped in her panic room only to end up an Alicorn anyway)...
These Alicorns were the result of failures mating with failures and they carry on being evil even in the future their actions created. Their collectivist ideas make them a hive mind of identical beings who "share skills and powers" yet they're stupid enough for LP to outwit because it's her power fantasy and she gets to decide the difficulty level. Even though they surely have pre-war knowledge on architecture, gunsmithing, armour creation, item enchantment, and more somewhere within their hive mind they don't even attempt to use these things for the good of Equestria because as far as LP is concerned, the Mane Six era's ponies didn't effectively use their skills for the good of Equestria. Their Celestia is nothing but a narcissistic fraud and with her gone, all the remaining Alicorns can think of is getting laid.

Everything that makes the Alicorns shit is inverted for the Enclave yet they're still painted as villains because while LP secretly wishes a fascist genocidal takeover would have saved Equestria and "Cauterized" the Ziggers into an ex-problem that only exists in the nightmares of war veterans and arguments of historians, she doesn't want to admit this to herself or live in a world where she's forced to admit desperate times call for desperate measures and there is nothing inherently wrong with fascist solutions to real-world problems no pussy liberal/knowingly-evil liberal could ever solve with "friendship". She lives in a world where Equestria's comfortable-liberal beliefs failed it and its occasional flirtations with equestrians-first ideas didn't do enough good, and while in her power fantasies she gets to be the violent judge and jury and executioner solving problems with war and violence she doesn't want to admit to herself she resents the mane six and wishes pre-war Equestrians tried being as violent and callous as her to end the war in total Equestrian victory. Taking Diamond Dog land didn't do much to benefit Equestrians desperate to spare and house zigger rapefugees even as the war rages. But the Enclave will obliterate the former capital city of Equestria on the off chance that it might house some Alicorns, even if it means wiping out Ghoul settlements.

All that bellyaching about the tragedy of life in The Edgequestrian Wasteland, an eternal war over resources, and how it forces the worst out of you? LP patting herself on the back for not ending up like the broken war vets she read about in history books. Whenever she and Velvet compromise on their morals for the "greater good" everything invariably turns out fine, even if it means betraying others and sacrificing something important. LP wishes pre-war equestria sacrificed more so she, mentally rotting away in her oversized coffin of a boring Stable, wouldn't have to imagine sacrificing things inside her coma.

LP isn't learning any lessons from her enemies or defeating them in a satisfying way because in her mind (and the author's) LP is already perfect and has no room to grow. LP "Defeated" Red Eye by doing exactly what he wanted, LP "Defeated" the alicorns by having one of Red Eye's slave zebras sneak his nuke into Maripony, and LP plans on "Defeating" the Enclave by seizing absolute control of her own little world and forcing everypony to get along because she thinks if she was the highest authority in the land, higher than Celestia or the Alicorns or anyone else, she would be able to get everything right.

And that's everything. It's not as deep as a One Piece theory but I did my best.

LP's in a fucking coma, Calamity's her repressed heterosexuality and masculine feelings and repressed idea for a hunky cowboy Enclavee pegasus gunman to save her ass, Velvet's her first crush turned into a contradictory wishy-washy bitch by LP's inability to decide whether she's an admirable kindhearted medic or a stupid overly-flawed bitch because LP resents the real Velvet for never giving her the time of day, Homage is the ultimate in autofellatious waifu-imagination, the Enclave and Alicorns are two regurgitations of the past that symbolize everything she hates about pre-war Equestria's two faces, she longs for a better world she never knew, she resents ponies of the past for not giving her that better world, she worships absolute force because she believes mid-war Equestria exhausted all alternatives to force, and she wants her glorious based red-blooded redpilled fascist husbando Red Eye to forcefully cum inside her.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
8c2d841
?
No.314485
>>314101
This is an excellent post and sums up the problems with this story perfectly.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
8c2d841
?
No.314488
314490 314514
6218193__safe_artist-colon-dearysnowy_imported+from+derpibooru_starlight+glimmer_pony_unicorn_-colon-3C_chest+fluff_cloud_cute_eye+clipping+through+hair_eyebrow.png
>>314025

LP and Regina continue to unlock cages while Regina waxes nostalgic about her brother, who was in the story for all of one episode and barely had any spoken dialogue.

>“You!” one of the prisoners called out. I rotated towards the voice and saw Tracker. The jade pegasus slammed his forehooves against the energy field, ignoring the feedback. “This isn’t how things are supposed to be! Get out while you still can. Before they get you too!”
I had to check the wiki to see who the fuck Tracker is. It seems that he was one of the throwaway characters who participated in the attack on New Appleoosa, was injured during the battle, and received medical treatment afterward. I remember Calamity arguing with one of the Pegasi about whether or not the Enclave would allow him to rejoin their ranks after having been "exposed" to the surface; the idea seems to be that he returned dutifully to the Enclave and they imprisoned him for some reason.

Anyway, after they set all the prisoners free, they hear some alarms go off and feel some vibrations in the ship's hull. LP deduces that they have arrived at the Cathedral, and it is firing on them.

Page break. We rejoin the party at some indeterminate point in the future, in an indeterminate location. LP and Calamity have found each other; Calamity somehow found time to do some more looting, as he is described as being "laden down with rucksacks." As is par for the course in this story, nopony has questioned either his actions or the presence of Littlepoop, who (despite being entirely reliant upon her stealth buck for invisibility, which should logically be past its time limit by now) may or may not still be invisible. Regina's whereabouts are not given, but presumably she is still hanging around with the two of them.

There is no further mention of the prisoners that were set free in the previous scene. Like most of the other NPCs that LP has rescued over the course of this story, their only role was to make LP look heroic; with that obligation fulfilled, they are presumably on their own from here. Considering that they are now running around completely unarmed, without the convenient plot armor of an invisibility device to keep them from being detected, on a ship full of armed soldiers, leaving them in their cells might actually have been the more humane thing to do.

I'm also curious how the prisoners are supposed to get off the airship, since presumably none of them can fly. Although, since kkat provided no description of any of these prisoners, this point is actually rather ambiguous. Tracker (a pegasus) was the only one mentioned by name; it's not clear what sort of pony any of the others are supposed to be. I would assume that since they are all prisoners of war, they would logically come from among the Enclave's enemies; ie, unicorns and earth ponies. Then again, it's kkat, so who the fuck knows?

>“Where to, Li’lpip?” Calamity asked.
>“You’ll like this,” I replied from beneath the zebra cloak. “You’re going to steal one of the Enclave’s sky-tanks.”
Apparently, LP is now wearing one of the zebra cloaks. Presumably she would have swapped out her dead stealth buck for the cloak that Calamity was using previously. I guess. Nice of kkat to make sure these little details are always crystal clear.

>“Good.” I could almost hear the grin breaking across his face. “The Enclave owes us fer the Sky Bandit.”
Yeah, a full-blown military airship is perfect compensation for a crappy rusted-out air-cart with no windows that had to be physically pulled around with them everywhere.

>“There’s an exterior airlock we need t’ pull up t’ once we’re free of the ship,” Reggie added. “Got some extra passengers t’ take aboard.”
Oh, there's Reggie. Also, it sounds like the plan is to sneak the prisoners out through the airlock once they have the tank. It's still not clear where the prisoners are on the ship physically, or what they are supposed to do in the meantime while LP screws around stealing this tank. My recollection is that Calamity talked his way past the guard outside the cell block, while LP murdered the two guards actually inside. If any of the prisoners try to leave the cell block area they will presumably be spotted by the first guard, so the only thing for them to do, really, is to just hang around their now-unlocked cells. What happens if guard #1 goes inside the cell block and sees that the two guards are dead and all the cell doors are open?

>The entire ship flooded with the tense sound of brass, drums and violins, the heavier classical music replaced by the stirring battle anthem Flight of the Shadowbolts.
How does Littlepoop know this composition by name? Also, my earlier question about classical music still stands.

Unsurprisingly, stealing the tank turns out to be a completely mundane task that poses no serious challenge whatsoever. They literally just walk onto the hangar and take one. The "tank" appears to be a somewhat upgraded version of their old airbus: it's still basically just an airborne cart that Calamity has to pull, but it is apparently armored and has some advanced weapons attached to it. On their way out, Reggie lowers her hood and makes a snappy remark to a couple of Enclave poners who try to climb on board the departing airship. Unsurprisingly, they offer no resistance to the party as they escape. The ship is called the Tortoise, if that's important.

Page break. As they fly away, LP observes that they are now over the Cathedral. I'm not 100% clear on this, but I think it was built on the ruins of the Castle of the Two Sisters. The Enclave appears to have the upper hand in the battle.

The Tortoise pulls up alongside the aforementioned airlock, which is opened by Tracker. The prisoners all hop on board the Tortoise one by one. As usual, no one on the Enclave side seems to notice what's going on, or attempts to intervene. Then, suddenly, a dragon appears and starts fucking up airships left and right.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
8c2d841
?
No.314490
314522 314560
6210716__safe_artist-colon-jinglebelle_komori_imported+from+derpibooru_starlight+glimmer_pony_unicorn_a+royal+problem_aweeg2A_cute_eating_female_food_glimmerbet.jpg
>>314488

Page break. The dragon is cybernetically enhanced, because why wouldn't it be? It appears to be another of Red Eye's wacky creations. One wonders why, if he had something like this at his disposal, he didn't deploy it earlier to aid in his quest to take over the wasteland? Then again, it's not actually clear that taking over the wasteland is even what Red Eye is trying to do. What exactly are his goals again? Why are the Enclave invading? Why are these two groups fighting each other in the first place? Something about radio towers, I think.

Anyway, for some reason, LP and Regina each take one of the plasma cannons mounted on the side of the tank and start shooting at the Enclave. This seems like a particularly dumb and pointless move; as far as I can tell, this battle is just two of their enemies duking it out with each other, so LP really doesn't have a dog in the fight here. Plus, if they're trying to transport these prisoners, the thing to do would be to try to blend in with the other Enclave ships while sneaking away; an Enclave ship that starts suddenly firing on its own side is going to attract the wrong sort of attention.

>Some of Red Eye’s troops along the Cathedral wall opened fire on the Tortoise as Calamity brought us close. I gasped in dismay as two of the escapees crumpled, dead, crimson flowers bursting across their bodies. Several of the other escapees screamed. The more level-headed ponies stepped in, trying to prevent a panic. Tracker belted out a command ordering everyone to lay flat on the floor and make themselves as small a target as possible.
This is one of those areas where clear physical description is crucial. Kkat has told us absolutely nothing about this tank: we don't know what it looks like, how big it is, whether it is open to the air like a wagon or closed in like a van, how well-armored it is, whether or not it has windows, etc etc. How exactly were these ponies shot? I was assuming that as soon as they were inside the tank, they were basically safe; however, this seems to be implying that they are exposed enough to the open air that stray bullets can still hit them. Also, as usual, kkat's description of the actual events of the battle are spotty at best. Where are they flying currently? How close to the battlements of the castle are they?

>The bullets hadn’t penetrated the tank’s armor so much as ignored it completely. There weren’t even bullet holes. Red Eye’s troops were using bullets enchanted with an armor bypass!
This offers a little bit of explanation, but my earlier comment still stands. There shouldn't even be any confusion about stuff like this; if the tank is an enclosed space, the author needs to let us know that it is an enclosed space. That way, if characters who should be safe inside it are being shot, we will assume the enemies have some kind of armor-piercing bullets on hand. In a scene that relies this heavily on action in physical space, there is no room for ambiguity about what things look like or where characters are supposed to be located.

Page break. As usual, kkat ends the scene abruptly in the middle of a fight, and begins the next one an indeterminate amount of time later, with the party out of danger. Somehow, LP & Co. have managed to penetrate the central and most protected area of the castle, which is conveniently almost empty because all of the soldiers are out fighting the enclave. They dropped off the NPCs in a nearby empty barracks, where I'm sure they will remain ad infinitum unless kkat needs them for something else.

From hacking a few terminals that were conveniently lying around, LP seems to have learned that a large contingent of Red Eye's troops is headed for Fillydelphia, to stage what promises to be the biggest battle in Edgequestria since the war itself. LP, naturally, feels that the task of (somehow) stopping it falls to her and her alone.

>Once I freed the unicorns Red Eye intended to sacrifice in his damned ascension, we would need to leave very swiftly.
Is that what she's here for? It would have been helpful if the author had told us that. Or, since it was probably some minor aside that was mentioned back in Chapter 15 or 16, it would have been helpful if the author had reminded us of that, instead of just assuming that every single autistic detail of this story is being dutifully observed and recorded by the reader.

>The trio of us snuck through the Cathedral. Calamity had left the Enclave armor in the Tortoise and was back under a zebra stealth cloak. This time, it was Reggie who walked around visible. There were enough Talon griffins in Red Eye’s forces that nopony gave her a second look.
Apparently, for kkat, this suffices as adequate explanation for how they managed to get into this building and walk around without being detected. No mention at all is given of how they managed to extricate themselves from the battle that was raging at the end of the previous scene, or how they managed to fly their Enclave airship directly into the heart of the fortress being besieged by the Enclave without any of its defenders noticing and at least attempting to shoot them down. The implausibility here is compounded by the fact that in the last scene, they were doing quite a bit of shooting and were attracting quite a bit of attention to themselves. No explanation is given as to where they landed their ship, how they managed to hide it, how exactly they managed to get the prisoners into an empty barracks without being detected, or how much time has passed in the interim between this action and the present moment, in which they appear to be once again incognito and walking around hostile territory in plain sight.

>“Okay, this is kinda creeping me out,” she admitted as she strode by a squad of Red Eye’s soldiers who were running to garrison part of the building, one of them stopping to smile and wave to her as they passed.
Nice to see the baddies in this story are as dumb as ever.
Anonymous
45cb9bd
?
No.314504
Screenshot_20210723-150456.png
An observation about the photo:

The mare is going to die, after she is brutally raped. Did nobody care? She had no father? No mother?

I see how this sort of thing happens.

Maybe she deserved it. Maybe her father or shitty husband allowed it to happen. Maybe she was betting on a man that said "no" and didn't get the message 'till she realized there was nobody to save her from the fate of being brutally raped in (what appears to be broad daylight) before being murdered like a black cat in Mexico.

Nontheless, she likely deserved it.

I wouldn't let that happen to one of my girls. Unless, of course, they deserve it. And if I say they deserved their death, likely they might as well not be mine.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314514
314516
unnamed (1).jpg
>>314488
MLPFIM had Tank The Flying Tortoise
Fallout Equestria has Tortoise The Flying Tank

gay bronybait is gay
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.314516
>>314514
Pretty much. This section of the story was written at around the same time as S2's early episodes were being released, so a lot of memes from back then were shamelessly forced in just for the sake of including them.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314520
314521
Kkat learned the worst possible lessons from Fallout 3. Worldbuilding is one of them. Old terminal entries and holotapes and paper notes... they can be funny. They can tell you what location you are in. They can try to add some context to the corpses or loot nearby. They can hint to the player that there is loot nearby with text like "day 2480 of being a security guard. Took a gun from a tenant and stashed it in my bedroom's locker. My boss will never know". Notes can give you fun little stories like the fights people in offices had days before the bombs went boom.

But all this wasted text is too far removed from the "modern day" of the Wasteland to matter.

Does it matter what three employees in a nameless generic office with mediocre loot now full of giant scorpions were arguing over before the bombs fell? No. It doesn't matter what a destroyed ruined robot factory used to be if it's just set dressing for another fucking dungeon crawl and nobody plans on rebuilding it and crafting sick robot companions now or at some point in the future.

Does it matter what text is on terminals in a solar power plant facility that's also the power supply for a satellite laser gun the hero can get? Yes because it adds depth to what we know of the pre bombing world (during an energy crisis this power company had to make weapons for the military for funding) and depth to who built it (the all-new Poseidon Energy country) and who worked here and more. It hints at the player to unlock the sick top tier energy gun here instead of picking the moral "distribute power evenly" or max cash reward "distribute most power to NCR" option. Everything at Helios One in FNV matters because the Brotherhood Of Steel lost a war over it, it sent Elijah off the deep end and made the BOS ideology look like shit, all for a fucking glorified artillery piece that's useless 99% of the time and needs direct line of sight to work. It's not just here for memes, it's a worldbuilt part of the goddamn world and a vital part of the "tell the Brotherhood they are wrong faggots" questline Veronica, an important companion, takes you on.

Fallout 3 includes the Brotherhood Of Steel as oversimplified white power rangers fighting the oversimplified Orcish brainlet Stupid Mutants and "fashist" Enclave.
Fallout NV includes the Brotherhood Of Steel because it wants to take a fat steaming deconstructive dump on all possible interpretations of the BOS. The BOS is dying and cannot win the Mojave with anything other than force which their isolationist and "you must be born into the BOS" and "women serve too" policies prevent them from gaining in large quantities. Obsidian Black Iron studios has something intelligent to say about the gayness of a fictional faction it invented two games ago.

And Fallout Equestria includes the Mean BOS for a while before they spontaneously split and create the Nice BOS because Kkat didn't understand what he was copying and forgot about the decades/centuries of time and countless miles of land separating the different Brotherhood Of Steel sects with different leaders and ideological interpretations of their holy codex.

Kkat sucks gay penis through a straw except the straw is more gay penis.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314521
>>314520
Come to think of it, with memory orbs taking the role of all notes and computer notes and holotapes, is there a point in keeping those 3 note types besides "tradition" and falloutbait pandering? These stupid fucking Lore Orbs (or "Lorbs" if you're annoying) let Kkat display any scene that happened after the invention of memory orbs to any character still alive after their invention.
This should revolutionize the world.
VHS tapes of exercising celebrities? Fuck them, try memory orbs of being a celebrity and exercising. Or being Twilight Sparkle and giving a college lecture on the most advanced magic she knows to an empty hall before casting spells, so anyone who experiences the memory can "remember" how to cast them.

It makes little sense for 200 year old notes to still exist. It makes little sense for Kkat to put them in his story when they barely if ever matter to the story he's telling now in the wasteland or the story he's telling in the past about the fall of equestria and the rise of edgequestria.

If you needed a PipBuck to read a Memory Orb it could make LP important without needing to make her OP. Like letting her speak a dead language necessary for opening something important or solving a major mystery. Or making her one element of harmony instead of trying to make her more important than all six.

A memory Orb could be the ultimate McGuffin and contain any interesting knowledge or memory. Nuclear launch codes. Factory-making and farm-making instructions. Twilight Sparkle's Ten-Hour Beginner To Pro Magic Course that includes a radiation removal spell. Twilight's first time fucking Celestia. Any number of groups could fight over this one thing and the protagonist could be a nopony hired to deliver it before getting shot and robbed for it. Or the protag could be LP who stumbles into a courier getting shot and robbed for the Orb only to step in and save the orb and courier and get taken on an adventure for having a useful PipBuck the courier lacks. Countless fucking possibilities and ways to reinterpret Fallout elements creatively squandered because Kkat can't think and can only copy.

Anyway Kkat is a faggot for not doing anything with the memory orbs more interesting than "Velvet is getting somewhat addicted to the memory orb of being Fluttershy".
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.314522
314543 314581
6220031__safe_artist-colon-maren_artist-colon-sina_artsnstuff_imported+from+derpibooru_starlight+glimmer_pony_unicorn_book_glowing+horn_horn_purple+background_s.jpg
>>314490

>We passed under an archway. Carved into the stone was the message: Equality is Harmony.
>We saw two more up ahead, admiring one of the many pinkish stained-glass windows. A third walked up to join them, my ears catching the phrase, “Walk in the Blessings of Unity.” The other robed ponies parroted the hail.
As much as I'd enjoy smearing kkat as a typical libtard/SJW author trying to write an obvious political allegory, this story isn't really ideologically coherent enough to even attack him on those grounds. What exactly do these slogans mean? Are Equality and Unity supposed to be some significant part of Red Eye's goals and/or beliefs? If so, it hasn't been clearly established. For that matter, it hasn't even been clearly established what any of Red Eye's goals or beliefs are; all we really know about him is that he wants to become some kind of god and he's trying to take over the wasteland because reasons.

The author throwing these spoopy propaganda messages at us reminds me a little of his Thunderdome fight earlier. Kkat probably inserted that event because A) it was an opportunity to gracelessly wedge yet another gratuitous Fallout reference into the story, and B) because he thought it would be an edgy and shocking plot twist that would showcase his villain's brutality. The problem is, there's no obvious reason why Red Eye would want to make his slaves fight each other to the death, particularly if he's supposed to have some kind of overarching goal he's trying to achieve that requires both the labor and loyalty of his slaves, so the whole thing just seems pointless and corny. Without some kind of character-specific justification for Red Eye's doing something like this, it's just cliche villain behavior, on par with tying a helpless maiden to the train tracks or threatening the world with a doomsday device for no reason.

In the same way, kkat attributes vaguely-totalitarian-sounding propaganda to Red Eye in the hopes that it will make him feel more like a sinister dictator who needs to be stopped, and less like an incoherent mishmash of Fallout references that was hastily slapped together at the last minute because the author needed a boss for his heroine to fight. At this point I'd welcome it if kkat tried to turn this story into a hokey libtard political fable; at least then it would have a clear message and a set of themes that could be directly addressed and criticized. Right now, the two biggest villains in this story are the Enclave, who I guess are supposed to be some kind of vague allegory for Bush-era America but whose in-world goals are not really defined, and Red Eye, who doesn't represent anything, either inside the story or out of it, as far as I can tell.

Anyway, Littlepoop and Co. continue to explore Red Eye's Cathedral under the very noses of its occupants. They overhear some side-banter about Discord; apparently Red Eye had the stained glass murals depicting his transformation into stone brought here from Canterlot for some reason. I can't tell if kkat is going somewhere with this, or if this is just another bronybait reference wedged in for no reason. We'll put a pin in it for now.

>Up ahead was another huge archway with wide-open sainted glass doors, another bon mot from Red Eye engraved into the stonework, inlaid with bronze: Remember, you are not here because you are better than those who are not, but because you are better than who you were.
This is just more of the same thing I was complaining about above; I don't have anything to add here. I just wanted to highlight it partly because it's an even more egregious example of kkat's overly-tryhard efforts to make Red Eye seem unduly menacing, and partly because he misspelled "stained glass" and misused the term "bon mot." Also, he forgot to put the quoted portion in quotation marks and/or italicize it.

Actually, though, it's worth noting that Red Eye contradicts himself a bit here. Earlier we saw an inscription that reads "Equality is Harmony," yet a little further down the same hall we have another inscription extolling superiority and elitism. It's possible kkat did this intentionally to paint Red Eye as a hypocrite, but if that's the case it lacks subtlety. Then again, I remember commenting earlier that Red Eye seems like kind of a shitty propagandist.

Anyway, whatever; let's keep moving. LP and the others enter the centermost portion of the Cathedral's keep, again without being stopped or questioned by anyone. There appears to be some kind of church service going on; apparently Red Eye has his own religion now. Or maybe he had one to begin with; I can't even keep track anymore. Anyway, he's going to try to ascend to godhood right now, in the middle of the battle.

ANYWAY, continuing to demonstrate that he has completely checked out of his own story and at this point seems to be consciously refusing to put any serious thought into it, kkat takes us on a short tour of Red Eye's inner sanctum. Everywhere we see the corny priests of his corny made-up religion doing the sort of corny things that cliche megalomaniacal villains usually have their fake-priests do. At one point, the party observes a group of children wearing alicorn costumes being indoctrinated with cliche fake-religion propaganda about how Red Eye's victory over the Enclave is preordained.

For reasons that are as flimsy and badly explained as usual, LP somehow knows exactly where all the secret passages are inside this building despite this being her first visit. Apparently, when one of the alicorns was communicating things to her telepathically, it accidentally dropped information about this particular location, and LP memorized it like an autist. She leads them down some staircases, and then suddenly, for no reason, she switches on her radio at the precise moment that one of her girlfriend's pre-recorded broadcasts are playing. Homage doesn't talk about anything important, and the broadcast cuts off rather quickly.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314543
314560
>>314522
Fans of Fallout Equestria love calling Red Eye "Fascist" and "Totalitarian" and claiming he "represents control". Those are the soundbytes used.

If the "totalitarian fascist who represents control" and is based on a slaver from Fallout 3 in charge of steel mills (potentially making him represent the industrial revolution), what does it do to the Bush-Era America=Enclave allegory if these two "fascist" powers are warring rather than working together against the commoners?
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.314560
314563
noemergencyhereheywhowantslunch.png
>>314543
I've never seen anyone call Red Eye fascist - that's more then Enclave's thing. He's supposed to be Littlepip minus the morality (LOL), an absolute pragmatist who's trying to fix the world in his own twisted way. Or at least, that's how kkat seems to be trying to present him. I posted some time ago about how Red Eye is essentially two characters: a knock-off of Lord Ashur with shades of President Eden in the Fillydelphia arc, and a generic idiot supervillain thereafter when Kkat ran out of material to crib from Fallout 3. I suppose that if you wanted to really stretch and compare him to a real life political figure he might be Stalin-esque - investing massively in industry at the cost of countless lives, claiming to be working towards a equality for everyone while clinging to absolute autocratic power - but that's giving kkat more credit than he's due.

>>314490
>The dragon is cybernetically enhanced, because why wouldn't it be?
Despite its dramatic introduction, this dragon accomplishes nothing of note and never appears again.

>No mention at all is given of how they managed to extricate themselves from the battle that was raging at the end of the previous scene, or how they managed to fly their Enclave airship directly into the heart of the fortress being besieged by the Enclave without any of its defenders noticing and at least attempting to shoot them down. The implausibility here is compounded by the fact that in the last scene, they were doing quite a bit of shooting and were attracting quite a bit of attention to themselves. No explanation is given as to where they landed their ship, how they managed to hide it, how exactly they managed to get the prisoners into an empty barracks without being detected, or how much time has passed in the interim between this action and the present moment, in which they appear to be once again incognito and walking around hostile territory in plain sight.
Red Eye's cathedral is a bizarre addition to the story that will take a little explaining. In the original Fallout, the Master (the giant mutant amalgam on which the Goddess was based) founded his own religion known as the Unity to put on a peaceful front to humanity at large. They have a cathedral, built on top of a hidden vault in which the Master resides, which serves as the final dungeon of the game. Early on, you can encounter members of the Unity cult offering free healthcare and other forms of charity in many settlements.

You may recall occasional mentions of the Goddess having missionaries and preachers here and there that never amounted to anything. At some point, and for whatever reason, Kkat decided that the Cathedral is actually Red Eye's thing and has nothing to do with the Goddess. There's been no indication priot to this point that Red Eye has his own religion, and the Goddess' religion seems to have vanished off the face of the planet, so I'm not sure if this was intended as a bait and switch or just Kkat not keeping his own story straight (imagine that).

The reason Littlepip and co are able to explore the Cathedral unopposed is because... well, because you can do that in Fallout. In the game, the cultists are peaceful enough unless you attack them or try to break into secure areas. Of course, in the game the Cathedral never comes under attack (except by the player), so nobody has any reason to suspect that something might be amiss. Kkat seems to have overlooked how downright bizarre it is for sermons to be taking place as normal and guards to be giving people friendly waves in the middle of a raging battle that they're losing.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314563
>>314560
Kkat can't keep his story straight because he's too busy keeping it gay! Ha! I was a professional author once.

I don't think Red Eye works as an evil take on LP. LP and Red Eye have many things in common and many things different from one another but nothing really makes them good rivals or counterparts. Red Eye is a faction leader with godhood on the brain while LP is a murderhobo with three-ish friends. They both want overwhelming power so they can solve their problems solo but a competent writer would make "you don't need to be like Red Eye and you don't want to be like him" into a lesson LP has to learn. Don't take the world on solo, don't abandon your ideals or roboticize your dog, godhood is overrated, friendship is magic, blah blah blah card games blah.

A competent writer would establish parallels with the way LP and RE like to think and solve problems while scattering Memory Orbs around that introduce LP to who Red Eye was before he... I don't know, lost his party of murderhobos to raiders and decided going full slaver was the only solution. Could make him eerily similar to LP for max symbolism before Red Eye went bad. Sometimes LP and Red Eye use charm and sometimes they use force, no characterization there. I guess both use outside enhancements in the form of LP's crackmints and pipbuck while Red Eye has his cyber implants but that's a stretch. LP is technically part machine now that her pipbuck fused into her leg but that never mattered.

maybe instead of "that raider pony in my head" and "muh corrupted kindness" LP should think to herself "I don't want to be like Red Eye".

One Piece is superbly written and loves making the wandering hero Luffy a Chaotic Good spanner in the works of assorted high-and-mighty scheming overpowered villains whether those baddies work for the law or against it. But that isn't done right here. LP doesn't differ from the villains in a meaningful way and she lacks the kind of high quality consistent characterization Monkey D. Luffy gets. On the surface he's a stereotypical idiot hero but beneath that he's an honest and straightforward adventurer with great respect for dreams and his own views on what's right and wrong. He doesn't consider himself a hero because he runs a pirate crew, not a charity, but he'll kick the ass of any villain that pisses him off or threatens/hurts someone he cares about. He really is the kind of guy who would declare war on the world government for his friends. Meanwhile LP's morality is as vaguely defined as her religion and Red Eye's, and characters suck her cock for her "morality" without ever having a meaningful problem with how she operates. It's highly unusual for a random fucking pipbuck repair pony (or toaster repair pony if you're annoying) to pick up lockpicking offscreen and master guns in an afternoon and decide being forced into becoming a social pariah is the perfect time to become a roaming murderhobo whose murderboner forces her to penetrate countless raider and slaver and assorted monster skulls with lead bukkakes. She acts like a video game protagonist and doesn't seem to care about gathering information before making a major political decision even if it means risking her life for said decision. And this can't be a consistent intentional character trait because it never meaningfully fucks her over.

"The portal to hell is opened with the incantation of good intentions" is supposed to be a major theme of this work since the good intentions of assorted poners only make things worse if they are not named Littlepip or working for her. Why the fuck doesn't LP's good intentions ever backfire on her? When she stumbles into a doctor's hideout and shoots her way out she isn't setting the cure for a plague back a thousand years, the doctor is conveniently pure evil. When she goes from New Appleoosa to Old Appleoosa and opens fire she doesn't get NA fucked. At best her decisions made involving The Megaspell from Bootleg Pinkie's place backfired a little but it didn't matter much in the long run.

Maybe Kkat should have divided this story into two halves. In the first half, LP is a civilian who can't go home and wants to find a place to live away from violence. She hates killing and hates danger but really wants to save Velvet anyway upon learning she was kidnapped and enslaved. Calamity's the one pulling her into dangerous dungeon crawls for ammo.when the party is low on supplies. If she does enough sidequests for a location to like her and consider letting her live there circumstances fuck shit up for her and force her back onto the road. Second half, LP sidequested and main quested so much that she's finally got a permanent home in Tenpony Tower and could retire. But now she knows about the whole wasteland and the factions fighting over it and she doesn't want to any more because she's grown to care about the one-off background characters she befriended along the way and really wants to save them. Now she has a reason to carry out missions for her radio waifu and they should be more important than scavenging for records, they should directly contribute to winning the bigass battle in Act 3.

Character growth. Like in real-ass motherfucking books. And like in Role Playing Games with the EXP and level ups.

And it would be like in Fallout NV where Act 1 has you make your way to New Vegas hunting Benny and Act 2 has you reach the goal that carried you through act 1 before the mystery behind act 1 ("what's so special about the mcguffin you were robbed for?") Is answered and you pick a side and start doing tasks for your chosen side to rig things for Act 3 and then Act 3 has a bigass battle. Acts separated so cleanly you could cut them into three separate books and call the result a trilogy like a real-ass author. Kkat isn't a real-ass author, he's a real ass of an author! Dohohohoho!
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
a911578
?
No.314581
314586 314599 314605
6221959__safe_artist-colon-arby_lakeripple_imported+from+ponybooru_starlight+glimmer_pony_unicorn_chest+fluff_ear+fluff_ears_female_fluffy_long+glimmer_long+pon.jpg
>>314522

>…until the Cathedral shook under a mighty, rending rumble. The crippled Raptor had finally lost any semblance of control and was crashing into one of the battlements outside, gouging out an avalanche of sundered stone. The Raptor’s storm clouds dissipating in a hurricane blast that shattered the nearby windows into razor shards and fine pink dust. I instinctively lashed out with my telekinesis, pushing back at the debris, keeping it away from us and from the children, terrified at the consequences of breathing powdered Pink Cloud glass.
Couple of things here. First of all, I'm a little confused about the physical composition of the Raptor.

I think it was stated earlier that all of the pegasus technology, including their airships, is made out of clouds. For Ponyland this is perfectly fine; in fact I think it's canon in the show that pegasi build things out of clouds anyway. However, this creates some logical problems, as kkat has also established that non-pegasi are incapable of interacting with clouds in the way that pegasi can. Earlier, for instance, we saw a "cloud" terminal that LP was unable to hack because she couldn't physically interact with it.

I also seem to recall a conversation about clouds being an unsuitable material for crafting armor. See where I'm going with this? If the ships are made out of cloud, then A) LP and other non-pegasus characters should not be able to walk around inside them, and B) it would in any case be retarded to build military aircraft out of a substance that would provide no protection against bullets and other projectiles. Disclaimer: kkat tends to be selectively attentive to certain details while ignoring others, but this kind of autism tends to be one of the areas where he's pretty thorough. So, it's entirely possible that he's already explained how this works and I just forgot about it. However, it still bears mention, particularly since it relates to what I was saying earlier about kkat's limited description of these vehicles causing confusion.

This bit also caught my attention:

>I instinctively lashed out with my telekinesis, pushing back at the debris, keeping it away from us and from the children, terrified at the consequences of breathing powdered Pink Cloud glass.
I was a bit confused about the connection between the glass and the Pink Cloud. I remember LP remarking on the pinkish color of the glass earlier and how it reminded her of the Pink Cloud, but I didn't realize she was speaking literally.

I went back a few paragraphs, and here is exactly what the text says:

>I stared at the window, ignoring the monster depicted and instead focusing on the pinkish tones of the glass itself. A surge of dread hit me as I realized that all the windows in the Cathedral were suffused with Pink Cloud. My little pony conjured up imaginings of the windows slowly leaking minute amounts of necromantic poison into the building.
If I'm understanding this correctly, she's basically saying that the pink parts of the stained glass are...made out of Pink Cloud? Did I get that right? That seems like a pretty dumb thing to make windows out of. What's more, it was previously explained that Red Eye didn't make these windows himself, he had them brought from Canterlot. So...the pre-war royalty had the windows of their palace made out of Pink Cloud because...why exactly? I really don't get what the author was going for here at all.

Page break. The party descends into some kind of basement armory beneath the chapel. While there, LP decides to once again listen to some random recording she picked up somewhere. The recording is of a conversation that took place between Red Eye and the Overmare of Stable 101 at some point in the distant past. The Overmare seems to believe that earth ponies are superior to unicorns and pegasi, and Red Eye is arguing the opposite. If this subject has ever come up as a point of contention before, I don't remember it. More likely this is kkat attempting to clumsily graft some kind of motivation onto Red Eye's character at the last minute: he grew up under an ideology created by one of the CMC's wacky social experiments, and everything he's done since then is a reaction to this upbringing. As usual, it might have worked if kkat had set it up earlier and developed it properly, but now? Not so much.

The debate reads like a tedious Reddit argument, with each side ponderously rolling out fairly obvious talking points that sound rehearsed. It does not feel like natural conversation, and neither side has anything particularly earth-shattering to say. It's not really worth analyzing here. Meanwhile, LP explores the room and finds a locked closet full of guns, and Reggie finds the door to the next room. As the recording draws to a close, an implication is made that Red Eye has poisoned the Overmare's drink.

Page break. The next level is some kind of surgery room. Consistent with kkat's depiction of Red Eye as a walking ball of cliches, the area seems to have been mostly used for various ghastly medical experiments in cybernetics. Sacrebleu, le edge.

They encounter some sort of cybernetically-enhanced roboponer who is down here for some reason. He turns out to be a random throwaway character who was namedropped literally about 20 chapters ago:

>Doctor Slaughter. I knew that name. Oh, and tag her to see Doc Slaughter. She’s got one of them leg terminals that are a bitch to get off. He was in Fillydelphia. I narrowly avoided losing my PipBuck to him.
This is that doctor that she was supposed to have seen but never wound up seeing. I think the implication is that he would have cut her leg off.

Anyway, we don't learn anything important from him beyond that he was the one responsible for creating the cybernetically enhanced dragon we saw earlier. Apparently Red Eye had him install some kind of bomb in the dragon's heart to ensure that he doesn't go off the reservation; more typical cornball villain stuff.
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.314586
314595
>>314581
>What's more, it was previously explained that Red Eye didn't make these windows himself, he had them brought from Canterlot. So...the pre-war royalty had the windows of their palace made out of Pink Cloud because...why exactly? I really don't get what the author was going for here at all.
The pink cloud seeps into solid objects. Everything in Canterlot was full of it. Red Eye presumably had the windows salvaged from Canterlot after they'd been immersed in the cloud for two centuries because he is a big dingus that likes his historical shinies.

Never mind the fact that a salvage operation of that scale would have required a large workforce to spend an extended period of time to work uninterrupted in Canterlot, which was supposedly one of the most lethal places in the setting.
Anonymous
19f8cd0
?
No.314595
>>314586
Not only that, but that was a place the Goddess wanted in on, and thus sent Littlepip. Wouldn't she ask her then at the time ally, Red Eye, to grab the book while his expedition was there? Or wait, was that supposed to be a secret because she wanted to overpower him? I'm forgetting.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314599
>>314581
All the vehicles currently fighting are foreign to us. Enclave battleships, the cyber dragon, flying tanks, and more.

LP should have been forced to fight one flying tank earlier in the story and fight one battleship much later, struggling both times and nearly dying and losing her whole team to them both times. That way we'd know what to expect from these vehicles when we see the Enclave unleash hundreds of them against Red Eye.

As for the cyber dragon of supreme unimportance, imagine a scene where the Enclave unleashes mind-controlled dragons onto Red Eye's forces. Teenaged ones and a few adult ones. Then Red Eye's one CyberChimeraTech OverDragon Inferno (it needs a cool name) rips and tears its way through absolutely all enemy Enclave dragons in a shocking display of overwhelming force, obliterating Enclave troops through collateral damage as it eliminates and outclasses all high-priority targets like the tanks and airships. This single piece on the board makes LP feel like she needs to kill it however she can right now and that motivates her to seek out the obligatory killswitch for it.

LP could even say something like "How do I know he put a killswitch on it? Simple. That's what I would do. Also he's a massive control freak. I'd be surprised if he didn't have a self destruct button somewhere in his base".
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
743744a
?
No.314605
314609 314611 314613 314620
6225156__safe_alternate+version_artist-colon-d3f4ult_4rt1st_imported+from+derpibooru_starlight+glimmer_human_pony_unicorn_absurd+resolution_alternate+character_.png
>>314581

Page break. Despite having been seen by multiple guards and soldiers, and having directly interacted with one of Red Eye's higher-ranking employees, the group is still permitted to pass on to the next level of sub-basement unchallenged. Kkat's flimsy explanation for this is that Calamity and LP are invisible because of zebra cloaks, and nobody finds Regina's presence out of place because she's a griffon. Never mind that griffons are individuals like any other type of creature, and no one on Red Eye's staff would know Regina. Nope; Regina is a griffon, and Red Eye has a couple of griffons working for him, so that means she is ok to stroll around down here without anypony raising an eyebrow. The level of managerial incompetence on display here seems a bit much even by the standards of this story.

Also:

Never mind that the group is just casually waltzing through what would logically be a restricted area requiring security clearance. Never mind that an invisibility cloak wouldn't prevent a creature with hooves from making noise when walking on stone. Never mind that the sound of horse hooves going clippity-clop on stone would be even more noticeable in an enclosed stone corridor where an echo would be present. Never mind that kkat has never clarified whether or not a pony wearing an invisibility cloak would still cast a shadow. Never mind that in order to render a pony completely invisible, a cloak would have to envelop their entire body as well as cover their face, meaning that said pony would effectively be draping a sheet over themselves, which would make moving around difficult.

We're just supposed to accept at face value that all of these seasoned soldiers, accustomed to living in a world of tricks and magic, would find nothing strange about a mysterious griffon poking around in restricted areas, accompanied by two oddly-shimmering patches of air that keep whispering to each other. Clearly nothing suspicious going on here.

Anyway, according to an inscription above the door, the purpose of this level is "meta-pony testing." I don't even have the slightest idea what a meta-pony is, or what the testing of one would involve, but apparently LP and Calamity do. Unfortunately, they don't seem interested in sharing their insights with us, so we have no choice but to keep following along.

>“The way you talked, I didn’t think your stealth missions tended to go this smoothly,” Regina commented, pulling out her guns and checking the loads. “I ain’t complainin’. Jus’, I’m ‘fraid if I don’t getta shoot somethin’ soon, I’m gonna forget how.”
One of these days, someone is going to need to sit kkat down and explain to him what a "stealth mission" entails; namely that some level of stealth is actually necessary and is being employed. As usual, the issue here has less to do with the "stealth" tactics being employed by the party and more to do with the fact that their enemies are almost criminally incompetent. I suspect the three of them could dye their coats bright neon colors and strut around playing brass instruments and still wouldn't be caught.

>Unity. The password was “unity”. I felt cheated. He wasn’t even trying.
All of the passwords in this story suck. I haven't been noting them in my commentary, but most of them have just been simple words that could be brute-forced in under a second. Though I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that Red Eye's IT department is as incompetent as the rest of his staff.

Anyway, LP hacks some terminal and opens some door, and as a bonus for her; not us she gets access to another long journal entry. The author has a bit of a pottymouth, but aside from that there's nothing super interesting here. Basically, it's yet another pointlessly detailed record of some ghoulish experiment that Red Eye was conducting for some unknown and probably moronic reason. As far as I can tell, it relates to his efforts to recreate whatever that radioactive goop is that turns regular ponies into alicorns; the stuff that Twilight's Ministry was making way back when, that was responsible for turning Trixie into the Goddess.

Unsurprisingly, all the casual cruelty on display in the doctor's research notes has Littlepoop's taint in a tizzy:

>I felt a ruddy darkness seep across my vision, a drive to violence mounting in every beat of my heart, the likes of which I hadn’t felt since Arbu. My nerves were on fire.
What the fuck else is new?

Anyway, LP's PipBuck helpfully informs her that the door she has just opened leads to Stable 101. Apparently, Red Eye's Cathedral is not only built on top of the ruins of the Castle of the Two Sisters, it is also the site of the stable he grew up in. I don't remember if that was mentioned earlier or not, but I think I remember reading something about it.

>The door opened into a chamber of horrors. A catacomb for the horrifically malformed and mutilated byproducts of Doctor Glue’s experiments, lit sporadically by mounted lanterns, many of which were dark and cold.
What the fuck else is new?

Anyway, whatever; the room is full of more of Red Eye's wacky experiments in body augmentation, or alicorns, or cybernetics, or something equally nonsensical. Horribly mutated and misshapen corpses abound. Le edge, le edge.

>The strains of classical music were being piped down here as well, a twisted counterpoint to the vileness. The music was defiled by being played in here; I didn’t think I’d ever be able to enjoy Octavia’s artistry again.
Has she ever even heard "Octavia's artistry" before today? Unless Homage has Octavia in regular rotation alongside Sweetie Belle's assorted emo ballads, I don't see how she possibly could have. In any case, neither Octavia nor her music have ever been mentioned prior to this chapter.

Suddenly, they hear Autumn Leaf's voice, and they all hide while he and a couple of the Enclave soldiers go running past. Apparently, the Enclave got in here somehow. They appear to be hunting someone.
Anonymous
b8dbaab
?
No.314609
55.gif
>>314605
>pic
>anon massaging a fluffy chest
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314611
>>314605
Even now in the final stretch, LP is still listening to Lore Notes. Tapes, notes, terminal entries, memory orbs, all sorts of shit. Is this bad pacing?

Surely by the time we reach the story's final act, we should already know everything about the world that's necessary for us to understand the finale without infodumps and random scenes and interruptions from the past, be it a past a few years ago or 200ish years ago.
Anonymous
376fb16
?
No.314613
314621
>>314605
>pic
God I wish that was me
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.314620
314625 314668
2496901 - Friendship_is_Magic My_Little_Pony Setharu Starlight_Glimmer.png
>>314605

Page break. Once again, kkat has dumped us into the middle of a strange scene in which it is difficult to tell where the central players are located and what exactly is happening. As far as I can tell, Autumn Leaf and his entourage have cornered Dr. Glue, who is the foul-mouthed author of the journal that LP was just reading, and I guess the guy responsible for all the dead bodies and stuff scattered around the basement. They are apparently behind a locked door of some kind. LP and the others are standing outside of it, watching the scene unfold through the glass. Regina wants to go inside and start busting caps, but LP refuses to open the lock because she's afraid it would jeopardize their mission, or something. To kkat's credit, he does give us a bit more to work with than usual in terms of the physical placement of characters:

>Doctor Glue bellowed at the four ponies surrounding him, three of whom appeared to be Enclave elite guards. We could see them through the security glass window set into the lab door.
>Behind me were the catacombs. To my left was a stone archway and stairs leading down to a vault door flanked by mounted terminals. I couldn’t picture the room beyond, but the fragmented alicorn memories told me that Red Eye’s prisoners were down there.
It's easy enough to visualize where these characters are in relation to each other. However, what isn't clear is how Autumn Blaze's group and LP's party wound up on opposite sides of a locked door.

Presumably, the "catacombs" are the space filled with mutilated corpses that the party found themselves in at the end of the previous scene. This area appears to have been quite large, and they seem to have traversed most of it during the etherspace between scenes. However, at the end of the previous scene, we have LP & Co hiding among the corpses while Autumn Blaze and his soldiers run past them, indicating that they got in here the same way the party did and were trailing behind them. Autumn's soldiers passed LP's party while they hid, found Doctor Glue, entered his lab, and then...locked the door behind them? It's not really a continuity error, but it's a bit of an illogical action. It gets weirder:

>Beside me, Regina was furiously trying to pick the lock with her talons.
This seems to imply that the door was somehow locked from the outside the room, yet the only persons who would have wanted it locked are all inside. We're veering into some weird Harry Houdini territory here. The question is not only why is the room locked, but how exactly did it become locked?

Anyway, we'll leave that question to the ages for now. Even though her objective is down the second hallway, LP decides to pause here and watch this scene unfold.

>“No, no. I think we will keep you company while my mares hunt down your master.” The reply came from a pony in magnificent jade carapace armor, exquisitely crafted and embellished with ebony filigree and a scarab motif of leaves in iridescent bronze and copper. I didn’t need to see any part of the pony to know who it was. The voice was unmistakable.
>Colonel Autumn Leaf sneered casually as he strolled around the Glue’s lab of horrors. “Just in case he doubles back.”
Colonel Autumn Leaf's voice is "unmistakable?" To my recollection, this is exactly the second time this guy has even appeared in a scene. He hasn't exactly been a significant character up to this point, so this moment doesn't have quite the dramatic punch that kkat would like it to.

Ctrl-F reveals that Col. Autumn Blaze was not mentioned by name in the text prior to Chapter 41, and even then he is simply being discussed in passing by Calamity. He doesn't appear as an actual character until the present chapter. LP has not interacted with him at all; she overheard him talking to his underlings back when they were on board his ship and she's heard him on the radio a couple of times; that's it. Yet here she treats him as like some arch-rival she would recognize anywhere. All this does is call attention to the half-assed way this miniboss was wedged into the story at the last possible minute, and at a point when it ought to be focusing on one of the two main villains.

>I was watching two mass-murderers. The scope and heinousness of the evil in that room was breath-stealing.
It actually isn't that "breath-stealing" at all, and I can't say much for the scope or the heinousness either. The bit about the two of them being mass-murderers might be technically accurate, but neither LP nor the reader has spent enough time with these characters to dislike them this much. As I explained above, Autumn Blaze has hardly been a major character thus far, and we'd never even heard of Dr. Glue before the last scene. Kkat is trying to give this moment far more emotional punch than it actually has.

>Truth be told, I wanted to charge in there guns blazing too. Or worse. there was enough blood in that room to fashion a guillotine for each of them.
What the fuck else is new?

>My little pony was horrified that such a plan crossed my mind, more so by just how appealing it was.
No, seriously; what the fuck else is new?

Anyway, both LP and Regina are so unutterably buttmad about the atrocities these two throwaway characters have apparently committed that they decide to toss both stealth and their larger objective to the wind, and slaughter them both in their usual brutal fashion. For some reason, LP has a clip full of magic bullets that can bypass armor or something, and she announces that if her bullshit targeting system allows her to lock on to enough targets in succession, she should be able to kill everyone in the room before they can raise an alarm. In spite of the fact that they are all just standing here in plain sight gawking through the window, and Regina has been rattling the door and muttering to herself for the last five minutes or so, they somehow still have the element of surprise, so there's a chance this might work.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.314621
314628 314640
>>314613
If you want me to massage your chest floof, all you have to do is ask.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314625
>>314620
Why is LP pretending gunning those two down and abandoning stealth while making a fuckton of noise would somehow be morally superior to silently using her bullshit bloodbending to make a big gay sword or gay-otine to behead them?

Man... it would probably improve the story if that one mad scientist with the Manticores was this evil scientist. Combine the two evil characters into one, give him some Enclave vehicle he can use to fight LP off before fleeing in.the vehicle the second the fight gets bad for him, and this kills two Pidgeys with one stone. We'd spend much of the story wanting the Enclave mad scientist gone and cheer when it finally happens. In theory. The Enclave should also have a more consistent theme and more important leader. Who runs the Enclave again? How does it make them a metaphor for America?

If we're supposed to give a fuck about Autumn Bitch and recognize his voice he should have a radio show of his own. LP should occasionally run into an Enclave Radio show that calls Littlepoop a little bitch and the mane six total retards and the Enclave the best faction. And when the Enclave bombed Canterlot into rubble, his villainous gloating and orchestral shit should be turned up so loud the whole Wasteland hears it. Or at least loud enough for LP to hear it. The enclave bombing motherfucking Canterlot was an afterthought for this story. Bombing canterlot and probably also Raiderville should be a bigger deal. The enclave should bomb raiderville too because it makes fat coombrained consoomers in the audience cry even though ponyville as a location is currently just ruined buildings now that everything important and good about it (the poners) is gone.

Also wouldn't it help the edge seen less retarded and pointless if all Slavers were working for Red Eye and all Raiders were individual gangs with their own degenerate culture and theme yet they all happily sell captives to the Enclave for scientific experimentation and the testing of bioweapons and cyborg BS? Then instead of reducing it to rubble the Enclave could destroy Canterlot with a bioweapon that eats Pink Cloud and Ghouls and Alicorns and radiation to sanitize Canterlot and turn it into the new Enclave ground base. Canterlot Castle can be the new cathedral with stained glass shit. Perhaps the bioweapon could be a hive mind of airborne radiotropic omnivorous parasites that reproduce asexually and feast on anything their current host, the angriest motherfucker around, wants gone. Could implement some magically altered not-food-eating Parasprite DNA in there to make things less "MGSV fucked Purple Haze from Jojos" and more FIM. Although if these parasites could also mind control people that would be fucking awesome. Your own army on command made from anyone in the world? Truly a weapon to surpass metal gear, and if LP ended up taking control of that by being the new angriest motherfucker around that would be the best possible payoff for all those scenes where she rants about her rising raging throbbing murderboner and what assorted villains do to it.

Then again it would be a bit OP for LP to end up in charge of a weather machine and nanomachine parasites that can brainwash anyone at will and thr Sky Tank they currently own. Hell do they still have that Balefire Phoenix? That's a consistent balefire egg aka mini-nuke producer. At this rate I'm surprised LP doesn't have the Helios One sky-beam solar gun. And to think, when I was writing that shitty story that tried to one-up and fix FE I was worried giving the hero Power Armour meant for Unicorns with a magic-enhancer and mana batteries and energy shielding and energy wings would make him OP.
Anonymous
c63758f
?
No.314628
314669
>>314621
Promise?
Anonymous
376fb16
?
No.314640
314669
>>314621
Do it, you won’t
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
e60bced
?
No.314668
314687 314689
6212740__safe_artist-colon-t72b_imported+from+derpibooru_starlight+glimmer_pony_unicorn_alternate+hairstyle_bust_clothes_crown_fine+art+parody_hat_historical+ro.png
>>314620

>The Colonel’s next words confirmed my darkest fears. “You are researching starmetal for Red Eye.” It wasn’t phrased as a question. I didn’t know which filled me with more dread: what Red Eye’s interest in starmetal was, what Doctor Glue’s experiments might entail, or the fact that Autumn Leaf knew about starmetal and could recognize it on sight.
Doctor Glue's research is about "starmetal" now? I thought it was about dismembering cute little woodland creatures and turning them into alicorns and chimeras and stuff like that.

Anyway, since the subject hasn't come up in awhile and you may or may not remember, "starmetal" is the substance that apparently came from space in a meteor. Zebras think it's evil or something because Nightmare Moon's armor was made from it I guess, and it was apparently the cause of the entire war 200 years ago. It may or may not be actually evil and have magic powers; the jury still seems to be out on that one. Now it seems that both Red Eye and the Enclave are researching it for reasons I can't even begin to comprehend, and also Red Eye has an entire research wing in the basement of his combination church/fortress dedicated to ripping up various creatures and turning them into robots and also alicorns, and somehow this relates to starmetal. Just so we're all on the same page about what's currently going on in this story.

>Regina moved up beside me, the cloak draped over her shoulders but the hood down so she could look me in the eyes. “No, Littlepip,” she whispered, holding out her talons for the assault carbine. “Let me do this. For Kage.”
Kage died fighting some random Enclave guard under the command of yet another of Calamity's brothers, a guy named Windsheer. His death had nothing to do with whatever the hell is going on in this basement. My best guess is that since Autumn Blaze is in command of the Enclave, he might be considered indirectly responsible for Kage's death. Regina probably holds the Enclave itself responsible for what happened to her brother, so killing their leader would be vengeance after a fashion. It makes sense logically, but this character is too far removed from the actual incident for this "revenge" to have the dramatic punch kkat is going for here.

Also, if you want to get super-technical about it, consider this excerpt from Chapter 41:

>“Fuck! Celestias fiery hemorrhoids of solar-flarin’ death! Kage died for nothing!”
Straight from the horse's mouth, as it were. Kage literally died for nothing: Littlepoop roped him into one of her harebrained missions to do God only knows what, knock down a communications tower or hack it or something like that as I recall, and he caught a stray bullet. That's all that happened to this poor schlub. If Regina wants to avenge her brother's completely pointless death, she ought to be aiming her guns at the delusional psychopath who dragged him into a fight that had nothing to do with him, not a couple of random baddies who were just gracelessly plopped into the story a few scenes ago.

>Inside the room, Doctor Glue was spitting. “Are you fucking retarded? Is that how the En-fuck promotes? Based on the number of your brain cells that have been replaced by diarrhea? Who the fuck is going to put bizarre-ass metal with unknown properties from motherfucking space in their fucking bodies? I still can’t believe anypony was willing to make armor out of it.”
>Taking a breath, he seethed, “And cybersurgery is one floor up, you fetid asshole. Seriously, how long has it been since you were euthanized?”
Kkat's gratuitous vulgarity-for-the-sake-of-vulgarity is obnoxious enough on its own, but what makes it even worse is that he's not even particularly good at it. His "creative profanity" is all profanity and no creativity.

Here, watch how a pro does it:

>"Confound your lopsided fake titties, kkat, you sperm-encrusted man-slattern!" cried Littlepoop, thrusting her bloodstained hoofsies up toward the heavens. "Yon Equine tale is like a banquet of putrid excrement spread before me. Get me out of it, or I swear unto Celestia's infected quesadilla cunt that I will shit an entire live walrus directly into your eyes. Do you hear me? I am going to shit a walrus into your eyes, kkat; right into your goddamn eyes."

Anyway, continuing.

>I looked at Regina. She looked so much like her brother; I could see him in her.
You barely knew her brother. You barely know Regina, for that matter. All of these characters are just shoddy two-dimensional cutouts orbiting around the black vortex of your psychopathy.

Anyway, as the conversation slowly devolves into a drawn-out argument over which one of these jackoffs has more of a right to pointlessly kill these two minor side-characters, Calamity suddenly decides he's had enough. He pounds on the window, drawing his brother's attention; Autumn responds by screeching like a girl and demanding Calamity's testes on a plate. A chaotic fight breaks out, and while the details can probably be skipped, the main takeaways are as follows:
>Regina gets shot in the arm/foreleg I forget how it works with griffons, and may be "seriously" injured
>Doctor Glue attempts to escape with the starmetal fragment, but is shot and killed by Autumn
>the weapon Autumn uses to accomplish this is resembles Homage's alien space laser; the significance of this is not clear, but it seems to relate to LP's earlier comment about Autumn's familiarity with starmetal

The fight is suddenly interrupted by Velvet Remedy's voice coming over the radio. Before you ask, I'm as confused by this as you are. It appears that Red Eye has taken her hostage, or something, and has hijacked the Enclave's radio system to tell them about it. Calamity immediately drops what he's doing, and runs off...somewhere. Reggie goes with. Autumn momentarily forgets about killing his brother and runs off...somewhere. LP, meanwhile, heads down the other corridor, which is where she was supposed to be going in the first place.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
e60bced
?
No.314669
314670
>>314628
>>314640
*massages floof*
Anonymous
b8dbaab
?
No.314670
415.png
>>314669
>*massages floof*
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
e60bced
?
No.314687
314690 314703
1624525069064.png
>>314668

LP descends the staircase into a chamber that is an exact replica of Trixie's lair from Maripony. Huge vats of taint, or whatever the fuck the mutagen stuff is called, take up most of the room, with a narrow catwalk running over them. There appears to be some kind of ceremonial altar with a chalice or something at the end of the catwalk.

>The door at the bottom of the stairwell had opened to a pony-sized platform, like a diving board, providing me with this dizzying view of the room below. After all the tight corridors, the abrupt spaciousness of this room had managed to kick up a lingering wisp of dread. Oh agoraphobia, my old friend.
I'm still not 100% certain she's using the term "agoraphobia" correctly. Also, this phobia of hers is in the same category as her mint addiction in that it only appears when the author feels like mentioning it.

Protip: giving a character some sort of irrational fear or mental disorder can flesh them out and make them more interesting and/or fun. Think Indiana Jones and snakes, or Fluttershy and dragons or Twilight and quesadillas. With an overpowered Mary Sue character like the one we're dealing with, a phobia or a mental problem can double as a weakness or a flaw and make them more accessible or at least tolerable to the reader. A character like Dr. House falls into this category: he has genius-level intelligence and can solve any medical puzzle, but he's also a cripple and a social autist with a Vicodin problem. If he didn't have these flaws, he would seem too perfect to be believable, and we would find the character irritating or boring. However, with them, he becomes a tragic figure and therefore sympathetic. So, kkat was fundamentally on the right track with all this; the problem is that for a flaw to work, you have to actually work it into the story and make it a significant part of the character. Just having it be some random thing that pops up every once in a blue moon but has no impact on anything important doesn't produce the same effect. LP's on-again-off-again mint problem and occasional bouts of vertigo hardly count as sympathetic flaws.

Red Eye keeps all of the unicorns he plans on using for his experiment or whatever in a cage suspended over the vats. Seems to me it would make more sense to just keep them in a cell block or something until he plans on using them, but whatever; far be it from me to tell a man where to imprison his unicorns. LP's task is now to rescue them.

>It had taken me two minutes to hack the terminal. And that was a minute and a half more than I would have actually needed if I hadn’t been in denial. Really, can it ever be a good thing when your name is the password on somepony else’s terminal?
It's not clear which terminal she's referring to. Her description of this room doesn't mention one, so we can only assume she means the last terminal she interacted with, which would have been the one back at the entryway to Sublevel Four (the one with Doctor Glue's journal entries on it). However, the password there was "unity," not "Littlepip," so there is an implication that she's now talking about some mysterious new terminal that hasn't been mentioned anywhere else. This is the kind of minor ambiguity you want to avoid whenever possible, particularly when you're talking about something like a terminal, and there are literally goddamn hundreds of terminals in your story that all do more or less the same thing.

Anyway, this mysterious terminal apparently contained an additional entry in the good doctor's journal, which LP inappropriately decides to listen to at this precise second. The entry seems to at last clear up one of the ambiguities that has been plaguing this story for some time now: the question of whether or not we are supposed to take the zebras' fear of "starmetal" literally or not.

According to the doctor's notes, the starmetal fragment did not contain anything like an evil spirit as the zebras believe. However, it did contain some sort of virus, and this virus was responsible for...something. I guess. I think the implication is that it accounts for some of the weirder magic that exists in Ponyland: Discord is mentioned by name, for instance. It's still not clear how this stuff connects to the larger story of FoE, or why everyone is so fired up about it, but at least we have a better understanding of what it's supposed to be.

>My insides felt like they were twisting up when I realized he had been talking about Xenith. I was not sorry that Doctor Glue was dead. No, not one iota. Not a single hair in my coat worth of sympathy for that disgusting blight on ponykind.
This comment relates to an offhanded remark that Dr. Glue made about a zebra he observed fighting in Red Eye's pits, who is obviously Xenith. There are two things wrong with this. First is that the whole point of this journal entry was to spoonfeed the reader information about space metal, not to share the doctor's thoughts about zebras. Having LP zero in on the wrong aspect of the entry while ignoring the shit the reader is supposed to actually be curious about defeats the purpose of the infodump.

Second, what the fuck is she even mad about? This character was introduced just a couple of scenes ago, and he's already been killed. Neither LP nor the reader have spent enough time with him to have this strong of an opinion either way. Presumably, she's supposed to be angry about all the cruel experiments he performed, which makes sense I guess, but from the reader's perspective it's hard to share her anger. Blood and guts and cruelty are hardly anything new in this story; I would imagine most readers are completely desensitized to it by now (personally, I was desensitized by Chapter 3; now I'm just bored with it). If we're supposed to hate this guy as much as LP does, the author needs to give us a little more than just "he chopped up a few ponies and talked some shit about the protagonist's zebra friend."
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314689
>>314668
>is that how the en-fuck promotes
this is fucking gay. There's already a sound in Enclave you can turn into gay...

Engayve.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314690
>>314687
Do you think it would improve the story if, instead of many factions warring against each other in poorly explained ways, the villain was a combination of factions all working together against the last good faction in the Edgequestrian Wasteland and the tiny city-state they called home?
The villains could have scenes where they monologue at each other and mwahahaha.
And LP could justify recapping those scenes to the audience by saying "Near the end of our adventure I looked through a shitton of old recordings of the Faction Leader meetings trying to find the meeting where they argued over and eventually agreed upon the password for something incredibly important".
Anonymous
82049d7
?
No.314691
314692
>>311564
WTF is this faggot shit?
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314692
314693
>>314691
Hey, at least it's not something less gay like anime girls with huge tits.
Just kidding, don't worry. This is an intelligent literary analysis thread and OP's image is perfect for driving away FE fanboys and pseudointellectuals.
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.314693
wheeze.gif
>>314692
>pseudointellectuals
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314699
saw7qizz6se71.png
Hey is Kkat using the Starmetal and virus to imply the Starmetal brought the Forced Evolutionary Virus from Fallout here?
Just like the meteor in Jojo's that brought a life-culling virus that unlocks Stand Powers with it?
Kkat is so unoriginal he rips off everything. Even Jojos.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.314703
314706 317186 320105
highimpact.jpg
>>314687

While LP is trying to work out how to free the caged unicorns (all of whom are unconscious), the door suddenly opens and Red Eye enters. He immediately switches on a stealth buck and goes invisible, so LP does the same with hers. Incidentally, I thought her stealth buck was out of batteries? For whatever it's worth, the one she has is a "Stealth Buck MK II," but I don't remember if the advantages of this over the MK I were ever hashed out. For that matter, I'm not sure kkat ever clarified how exactly the StealthBucks work in general: how long they last, how they attach to the PipBuck, how they're activated, whether or not they can be reused, etc. I remember being quite confused by the whole "StealthBuck" thing earlier in the story.

In any case, they both go invisible. A moment later, Colonel Fudgey LaRue kicks open the door and bellows something about corn muffins at Red Eye, and is surprised to see that he does not seem to be in the room. He is even more surprised when an alicorn suddenly appears out of nowhere and erects a shield, effectively trapping him inside.

Red Eye's voice, amplified by a bunch of speakers that are apparently also in the room thanks for letting us know about this in the descriptive paragraph btw, kkat, suddenly booms out. His speech is pretty standard supervillain fare: "we're all here now so we can begin, yes I was expecting all of you, yes that includes the little heroine who thinks she's being all sneaky and shit, hurr durr all of this was part of my needlessly convoluted plan, I am a super-genius." Colonel Sassy-Britches McWhiskers, for his part, follows along with the script dutifully: he asks Red Eye a series of mildly-flattering questions, which serve the dual purpose of running out the clock on the StealthBuck, while simultaneously causing Red Eye to spill the details of his idiotic plan. As a bonus, since it's kkat writing this, the conversation lacks even the minimum level of dramatic flair that these kinds of hokey scenes usually at least possess. The conversation does not flow naturally; the dialogue is stiff and awkward, and both parties sound as if they are reading from a script.

To save time, I'll just sum up the broad points of what they talk about:

>Red Eye intends to replace the Goddess (we already knew this, but it's restated here)
>once he becomes the new Goddess, he intends to use the Single Pegasus Project to control the weather or something (we already knew this, but it's restated here)
>he has also figured out a way to get past the SPP's protective shield that no one else could get past
>the shield was designed to be passed by Rainbow Dash and her descendants, as we already knew
>however, as we didn't already know, it was also designed for Celestia and Luna to pass
>an alicorn (actual alicorns like the Princesses, not the ones that Trixie made) is basically an amalgamation of all three pony races (earth, pegasus, and unicorn)
>Trixie's alicorns were flawed because the three ponies who made up the original Goddess (Twilight, Trixie, and those two twins whose names I've forgotten) were all unicorns
>thus, he intends to ensure that the new Goddess is created from one of each kind of pony, in order to ensure a "proper" alicorn is formed
>coincidentally, he has one of each tribe handy right now (Red Eye=Earth, Littlepoop=Unicorn, Colonel Angel-Drawers "Fartboy" Terwilliger=Pegasus)
>in case you haven't figured it out yet, this was all part of his cunning plan
>he lured these two hapless retards here so that the three of them together can become the new Goddess
>thus the new Goddess will be a "real" alicorn just like Celestia and Luna
>thus the new Goddess will be able to pass the shield on the SPP

My reviews of these stories tend to skew negative, because most of the stories we've read have been pretty awful, and my review of this particular story has skewed heavily negative, because this particular story has been extremely awful. However, I do try my best to give credit where credit is due, and I'll say that while most of this story has been disorganized, unintelligible, poorly-thought-out nonsense, there are some areas of it that kkat has clearly put some thought into. This seems to be one of those areas, and despite all of the problems in execution, I don't have as much of a problem with Red Eye's ultimate plan as I'd suspected I was going to.

If you want to successfully execute a plot twist, the best way to do it is to try to think of something inventive and shocking (or at least surprising), but that still makes sense according to the story's internal logic. It's similar to writing a mystery: you want the solution to be something that the reader probably won't think of, but once you show them the answer, they will immediately see that it's something they could have thought of. The pitfall to avoid is trying so hard to shock the reader that your twist ends up being preposterous.

With all of that in mind, Red Eye's big master-plan reveal is actually a lot less preposterous than I was expecting. It's perfectly logical within the context of both the MLP universe and FoE's internal logic: the alicorns in the MLP cartoon have the traits of all three races and represent the ruling aristocracy, so arguably they symbolize the harmony of the three races. In FoE, alicorns can be created from this muck that mutates anything that falls into it. Thus, if you were trying to create a "real" alicorn using an artificial method, you'd want to use all three races as a base.

There are still problems, of course. Red Eye is still a clumsily-assembled character with no clear motivations: we still don't know why he wants to gain alicorn powers or why he wants this Single Pegasus Project so badly. The story in general is also still a gigantic clusterfuck. However, Red Eye's methodology for obtaining his alicorn powers is reasonable enough within the bounds of the story's internal logic, so basically I'm okay with this so far.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314706
314828
>>314703
This seems stupid. I like Red Eye's plan in theory but in practice he doesn't seem smart enough in this scene. Why is Colonel Autism even here? Surely if Red Eye offered a ceasefire to discuss peace negotiations, that would be the perfect way to get himself and Autumn alone-ish in the same room, which would be the perfect inviting target to LP who wants them both dead. He'd easily get his targets into this room without making it seem contrived and incredibly random.

Surely it would make Red Eye seem cooler if LP came in fully invisible and stealthed with no alarms raised, yet he detected her anyway thanks to thermal-vision from a cyber-eye implant and instead of raising alarms immediately and starting a fight, he proceeded to monologue villainously to an underling specifically to run out the clock on LP's invisibility while preserving his own.
He could intentionally try to say dramatic shit to try and get LP as invested as possible. If he's in a meeting with Autumn, even better! The two can talk and Red Eye can play Autumn like a fiddle to get the responses he wants.
She'd end up thinking "I could shoot him now from perfect stealth... Or let him keep gloating about the locations of the bombs he's hidden and assorted backup plans he has that will go off if anyone snipes him right now!"

But once Red Eye senses LP's StealthBuck run low on power thanks to an electric-field-detecting implant in his brain, he immediately turns invisible with his own personally-upgraded and overclocked StealthBuck Mk XV and leaps behind something big before using a cybernetic implant of his or some custom-made hyper-upgraded overclocked PipBuck Mk9001 to start playing loud shit on the speakers in this room at max volume, hoping to deafen LP and everypony else in the room without the shielded eardrums he's given himself.

The Pegasus in the room is fucked, his ears fucking obliterated in seconds. Presumably Pegasi would have more advanced ears since they fly and need better balance and better hearing to hear anything over the wind when flying faster than sound. He'd be incapacitated and unable to fight against being turned into Red Eye's Alicorn puzzle piece.

And LP, the final piece of his puzzle? LP would be left deafened, fighting an invisible highly-dangerous highly-armed foe, and unable to detect where he is thanks to the continued loud noises. And it would be the perfect callback to all that bullshit about radio waves and the Enclave controlling Diamond Dogs/Hellhounds with sound.
Hell, the continued loud radio bullshit would turn LP's healing items against her. Every time LP takes some health potion, that regrows her obliterated eardrums so she can suffer some more and scream like a bitch and then lose them again.
This would be incredibly smart and dramatic on Red Eye's part, taking advantage of the "villain talks too much" cliche for his own purposes. LP's so used to bullshit fiction going her way, she wouldn't question it.

Red Eye, cyborg badass and tactical genius, would never not want advantages over the overpowered twat LP to tip the scales in his favour.
LP could then do something fucking cool for once like use her bleeding ears as a source of blood for her blood magic and send blood bullets flying around the room until they destroy all speakers and then hit Red Eye and converge on his upgraded StealthBuck, destroying it to remove his invisibility advantage.
Then Red Eye could hack into her PipBuck using his own better PipBuck Mk9001 and force her radio to play Red Eye Radio Station 2 aka the loud noise channel she thought she had silenced for good.

And because LP's PipBuck is fused to her leg, she could only stop the sonic agony device by destroying both the device and that leg herself, giving up every overpowered advantage the PipBuck gives her and one leg, maybe slicing it off for bonus drama points. Bonus points if the PipBuck was already established to "use magic" to let the user hear radio and audio tapes without alerting enemies, meaning you don't need ears to hear this magic audio player.

Oh and Red Eye's monologue should include something like "I chose my two Alicorn-buddies well! Colonel Autism rules the Enclave, and they would happily serve an ascended Alicorn if he was a part of it. Bringing back Equestria as it was before the war was always their true goal, and what says pre-war Equestria like an Alicorn ruler? And Littlepip? The Wasteland loves her. They can't get enough of her. All the praise and reverence and worship she's worked so hard to achieve will be mine! Well, ours. Once we are one Alicorn, he will not only have perfect control over the SPP weather machine. He will also be in the perfect position to unify as much of the Wasteland as possible into his new domain!"
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314720
314724
Maybe I'm missing something. Are LP, General Autumn, and Red Eye in the same room right now in RE's cathedral even though RE's unnamed forces and Autumn's Enclave are fighting a war right now and the Enclave's winning?

Has Autumn been established as a "lead from the front, gun weak enemies down with superior firepower reserved for the elites" kind of guy at any point so far?
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.314724
314801 314828
excusememisterenclavebattleshipwouldyoupleasegoawayimbusychanging.png
redeyejustwantstobethemutantwaifu.png
>>314720
>Are LP, General Autumn, and Red Eye in the same room right now in RE's cathedral even though RE's unnamed forces and Autumn's Enclave are fighting a war right now and the Enclave's winning?
Yes. Presumably Red Eye's plan is to ascend before the Enclave overrun his position completely, and then... dunno?

Something that bugs me about Red Eye's plan as a whole - he intends to recreate the conditions that created the Goddess, but why does he expect a different result? The Goddess, as far as we were lead to believe, was far removed from what anyone might call a true alicorn. She wasn't even recognizable as a unicorn, mutant or otherwise - she was a schizophrenic blob of flesh floating in a tank. Does Red Eye expect that he'll be able to hold off a siege on his fortress while painfully morphing together with his worst enemies into an entirely new being?

Does he expect that by glomming a unicorn, an earth pony and a pegasus together in a tank of the same mutagen would create a true alicorn along the lines of Celestia and Luna? There doesn't seem to be anything to suggest that this would be the case. The IMP wasn't even designed to work like that - Twilight intended it to turn regular ponies into alicorns, not to blob them together into gestalt beings. Alicorn Trixie was the intended goal, not the Trixie-Twilight-OC-OC blob that came about by accident.

I suppose one could argue that Red Eye's spent a lot of time studying the IMP and accounted for these factors - there's a lab under the Cathedral at least - but what little we've been presented with suggests that all his prior attempts to create alicorns ended in gruesome failures. Even so, he's confident enough in this plan to gamble his entire empire on it, based on... what?

>Has Autumn been established as a "lead from the front, gun weak enemies down with superior firepower reserved for the elites" kind of guy at any point so far?
He's not really been established as anything except a generic bad guy that likes classical music to accompany him everywhere.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314801
>>314724
Kkat is so gay for relying on the "classical music is evil" cliche so blatantly. He used tvtropes and saw a name given to that cliche like "Wicked Cultured" or "Classical Music Is Evil" and decided to toss them into his story like a nigger tossing a piece of raw chicken and an entire family-sized bag of shrimp into a vat of boiling water filled with fourteen entire spice bottles and ten packets or sugary cancerous candy powder and two entire spaghetti sauce jars.

Good writers have originality. Original twists on old ideas. But it seems the only language Kkat knows is cliche. In the way that the Japanese write english words out of symbols that mean sounds when they don't have symbols for those words, Kkat exclusively writes his story as a sequence of stolen half-baked unoriginal idea fragments. It's like when a small child glues macaroni and glitter and assorted other random things to a piece of paper and calls it art because he was taught this is where art begins and ends at school, imitating the process of making something without figuring out what you truly want to make. No idea forced into this self insert masturbatory fapfic blends well with its neighbour. No idea is enhanced by the presence of another idea or theme. If you told me Kkat wrote this under time constraints I'd believe you because this story screams "first draft before any meaningful revisions made with a concrete idea of where the story will go and what happens in it".

I hope Kkat reads this thread and considers himself a faggot. I hope he proceeds to rewrite Fallout Equestria into something less shit. But I don't know if he could. His fanbase puts him on a pedestal because this worthless "novel" is the only book they've ever read besides Harry Potter and maybe Worm. Normie pseudointellectual faggots can't tell right from wrong or quality from shit. If Kkat decided to rewrite FE he would alienate a circlejerk partly made of "true believers" and mostly made of opportunistic hacks eager to ride the FE train to easy success by making fanfics of the FE fanfic that imitate FE hoping to please FE's fans. These faggots love Fallout Equestria for being too long, too stupid, too filled with stolen ideas. It lowered the standards of the FE community and warped them so thoroughly that originality and unique ideas are as alien to them as vegetables are to niggers who exclusively eat KFC and even unhealthier homemade "hood cooking" overly-sugary abortions. sugarbortions if you will. Or sugarbominations? Whatever. Anyway whether it's a tightly-written and coherent take on the fic named Fallout Equestria with filler removed or a better take on the concept of a Fallout and Pony crossover, it doesn't matter. It would be as foreign to FE fans as a mosque in civilization. They want to remain in this fandom more than they have a reason to remain in it. So if they felt their ability to remain in the fandom relied on it, and Kkat wrote it, they'd abandon the current FE and worship the new FE even if it was actually worse than the last one.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314807
Gohan from Dragon Ball Z-
>crowd boos
...Abridged
>crowd cheers

As I was saying, Gohan from DBZ Abridged has an excellent character arc where this smart, polite, pacifistic boy is forced into devastating life or death fights and made important by a power level that rises with his rage, rage he's terrified of.

There's a scene where the heroes are hiding from some baddies, and the baddies kill kids. Gohan leaps in to save one, ruining the stealth. It's a hollow victory as so many people that alien boy loved are dead now.

and the fight with Cell? Magnificent. They absolutely built up to Gohan losing his shit, AND didn't just do it for cool points. Gohan becoming a cruel sadist who failed to finish Cell off in time fucked everything and everyone. The whole world would have been destroyed if not for his dad Goku stepping in to sacrifice himself and save the day.

But Fallout Equestria sucks more sweaty asshole than gay men who want to eat the poo poo.

Remember how all the moments where Velvet temporarily sets aside her morals are played to try and make her seem "cool"? Tranq darting LP to force her into instant drug rehab, blasting raiders at Fluttershy's Dead Animal Windchime Cottage circa cum Squirrel Stapler turned Child Thunderdome for pissing her off, tranq darting the Hellhound whose life she saved for holding her hostage and saying it's "not smart" to fuck with a medic...

None of these scenes go anywhere or radically change the character permanently or threaten and challenge who that character is.

Even scenes directly intended to make Velvet seem bad like the time Velvet fought with Calamity and tried cheating on him with LP knowing of her crush, only for LP to call Velvet an evil bitch, these scenes don't go far enough. They don't explore this character and examine her failings and force her to grow. These scenes are just there because this story needs to be long if it's going to scare away people who probably wouldn't enjoy this shit story.

Velvet Remedy doesn't grow from wannabe-cleric to real moral cleric or wannabe-medic to violent crusading paladin willing to do cruel things to villains to be kind to their victims. She doesn't respond to a Hellhound she saved holding her hostage by tearing open the staples keeping his wounds shut. She just snarks at him and puts him under after he lets her go. She never grows hard from wasteland exposure or suffers for failing to do so because she lacks consistent characterization. She can backflip and quip and gun down ten dudes with a flechette gun in one scene and then cry over her boyfriend sniping a rapist boy horse chasing a fully grown mare a few scenes later.

Everything in this fic is shallow and artificial like a dirty old man's nuvagina made from scar tissue and infected intestine flesh, and Velvet is the personification of this in more ways than one.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.314828
314873
>>314706
>This seems stupid. I like Red Eye's plan in theory but in practice he doesn't seem smart enough in this scene. Why is Colonel Autism even here? Surely if Red Eye offered a ceasefire to discuss peace negotiations, that would be the perfect way to get himself and Autumn alone-ish in the same room, which would be the perfect inviting target to LP who wants them both dead. He'd easily get his targets into this room without making it seem contrived and incredibly random.
This is kind of what I was getting at. The basic logic of what Red Eye intends to do makes sense, but as usual it's buried under a mountain of kkat's clumsy storytelling. Ideally, this moment would be the climax point in a story in which Red Eye is the primary antagonist and most of the events so far have been focused on stopping and/or unraveling his plan. It would also help if Autumn Blaze had been a little better established as a character, instead of just wedged into the story at the last possible second because Red Eye's plan required a pegasus. If he's supposed to be Calamity's brother, then this should be an important side plot that weaves into the main plot at this critical juncture.

>>314724
>Something that bugs me about Red Eye's plan as a whole - he intends to recreate the conditions that created the Goddess, but why does he expect a different result? The Goddess, as far as we were lead to believe, was far removed from what anyone might call a true alicorn. She wasn't even recognizable as a unicorn, mutant or otherwise - she was a schizophrenic blob of flesh floating in a tank. Does Red Eye expect that he'll be able to hold off a siege on his fortress while painfully morphing together with his worst enemies into an entirely new being?
>Does he expect that by glomming a unicorn, an earth pony and a pegasus together in a tank of the same mutagen would create a true alicorn along the lines of Celestia and Luna? There doesn't seem to be anything to suggest that this would be the case. The IMP wasn't even designed to work like that - Twilight intended it to turn regular ponies into alicorns, not to blob them together into gestalt beings. Alicorn Trixie was the intended goal, not the Trixie-Twilight-OC-OC blob that came about by accident.
This is also a good point. The problem here is, again, that it's never really been made clear what Red Eye is actually trying to accomplish in the first place. We know that he wants to achieve godhood, but we don't really know why. If he's just a standard Dr. Evil type villain who wants to take over the world because reasons, this whole plan is insane. If the new Goddess is made up of three separate personalities, he has no reason to assume that his personality will become the dominant one, or that it would even work that way. On the other hand, if he's some kind of mad altruist who is willing to sacrifice both himself and two others for some kind of common good of the wasteland, it might make a little more sense. The problem there is that this story's idea of "good" is as poorly-defined as everything else.

It's not clear what will happen if you dunk these three disconnected characters in the ooze and make a "Goddess," but there's reason enough to assume that the result will be as bad or worse than the Trixie-Twilight-Whoever hybrid that comprised the first Goddess. Since we don't even have a clear idea what Red Eye is even trying to achieve, it's impossible to understand why he would take a risk like this.

I'll once again restate my objection that the biggest problem this story has is that it's too long and the author tries to cram too many ideas into it at once. Instead of wasting time with all of these moronic side-quests and plot arcs that don't go anywhere, this particular story should have focused on the characters of Littlepoop, Red Eye, and Autumn Blaze in that order. The central plot would revolve around an ongoing duel between Littlepoop and Red Eye, with the main side plot focusing on Calamity's rather strained relationship with his brother. Autumn Blaze doesn't necessarily have to appear much in the story, but we should know a lot more about him by now than we do.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.314873
315081
>>314828
Maybe it would improve the story if all the major viainous factions were on the same page and secretly taking orders from the Enclave, and Red Eye and that evil scientist from a while back (now edited to also be the Manticore guy) and Goddess Trixie and some "King Raider" figure in charge of the raider gang that conquered Ponyville were like the obligatory four-man quirky squad of minibosses seen in many games.

This story draws so much of its structure from games but the best ones set up bosses and minibosses with narrative worth AND cool fights. LP's battles with each one should be a triumph and we should be able to tell how far through the story we've gone based on how many major villainous characters aren't dead yet.

Red Eye could get out of dying by charming LP into moving on and killing The Goddess with a nuclear bomb megaspell he gives to a zebra guard working for him that pretends to rebel and flee with LP and befriend her(in my rewrite I'd make Xigger the Zebra work for Red Eye all along until the lategame). That way The Goddess can still be killed by Xigger and Red Eye while the LP we follow has no idea what's going on but this skips over all bullshit with the memory erasure gambit, skips threatening Tenpony with a nuke, skips LP finding a nuke in Booteg Pinkie's house and giving it to Old Appleoosa only for its mayor to give it to Red Eye, perfectly streamlines this while making it clearer for all the FEfags out there that LP did not actually defeat the goddess and her zebra who is conveniently immune to mind readimg and has a convenient nuke she basically eventually found did all the heavy lifting.

Then Red Eye's plan to start nonconsensual fusion dancing in the mutagenic cum room with LP and his "boss" Colonel Autumn would be a shocking twist like in DMC3 when who the main villain is changes for a bit. Red Eye could have unicorns working for him waterbend the mutagen around hoping to hit Autumn and LP but LP tips a vat of mutagen onto Red Eye so he mutates into a big goo monster like Bio-Broly from the shit Broly movie and he wants to grab LP and Autumn now to make himself whole and keep himself alive.

Red Eye could try to grab them and yell "I will become your new Princess!"
and Autumn could dodge and pick LP up while flying and she shoots the goo and Autumn says "Not very classy for someone's dying words!".

Red Eye could yell "Unify your bodies with mine!" while vomiting mutagen at them and Colonel Autumn could yell "Ew, what are you, a faggot? Go to faggot hell, you gay blob of alicorn alicum!"

Colonel Autumn and LP could work together to put Cyber-Overpowered Red Eye down, grow to respect each other, and then fight in a super dramatic final fight. Autumn could fly off halfway through and return in a big battleship and force LP to fight it. When LP wins Autumn emerges from the ruins in a giant mech made of clouds and thunder. And when LP beats that Autumn takes some Party Time Mint-Als and other magic drugs mentioned earlier to become a big hulking mass of meat that's harder to kill than the literal tank LP just fought. But eventually they are both so exhausted they crawl to each other on their chins and LP headbutts Autumn so hard his head shatters like a watermelon leaving LP the new leader of the Enclave by right of trial by combat.

It'd be really fucking stupid and plagarized from 3 different games and a movie and anime but it would make the target audience of goomers cum literal buckets into more buckets until their house has more buckets than skyrim.
Anonymous
513e7d6
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No.315020
315081
Wait a minute, that arc near the start with the dragon fight and rock-breaking prison... did it actually matter to the plot?

I guess it technically introduced Gawd but she didn't do anything in that arc.

All that time, all those words, all those bullshit twists, as if Kkat was making shit up as he went along and retconning things with "new" info whenever he decided to change what he'd written so far instead of just rewriting it... Was it all for nothing?

Did learning the prison was managed by Diamond Tiara matter?

Arbu was filler too. The BOS civil war was filler. Steelhooves was filler. All that bullshit with Crusader Maneframes was filler. Everything with the Brotherhood of Applejack Rangers Of Steel could be cut and nothing would fundamentally change the world. LP would still randomly trust the first friendly town she found with a megaspell she finds in a retarded location even though she knows this town associates with one of Red Eye's towns. It's not even as if killing the dragon there mattered because Red Eye had his own bigger badder one all along with super duper cyber parts.

God, Fallout Equestria really is a motherfucking mess. "master of Chekov's Gun" my muscular ass.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.315080
315081
I don't think it was a good idea for LP's "heroic" journey to be kickstarted by Velvet unintentionally ruining her life.

It raises the question...

If Velvet chose someone else to remove her PipBuck before fucking off or never removed her PipBuck before fucking off or never fucked off at all, would that mean LP never left her comfortable home to become a hero?

If LP stayed home she and her vault would have eventually been attacked by the Brotherhoof Of Applejack's Steel Ranger Outcasts anyway. But would she be able to help fight them off if she lacked help from Calamity and Steelhooves and all the guns and armour pieces she picked up in the Wasteland?

Of course LP was always an OP instant expert at everything so she probably could have fought them all off solo the second she found a gun and instantly mastered it... How boring.

Maybe if the story started with LP's quiet life in the Stable getting fucked to death before LP leaps into action to save Velvet's life and Steelhooves leaps into action to save her life, those 2 vault/stable ponies could get kicked out and forced to team up with Steelhooves as reforming the BOS Of AJ's Steel Rangers and then getting dragged into DJ Ripoff's fight with General Autumn "Red Eye" Breeze's Enclave that would streamline this story and skip a shitton of filler. Combining the enclave and red eye makes sense since their war barely matters but I'm not sure if combining Goddess Trixie and her Alicorns with them would make sense... then again the Fake Alicorns went down like bitches and barely mattered too.

Fallout is a RPG. A role playing game. Characters are supposed to gain EXP per kill and conpleted quest and level up to improve their stats and skills. But LP starts off "basically perfect" and never has to grow at all. This just seems stupid.

The story's got too much filler and it stars an OP Mary Sue who never grows or learns anything that matters. Imagine if Arbu actually fundamentally challenged and changed her as a pony! But no, it's all just shallow surface-level bullshit for LP to sometimes angst over and then get over whenever it is time to be the most efficient murderhobo Kkat could think of.
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.315081
315083
>>314873
>>315020
>>315080
Jesus fucking christ, you post like Kkat writes. Pick a point and stick to it for longer than one sentence without spinning off into "wouldn't it be cool if this dumb shit was actually the kind of equally dumb shit that I, personally, enjoy"?
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.315083
315084
>>315081
Have you ever seen a video essay on youtube where somebody talks about an eighty hour game for five hours, condensing everything wrong with it into a relatively short timeframe? Have you ever seen one where a twenty minute cartoon episode is talked about for fourty minutes, or an hour, maybe two hours or more because talking about why the media sucks takes longer than experiencing it for yourself?
I know I suck at reviewing so I'm trying to get each point over and done with before I move on to the next.
This story is dumb shit thanks to its structure. By rejecting a serious and unique adult look at what a post-apocalyptic Equestria might function in favor of ripping off Fallout's iconography and blandest game and the simplest reinterpretations of its elements possible, Fallout Equestria can effectively only be edgy misery porn or a mindless popcorn flick.
I know adding "totally sick boss battles" where Littlepip does sixteen backflips before shooting Red Eye who fused with his cyberdragon to become strong enough to rip up and throw an erupting volcano wouldn't magically make this story into high art. But scenes like that wouldn't look out of place among the guro-indulging hyperviolence and godawful quips and religious dedication to avoiding meaningful introspection. This story is almost impressive in its determination to remain as shallow as possible. Morals are treated as flexible guidelines rather than unbreakable foundational moral principles and when the heroes violate their morality this is treated as something excusable to overlook, as if LP and pals have a literal "karma score" number that's too high for the occasional misstep to dent. Littlepip's Littleshits treat purging the wasteland of sinners as their moral duty but they are no saints and they've never thought deeply about what virtue means to them or for the world, EVEN THOUGH Spike The Watcher pretended that was going to be a big deal at the start of this story just like the Gardens Of Equestria.
Velvet's occasional violent moments and LP's slaughter of Arbu are played as triumphant revenge fantasies, not tragic moments of a character losing their way temporarily before hitting rock bottom and desperately struggling to atone for their sins and find their way once again.
Every time LP "wrestles with her demons" and "struggles against the pony in her head" she basically asks herself if she's become "corrupted kindness" or not and then decides she hasn't.
Has any character meaningfully challenged her beliefs and forced her to justify them?
LP feigns modesty but she loves the spotlight almost as much as she loves slaughtering enemies. A better writer would paint this stereotypical videogame protagonist as a damaged figure forced to harden too soon and abandon most (but not all) high-minded principles for cynicism yet on a quest for redemption/quest to protect the one thing left for this character to give a shit about, or a chilling sociopath pre-desensitized to violence yet imitating normal emotions out of convenience. But the shaky stereotypical story start of "bored girl is thrust into adventure" doesn't fit LP. Neither does her "nosy nerdy shy girl" persona. Nothing about this character informs or influences any other part of her. We're never told she fantasized of violence while bored at her job growing up. Kkat might have written a backstory to say she got her Cutie Mark of a PipBuck after lockpicking and hacking and using the radar function any other pony with a pipbuck could use, but her lust for violence remains as unexplained as her pain tolerance and instant commando skills.
This is a character shallow coomers will call the best-written and most tragic heroine in all of fiction. If any character deserves to have her story criticized it's hers, no matter how long that takes.
This story wants to be successful. Not fun or deep or introspective or meta, just successful. And to accomplish that, it is fundamentally dishonest about what kind of story it is.
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.315084
315086 315087
knowyourhorses.png
whatarewegoingtodointhemutagentanksenpai.png
>>315083
Point is, you can't meaningfully critique a story by calling it out as dumb, shallow schlock and then listing half a dozen different ways it could also have been dumb, shallow schlock. You wouldn't go into a restaurant, buy food, complain it tastes like shit and then suggest that the chef ought to use cat turds instead of dog turds next time.

FoE's problem isn't even that it's dumb schlock, at the end of the day - there's nothing wrong with a bit of bombastic action adventure. The problem is that Kkat is trying very hard to write anything but schlock but just doesn't have the writing experience, self-awareness or range of understanding to present his ideas in a way that isn't loosely copied from a videogame or other popular media. The scale and scope of the plot imply a sweeping epic with the whole of Equestria at stake, but the humor is composed of blunt references and sex jokes, the big reveals are based on dated memes, the only consistent emotions any character expresses are anger and juvenile lust, and the narrator bounces back and forth between highschool philosophy and overwrought whining with a goldfish's attention span. Kkat thinks he's writing a troubled but righteous protagonist saving the world from greater evils than herself at great personal cost, he just doesn't have the chops to pull it off and make it believable.

I think part of the reason that FoE is so frustrating to read, and paradoxically maybe why it is/was so popular, is that if you switch off your critical faculties and look at it in strictly the most basic, low-resolution terms, giving Kkat the benefit of the doubt at all times, you can vaguely see the appeal. In an "I'm stoned and hung over so I'm going to watch cartoons at 6am" sort of way. It has the vague framework of a grand adventure, and is written in a high-emotion/low-detail style that likely appeals to people that are easily manipulated (oh no a pony skeleton, I'm sad now!).

It doesn't need more schlock, it doesn't need deeper introspection, it doesn't need to be an ironic parody of itself (though it could, in theory, be any one of those things if that was the goal). Setting aside total rewrites, what it needs is a ruthless editor and a writer with the ability to look at their own ideas and go "no, that's dumb, let me scrap it and try again."
Anonymous
6edc71d
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No.315086
>>315084
>pic 1
I'll take a lewd raider-hors, with extra fight, please
Anonymous
513e7d6
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No.315087
>>315084
You're right, that makes sense. This story was meant to be a "Literary Epic(TM)" like LOTR, full of "deep" ideas and tragedies so massive Kkat couldn't bring himself to not underwrite and overwrite them(he wastes too many words on high-schooler wangst poetry and doesn't spend enough words making important shit hit as hard as possible), so I should judge it from that perspective instead of saying "Kkat should have made this kitshlock into fun kitshlock".
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.315155
315236
Drugs are a big part of Fallout but does anyone here like how this story handled them?
Making the hero struggle with something (especially a vice like drinking or gambling or lust or addiction) is a time-honoured tradition.
But Mentats/mintals are supposed to be dangerous things. Party Time Mentats/Mint-als are mentats fried in mesquite honey or booze or something.
And despite all that focus on one specific subtype of MintAls we barely remember anything about Jet and Psycho and Buffout or whatever ponyish name Kkat decided to give those canon fallout drugs.
Anyway...

If the audience is going to take Mentat addiction seriously, that addiction can't just be magicked away by a doctor.
I know that's how it works in the games but in that same game you reload guns faster by switching to different guns, instantly reloading the first by putting it away. That's a gameplay convenience not a canon worldbuilding element.
LP can get addicted to something less intense like Jet, but Mentats?
If LP struggles with it for her whole life without ever losing a battle or two to it, it's not as big a deal as the author's making it out to be.
For the audience to take Mintal addiction seriously above other addictions it needs to fuck a character up for good.
Maybe LP could make a friend in the wasteland whose love of drugs fucks her up and kills her.
I know! She could make other mistakes that get her scarred/crippled now and then so the audience will see actions and especially mistakes have consequences. See that life in the Wasteland as a travelling murderhobo actually results in wounds and scars and agony if you're not in the lucky 1% that's supremely over-geared (pipbuck autoaim and OP guns and OP power armour) and always able to find convenient healing items to fix everything ever.

Perhaps LP could find a town where gangs fight over selling drugs to locals. LP could be forced to help the least evil one take over for profit and their support in an upcoming war against the Enclave, while feeling awful about helping "damn dirty druggies" she'd rather shoot. But then their hidden depths are revealed and LP wonders how many raiders she killed had families and she feels bad. MORAL COMPLEXITY!
>*guitar riff*
Along the way everything the audience needs to understand about every drug that matters is explained to LP and their effects on ponies should be shown to the audience in memorable manners.
LP shouldn't find the party time mintals recipe in a stupid nonsensical place and then throw it away, she should learn it during this arc.
Hell, all those scenes where LP fights random nameless raiders/slavers could display villains using drugs to explain to the audience how drugs work if you don't want an arc dedicated to them.
Imagine a scene where a raider on Buffout (strength boosting drug. I forgot what kkat renamed it. Was it something stupid like Buck?) overpowers LP and almost beats her to death only for his heart to literally explode and he collapses, blood leaking from mouth and eyes for maximum edge. Or to be less edgy his heart could just give out.
Again, LP was introduced to party time mintals by Calamity who called them a good hangover cure even though the comedown's a bitch and they are highly addictive. That doesn't fit the mostly-simpish personality he's shown after that scene.
How is the audience supposed to take her first Mint-al use seriously when it was played up as a joke?

Her absurd preposterous telekinesis would be less retarded if she could only do that while on Mintals because then once she stops using the stuff she could never do any preposterous OP magic bullshit again. Bonus points if characters praise her for her telekinetic might and that makes her feel guilty because she's secretly taking drugs to get that strong. But using mintats should make her SUFFER especially during the comedown. Hangovers. Headaches. Blackouts. Blurry vision during a firefight that makes her shoot the wrong thing sometimes. Vomiting. Pissing herself. Joint shakes. Temporary retardation. Absence seizures. Joint pain. Strokes. Speaking gibberish and passing out when trying to charm someone. Gaining tourettes. Magic not working properly. Colourblindness that makes her shoot friends instead of enemies sometimes. Maybe even something supernaturally awful like losing a few years of lifespan per pill. The worse being "forced" to use these drugs to keep being OP becomes for her, the more audiences will feel bad fof her, right?

Am I on the right track here?
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.315236
>>315155
>when LP picks up more FUCKING memory orbs and random documents and audio logs
https://youtu.be/KL1FErzQWI8
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.315374
TheCrossAlphaOmega42.jpg
Remember when Red Eye threw Littlepoop into his cliche thunderdome with random barrels of radioactive goop scattered around the arena, and LP escaped by flying herself and Xenith out of the arena?
Radiation seems like a dangerous uncontrollable thing to put in your thunderdome. Frequent fighters would suffer damage from taking in too much radiation. Sure it makes sense as a videogame hazard for homosexual incompetent level designers who don't understand worldbuilding or think anything through but it doesn't make sense as something a book character would do in a serious setting. And this story doesn't want to be dumb fun, it wants to be serious, right?

Surely Red Eye would be a more unique and interesting character if his thunderdome was a radiation-free wrestling ring where his strongest battlers put on wacky wrestling costumes and personas engage in nonlethal show-fights for the entertainment of his people each week whenever Red Eye doesn't want a slave of his punished.
When Red Eye does want a slave punished he could send that slave into his WWE ring and tell his fighters to gang up on the slave and fight for real. Ladders! Tables! Chairs! Sledgehammers! Cage matches! Pyrotechnics weaponized by a crafty hero or rigged against the hero by a brutal cheating villain! The uniquely demoralizing horror of being thrown into a ring rigged against you full of enemies cheered on by a crowd so caught up in the fun they forget to think!
Turning the thunderdome into a caged wrestling ring also makes sense because thunderdome battles to the death can result in career-ending injuries for the pro fighters such as death. Anything short of instant death can be cured with healing items but they are presumably expensive enough for a lethal thunderdome to not be worth it unless you really want somepony gone.

It could also humanize (ponify? Equinize?) Red Eye by making him someone who likes a normal human thing like wrestling.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.315930
Hey is glim still alive?
Anonymous
f5915f0
?
No.315957
316001
Glimglam is on vacation. He will be back, but he will be out for a few more days at least.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.316001
>>315957
I hope Glim's alright, and I hope he enjoys his vacation.

I don't think this story is complete.

I know it's absurdly long and overstuffed with unnecessary fat but at the same time, the story isn't a complete story and neither is its side story.

Locations full of unimportant and unfinished characters are introduced to us only to never matter as anything more than set dressing at best. Look at how much we were told about the town with the Gizmo knockoff who had a bodyguard named Gizmo or something. We were told so much about that place but what did it matter? Was anything we learned about the location necessary for understanding what was going on there? Was the location anything more than a place LP visited only for the Enclave to attack it? What would have changed if LP visited a place we were already familiar with and the Enclave attacked that? It would probably improve the scenes by putting characters we've come to know and (in theory) care about in danger during the Enclave attack. It would certainly help the story's pacing. But Kkat really wanted to show everyone what he did with Gizmo when interpreting him and his/Killian Darkwater's Junktown from Fallout 1 into this tale, so Kkat wasted time setting that up. Fallout 3 too many shallow underwritten locations full of first-draft writing and Kkat wants to sprinkle in obnoxious "references" to them by coping as many as possible while sometimes telling people about his "totally superior" headcanoned ponified version of things.

But on a more fundamental level, putting the location problem aside...

Fallout Equestria is two stories, LP and pals murderfucking the wastes back to health and how Equestria became the wastes LP is murderfucking. But by the end of this tale there are still unanswered questions about how Equestria fell and whose fault it was, and that's not done for thematic "war is bad and who is to blame matters not" purposes. The stories of how the mane six lived and died and threw some hopes into the future and left some sins behind for their successors despite their best efforts are incomplete because some Wasteland problems lack a pony to blame and some mane six members have undetermined fates. Meanwhile because LP starts off as perfectly suited for Wasteland combat as possible(starts with food and other supplies, PipBuck with Radar and AutoAim SATS, stealth and lockpicking and hacking and repair skills, god-tier telekinesis, melee combat legend who can kill lifelong raiders with shovels, never touched or saw a gun before yet mastered it instantly on day one) she never has to grow tougher as a response to the challenges of the wastes or develop over time in dynamic and interesting ways.

Many stories give the hero a moment of failure, something to regret, a mistake to feel bad over. They challenge who this hero is and what he does. The worst stories do it because tradition or because the Hero's Journey JPEG told them to. While the best stories do it to explore the character and who he or she really is and must become to avoid making this mistake again.

LP might sometimes feel bad about robbing those Brotherhood Of AppleSteelJackRangers or genociding Arbu and sparing only the children but that hasn't forced her to confront her own callous looting greedy aggressive murderhobo behaviour or try to be more sympathetic and fair in the future. The story fundamentally wouldn't change if the entire Arbu arc was removed, it would only lose one publicity stunt meant to shock readers and give this pseudo-epic tale further illusions of depth.

Instead of picking a random other character like Velvet or Steelhooves and spending 4k letters fantasizing about what that story could be, I'll say I have enough experience with this mindset to recognize the telltale signs that LP was designed from a "what would make this character strong" perspective rather than a "what would make this character/story interesting" perspective. LP as a character would need more than a few small tweaks that reuse as much of the original FallEq as possible. LP, the Equestrian Wasteland setting, its backstory, and this story's plot all need a comprehensive rewrite that fixes all the mistakes holding this rough first draft back from being a functional story about an interesting protagonist in a coherent setting.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.316271
316968
Also we still have no clue who Colonel Autumn is as a person. We don't know if he's the type of villain who kicks puppies while going mwahaha or the type that thinks he's the real hero even if it means he has to put down a few rabid dying dogs here and there. We don't know if he wants to minimize casualties or maximize them. We don't know if war gives him night terrors or a boner. We don't know if he thinks cybernetic enhancement is kek or cringe. We don't know what he thinks of Red Eye or the Enclave or DJ Cuntpocalypse or Littlepip or Steelhooves, or the factions they represent, or what he thinks of the little people like Velvet and Crane, or what he thinks of Zebras like Xenith. We don't know what he thinks of the Enclave, the Dashites, the Wasteland, Littlepip's deeds, or anything. He is nothing but a living reference to a Fallout 3 character famous for his lack of personality and backstory and forced "rival to the hero" role. Colonel Autumn in the original game loved to start cutscenes with overpowered flashbangs that paralyze the player while he starts to yell and bluster and make demands. "Give me the codes!" he cries. "Give me the codes NNNOOOWWW!" because the author can't think of convincing or compelling dialogue. Fallout is a game where the personalities on display are as limited as the vocabulary of the writers. When people are mad or want to sound tough they whip out the same generic tough guy act with a generic level of profanity or an absurd level of profanity. Autumn is the baddie who works for the Enclave which is bad because it either wants total control of a machine that purifies all water in the state once or wants to infect that machine with a virus that will kill all irradiated people and especially muties. Because we all know how much lefty authors love making spiteful mutants a metaphor for oppressed minorities in futuristic settings when robots aren't an option.

Kkat had an opportunity to completely reimagine Colonel Autumn here. To transform him and his cartoon-fascist Enclave into more than the most evil thing he can imagine(the homosex-loving warmonger racist nation he thinks the United States is).

Countless fans have written alternate takes on F3 that improve the story... why didn't Kkat read any? It would be easy to swap the motivations of President Eden the retarded supercomputer and Autumn. Suddenly Autumn is one cunt who wants to kill all muties while the smart supercomputer wants his faction to have a monopoly on clean drinking water in the wastes. Alternatively play up Eden as an evil machine programmed to exterminate muties and Autumn as a kindhearted conflicted internal reformist who wants the Enclave to make America great again no matter the cost.

Wouldn't it improve the story if Colonel Autumn delivered a bigass speech to the Wasteland over the radio full of iconic character dialogue? Everyone loves big villain speeches. Something that really tells you who he is like the Major from Hellsing Ultimate. "I like women, I love war" and all that.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.316968
317083
>>316271
*Fallout 3
fallout 3 has limited personalities and writing. 1 2 and NV are masterpieces.
https://youtu.be/CSKFRw5Q2vc

I'm still trying to limit my number of words used but...
Isn't it fucking crazy?

Fallout 1's Master: I want the world unified as transhumanists. No more racial differences. Master race only. I am globalist nazi- oh no, we are sterile. Guess they call us trans-humanists for a reason because I'm going to blow up and kill myself plus over 40% of my mutants. Goodbye.

Fallout 2's Enclave: Lmao we're america, you fucking mutie. We're gonna burn your puny tribal village down for existing. Heil elitism. Frank Horrigan insults the idea of talking things out with him, too.

Fallout 3's Enclave: We either want to genocide DC or own a monopoly on a water filter that either cleans water before dumping it back into the Pachahamac or press a button that magically purifies all drinking water in DC.

Fallout NV: Actual writing masterpiece too deep to sum up here. Robert "Look out the window to see the fate of democracies, fuck the NCR for repeating America's mistakes" House and the New Crapifornia Recucklick and Based Legion all have their own compelling arguments for the shit they pull.

Fallout 4: Why is the Institute making synth gorillas for no reason when the Enclave invented intelligent talking deathclaws around 200 years ago? Why does the Institute kill people and replace people with robots? Why did they slaughter the Commonwealth Provisional Govt? Why even bother making synths? Why invent cybernetics to a degree that keeps Kellog the mercenary from aging then never touch them again or offer them to the player? Why crown the player the new leader of the institute no matter how you have acted in the Commonwealth as long as you aren't actively fighting the Institute itself? Why let Shaun die of cancer when brain in jar, brain in supercomputer, brain transfer into synth, what House did, and more are all ways to prolong one's life? All questions the director of the Institute and its members simply cannot answer because there are no excuses for this kind of lolsorandum behaviour.

Don't get me started on the non-faction that is the Minutemen you instantly repair(why do old generals who abandoned/betrayed the cause and demanded payment for protection which is against the Minutemen's rules get to rejoin with their old ranks like nothing ever happened?), the Railroad that wants to free some synths and blow up the only ones able to make synths, and the Brotherhood Of Steel that abandoned its "be nice" and "preserve and hoard tech even if it means being mean" missions to blow up the biggest producer and owner of tech in Boston.

Fallout Equestria lacks an original vision for what a Fallout-inspired Equestrian wasteland would look like or what could bring Equestria down into a Fallout-inspired state of affairs because it would rather reference Fallout, MLP, and godawful brony memes. Zebrakind is arbitrarily forced into the role of Communist China even though the author lacks the balls to call Communism shit and evil, while Equestria is arbitrarily forced into a delusional leftist's idea of what "a racist imperalist supremacist nation hungry for resources" looks like.

Kkat's attempts to add "Zebraness" to the zebras by making them drug-loving violent nigger refugees with do-anything potions and an irrational fear of the night and stars and Luna just muddies whatever message the author wanted to send by making ponies steal land from Diamond Dogs and rely on Zebra for coal only to end up warring over it when Zebrican King-protected Zebra pirates started kidnapping poners and killing the Wonderbolts sent to save them.

If there was a Death Note and MLP crossover, the laziest thing its author could do is what Kkat did: Retell Death Note with a cast of OCs designed for the setting plus a pony coat of paint and some canon characters dead in the background. The clash between two different settings is a big part of what makes crossovers interesting and fun!

Imagine a crossover between Batman and MLP. The Dark Night Rises featuring Twilight Sparkle. Twilight teaming up with Batman to fight Bane so she can get home. Twilight probably wouldn't like Gotham but she'd want to save the place before leaving.

If Batman raised a mindwiped filly Twilight, the resulting reinterpretation of Twilight would be better suited for the world of Batman and less like Twilight. She would think Gotham is normal unless she visited nicer earth cities.

Now imagine a Batman fanfic about OCs exploring "Originalized" Gotham 200 years into the future with Batman and Bane and Terry MacGuinness and the cast of MLP as a bunch of dead geezers in the backstory mostly responsible for all the new threats and villains the OCs face today, except everything is a reference to something in the Batman Arkham games even if it's incredibly anachronistic and causes the hero to run around at random sidequesting without a coherent main plot or goal for most of the story. That's Fallout Equestria.
Anonymous
f81de2f
?
No.317083
317088
>>316968
>If there was a Death Note and MLP crossover, the laziest thing its author could do is what Kkat did: Retell Death Note with a cast of OCs designed for the setting plus a pony coat of paint and some canon characters dead in the background. The clash between two different settings is a big part of what makes crossovers interesting and fun!
There is and it's exactly like you just described it. This is why I'm proud over the crossover setting I made between fate and mlp. Instead of the 7 pairs fight over the grail, they fight over Luna's dreamcatcher. It's still thought to be a wish granter as it catches your dreams and make them real but a dreamcatcher is suppose to catch nightmares so in fact upon being touched it will release a millennia of the collective nightmares of the ponies of Equestria. Luna made it to help ponies while she was gone.
Anonymous
f81de2f
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No.317085
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Hope your doing well, GG.
Anonymous
513e7d6
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No.317088
Twist_smiles_ID_S1E12.png
>>317083
That's a cool twist!

Kkat also sucks at characterization. A good character starts out with one Archetypal role he fits into and not just a literal "he's the tank with high HP and Strength" sense. In a team dynamic sense. Is he the team leader? The team dad? The team baby? Cynic or optimist? Sarcastic or genuine? What masks are worn? What lie that the character believes must die?

Sokka from ATLA isnt just "the quippy guy with melee weapons" in a party full of quippy guys/girls
He's a loveable sarcastic prideful goofball who often brings his suffering upon himself, making that pain funny. He's more than just a comic relief character, more than just the plans guy, more than just his weapons. Over time he has to grow and mature, he's a smart and brave kid but he's not perfect at the start. If he was he'd have nowhere to grow and nothing to learn over time. And his interactions with other characters are brilliant. And not just with the main cast. People cried when the moon happened. People still cheered when he ended up with Suki unless they prefered Toph. This story knows how to play Sokka's antics for laugh without making Sokka himself a joke, he can have serious romances and not all his pain is funny.

Compare that to Bolin from The Legend Of Korra, who is only the party's comic relief and earthbender and Mako's little brother. He's a dipshit joke character who sometimes gets to earthbend well. He's dating an airbender chick and once dated Korra before she cheated on Bolin by kissing his own big brother in front of him and blaming Mako for liking the kiss, he even has a Momo knockoff pet, but this is never explored or used to highlight interesting aspects of his personality because he's a tool, a goddamn cliche'd trope, not a character. It meant aomething that Aang the last airbender went around with the last Sky Bison and Ring-Tailed Lemur. Bolin just has a pet for the same reason Korra had a dog, the writers don't know how to recapture lightning in a bottle so they're ripping themselves off blindly.

At first Twilight seemed like just The Smart One(tm). The nerdy asocial type, albeit with a big heart and a tendency to take it upon herself to solve problems with or without the help of others. More depths were revealed over time. Sometimes she gets too stressed out and overthinks things, she wants to understand everything and hates it when she can't, she's more than just the nerdy pony who likes books. She can be brave, she can be scared and be brave anyway, she can take on more than she can handle, she can be all sorts of things and have all sorts of interactions with other characters. She can be the episode's good guy or wrong guy and the writers don't have to warp her character to do it.

Compare that to Calamity. He's a guy. He has an accent. He has shotguns. For some fucking reason this flier at mach bullshit uses mouth operated shotguns with an autoaim saddle that somehow doesn't interfere with his flying even though IRL fighter jets avoid using shotguns for a reason. Sometimes he is the party's straight man and brutal pragmatic survivalist and sometimes he's randomly praising Velvet the twat for good qualities she never demonstrated and sometimes he's a retarded kleptomaniac who giggles like a schoolgirl at the sight of sick loot to steal. Sometimes he shoots his shotguns at bad guys like raiders and slavers and rapey kids and assorted mutant monsters even if it makes his girlfriend pissy for a while. He struggles to shoot old friends/family members from his enclave days but has no problems with asking Regina McVagina Pussyfeathers to kill his family members for him or letting other teammates kill Enclavers for him. Once he worked for the Enclave and somehow did absolutely nothing wrong ever but one day he got buttmad when his squad wouldn't join in with him when he wanted to get involved in a ground fight that didn't concern him at all. He punished his troops for not wanting to "play the hero" with him (i forget what that punishment was) and his bosses fired him but not before branding him with Rainbow Dash's cutie mark and letting him leave with his sick overpowered Enclave gear which he proceeded to hide away and practically never use upon restarting his life as a hired bodyguard for trading caravans until LP showed up and threw herself into danger at him, impressing him into befriending her and joining her murderhobo quest for supposed justice.

This is painted as a heroic origin story because the author refuses to see nameless NPCs in this setting as desperate poners just trying to survive the best they can even though that would make things more tragic and edgy without the need for an immortal blood-magic half-alicorn unicorn OC protagonist who yells "Luna clop me in the clit! Celestia's burning orgasms!" and pretentious monologurs about "corrupted kindness" and "that little pony in me" and her feelings when not being "given orgasms" (that's such a jarringly and unnervingly juvenile way to describe sex, that's fucking baby talk but gayer and unironic, I fucking hate it) by her lesbian radio 3dog knockoff aka "homage". Pun intended.

At his core, Sokka is a smart kid affected greatly by the Water Tribe's loss of men. His self-confidence is low. He wants to be the man for his family and prove himself to his dad and his dad's friends. But he's a dolt who needs to learn true masculinity is about being a mature heroic smart guy with a sick sword and boomerang, not a blustering egostistical dumb thug with a gay club.

At his core, Calamity started this story as "shotguns yeehaw pegasus former enclave" and ends this story the same way. GAY.

A competent writer could salvage this character by starting him as "yeehaw shotguns retard with occasional smart moments but secretly hardcore patriotic enclave operative spying on LP" and grow into "rebel who Became The Mask and Went Native all Jake Sully and shit".
That could work.
But Kkat's anus doesn't work thanks to gay sex so he's full of shit.
Anonymous
19f8cd0
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No.317186
>>314703
>My reviews of these stories tend to skew negative, because most of the stories we've read have been pretty awful,

Glim, when you get back I have a question for you. Are there any fics that you've read in this fandom that you've found to be genuinely good? What are your favorite pony stories? Or do you find almost all of them to be the same kind of tripe suggested here?
Anonymous
513e7d6
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No.317485
317486 317489
blaren047__89734.1595617606.jpg
This might be a rather small complaint but even though Calamity is related to the Enclave and Steelhooves is the oldest living AJ Rangers Steelhood fighter, LP's friends have no major connections to the world or its events.

LP went on a wacky journey around the world and barely anypony had anything to say about the world or what they saw in it. Nobody learned anything from it or had their beliefs challenged.

Calamity could, after seeing some really fucked up shit or being betrayed by opportunistic wasteland thieves, yell "Why the fuck did I even come down here? I had a family in the enclave, damn it! Why did I give it all up just to risk my life helping you fucking mud-munching sacks of shit?!" and then get in a big argument and he could grow as a character as a result. Maybe storm off and then 10 minutes later swoop back in to save the day.

Steelhooves could have something to say about the validity or invalidity of Applejack's Brotherhood Of Steel Rangers and their goals (retrieve Applejack's tech and specifically from those dumb dirty wastelanders such as guns and power armour, or help ponies, preserve AJ's tech, take advanced tech at random when the author forgets which pony invented something like the Crusader Maneframe, etc) and learn something or question something every time he sees something interesting.
Like how Veronica from FNV had a lot to say about her traditional Brotherhood chapter's isolationist thieving advanced-tech-hoarding ways. Such as pointing out how the NCR has more trouble with Fiends (junkies) and the Legion than they had with the Brotherhood.
Or how Raul from FNV had a few things to say about old people he met, since he struggled with age and "should I be mexican ghoul cowboy or mexican ghoul mechanic?' questions.
Fallout Equestria is an absurdly violent place. Why the fuck wouldn't an AJ's RangerhooSteel never say "ponies were never meant to have guns" or something?
Hell, Calamity could do the same. He could talk about the Enclave and what it told him about different groups and how shocked he is at the successes or failures of different communities with different ideas.
These companions could argue. A lot. And when they argue they can reveal more of their personalities and exposit about their respective factions organically. Velvet could try to play peacemaker whenever her biases don't force her into taking a hardline stance for anything that makes her feel morally superior, forcing LP to play mediator between the three.

Could be fun.

Velvet could have looked at a town where refugees and hippies and hobos in the gutter are unrealistically nice to each other despite the lack of any authority figures (or a more realistic ethnostate rules itself without authority figures) and said "wow this place is so much nicer than the stable I grew up in because everyone is free to be themselves and there is no Overmare overseeing us and monitoring us at all times and dictating our lives for us. After seeing so much blood and gore I was starting to think that's what happens when there isn't an absolute power around to govern with the biggest gun. But these good armed people defend and help each other. This gives me hope that freedom can be a valid answer. Maybe even the best answer. Freedom from evil and freedom to be good."
Velvet could also have her obnoxiously liberal ideals challenged by the great successes and freedoms of an Enclave town that embodies all she believes to be icky and racist. Bonus points if Calamity came from that town.

This question may reveal an incredible lack of creativity on the author's part, but when you ignore any unnecessary backstories that are utterly irrelevant to LP's tale, how many of the locations Littlepip's Littleshits visited were just places where violence happened?

Too many.
Anonymous
513e7d6
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No.317486
>>317485
Too damn many. These locations aren't used to explore ideas or give the heroes something to react to in a way that reveals or challenges or even changes who they are and what they value. These locations are floors on DMC's bloody palace minus the good combat and stylishness. Too many locations are just places where violence happens and lore terminals/audio logs exist or places where sidequest NPCs and lore terminals/audio logs are waiting ready to give you quests that send you to violent places with more stupid fucking lore documents and bullshit twists and random bloated filler info designed to make this simplistic tale seem deeper than it is.

Wearing a wire to record Gizmo's confession, blowing up the entrance to a scorpion-filled cave instead of going in and shooting everything inside, dealing with a cannibal doctor, gathering info on the legendary Deathclaw that turns out to be a red herring, Fallout 1 had quests deeper than their violence.
NV had murder mysteries in Novac and the Ultra-Luxe, a goddamn clockwork Hitman 2 mission where you assassinate or save the NCR's president, war prep, and more.

An early mission in Fallout has the first friendly town you encounter send you to a cave of monsters. Radioactively enlargened poisonous scorpions. You can fight them or seal the cave with explosives cleverly. It's a simple dnd quest because Fallout learned lessons from pen and paper tabletop RPGs and wanted to recreate that in part for players everywhere.

An early mission in Fallout Equestria has the first friendly town LP encounters send her to a cave of monsters after a trip through water. Chimeras from a Vault where the experiment was putting men in charge. LP kills every last chimera and even though Calamity gets bitten and poisoned she makes sure to rig the stable to explode and then go door to door and loot absolutely everything that isn't nailed down before escaping with a poisoned dying Calamity in tow. Calamity doesn't mind how LP prioritized loot and explosions over his life and the poisoning has no side effects.

You see the contrast, right?

The literal video game "go there kill shit" quest has one smart bypass, tutorializing killquests and the occasional possibility of bypassing combat with a skill check.
The book's rewrite bloats this simple "solve Beginner Town's scorpion cave problem" tale into a colossal tumor that prepares the readers's anuses because it's all downhill from here.

>kill this prison boss who's secretly a dragon, because a hired defence company dislikes how this prison boss is going against their master's wishes" (at least I think that was the Griffon's motive?)
a simple explanation for another of FE's absurdly bloated arcs.
>all-seeing radio whore atop rich tower ruled by secret society wants rare records from a Manticore-filled building with the mad scientist creating them at the top and wants you to help her hijack enemy radio broadcasts and then infiltrate Red Eye's lands as a slave to try and assassinate him
>red eye foils your assassination attempt and threatens your gf and makes you take a nuke to kill the goddess with the help of zebra friend whose mind conveniently cannot be read
>goddess makes you loot Canterlot for the Black Book. And visit Zebratown for no reason
>protect town from Enclave
>kill Colonel Autumn of the Enclave and Red Eye at Red Eye's gay cathedral to stop both armies, turns out Red Eye wants to fuse the three of you into one big third-female futa alicorn that can fuck the all-female alicorns and rule equestria and control the old weather-controlling machines
Once you take what's actually happening away from the convoluted and confused and exhausting manner it is presented, the story's actually rather barren when it comes to meaningful decisions made and meaningful actions taken.

BREVITY IS THE SOUL OF WIT, KKAT!

I wish Kkat used the Edgequestrian Wasteland as an opportunity to explore different ideas. philosophy. people and ponies. the human element in Fallout and how magical pony shite affects it... instead of getting caught up in his desire to reference and rip off as many fandom memes and Fallout 1 2 3 and NV but mostly 3 iconography pieces as possible.

Your REFERENCES and your stupid grimderp EDGE get in the way of the story, Kkat!
Anonymous
0db1105
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No.317489
317490
881f962efec5a2d9cde4d2952176c685.jpg
>>317485
>Yugioh pic that has nothing to do with anything
Kek. I don't need to say never change.
Nah, I don't wanna start any drama but I can't help but wonder sometimes.
I like the sentiment of this post but I can't help but think about this specific part (3.48-4.10) of this vid, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_V7q8XhuBk , when I read your posts. That's why most of your posts are hit or miss to me.
Anonymous
513e7d6
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No.317490
317491 317493 317496 318801
>>317489
>yugioh card
It's a visual pun
That's "Darkness Metal, the Dragon of Dark Steel".
It's absurdly edgy just like this story.

I love that Terrible Writing Advice channel but I hate how he refuses to pick a side in the artistic culture wars. Are you pro freedom or anti freedom or do you want to stick your head in the sand and grab your ankles for the SJWs and hope this appeases them, JP? Pretending the culture war is someone else's problem keeps people from recognizing what a threat SJWs are and what small things you can do to hurt the leftist regime. And the more you do that, the quicker you eventually realize jews are evil for creating the modern marxist left and a lot of other stuff.
Do you think I'm too agressive with Kkat when it comes to the story? The idea of calling a creator morally bankrupt or retarded for making something crap never sat right with me. So I've tried to keep what I say limited to calling him incompetent and gayposting. Am I doing it right?

As for the "this story isn't subjectively for me" part...
FIM is subjectively for little girls. But its high quality attracts men.
Fallout is subjectively for me. Well the Fallput games are. Fallout 3 is not a fallout game, it's a Bethesda game wearing Fallout's skin. It is low quality and targeted at stupid people, though it reuses old fallout iconography wrong to try and bring new fans back since it knows its quality cant do that. I have played high quality things meant for retards before and this isn't one of them.
A crossover can do many things. For example, focus on the interactions between characters from different settings. Or the interactions between different settings. It can explore characters when they are sent to different settings. There are many opportunities this story squanders because it is so laser-focused on vomiting as much unedited and uncut stream of consciousness bullshit onto the page as possible while sucking Littlepip off and giving her shit to kill and feel things about.

I know a Fallout fanfic can focus on whatever the author wants, but he chose to focus on sucking his OC's clit like he thinks it'll grow to rival those of hyenas after enough attention. He failed to rival the great worldbuilding in better stories. Like Fallout NV.

I know this story would not improve if it was edited to subjectively appeal to me more by adding in sick fight scenes or big tittied monster girls or huge guns or a holy order of based crusaders who want to murder their way out of this hell or die trying and end up in heaven.
But...
adding the latter would improve the story by providing a counterpoint to LP's murderhobo antics and asking what the world would be like if everyone could "fight their own wars against the world" like LP. Only Senator Armstrong from MGR asked Raiden that question as far as I'm aware. His goal was to create a world where anyone can fight their own wars, where the strong survive anything and the weak die. Has any other piece of media raised that question in that way? Direcrly challenging the hero and his methods by making the creation of more of him the goal of the villain?

Making the fight scenes a more cerebral affair instead of constant showcases of LP's boring invincibility would make the fights more varied and creative.

And solving complaints I have raised like "LP's friends feel like videogame NPCs instead of real people with thoughts and feelings and opinions on the shit they see" and complaints Glim has raised like "We still have no idea who the enclave are or what they want at this point despite how important they've been for so much of this story" would unquestionably improve this story.

This story doesn't have to be for me specifically, or contain what I personally enjoy. I just wish it was high-quality, instead of a lazy remake of Fallout that centers absolutely everything around terrible OCs like LP and Red Eye while sprinkling in FIM iconography (Fluttershy's cutie mark is on the first aid boxes and Applejack invented power armour) at random and saying the cast of FIM died horribly failing to stop (or worsening) an apocalypse only Littlepip can fix.

I know a Fallout and FIM fic doesn't have to contain good worldbuilding but FIM and especially Fallout did.

I know a MLP and Fallout fanfic does not have to contain anything that made the original Fallout games or MLPFIM good.
This OC-obsessed Fallout retelling wearing a Cutie Mark skindress doesn't.
Anonymous
0db1105
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No.317491
>>317490
>Do you think I'm too agressive with Kkat when it comes to the story?
No, that's not it. It's just the timestamp section that I refered to that I think about when you make certain types of posts that start with, "Hey, wouldn't be cool if Littlepip was blah blah blah but instead was blah blah this. Kkat could have written this story like blah blah this and have cool stuff like blah blah this."
Sometimes these posts work for me and sometimes the fall flat. The ones that fall flat are when you basically say, "What if this was a completely different story altogather, wouldn't that be cool?" Which you're correct in but it's not really critiquing the story anymore since the story isn't remotely like that and would never have been even if Kkat was a better writer. It's when you move too far away from the story with your hypothetical versions of it, that I roll my eyes.
This is not a major problem. It's minor if any but I just don't think it adds anything.
Anonymous
0db1105
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No.317493
317514 317663
>>317490
I didn't mean that the entire vid applied to you.
>I like the sentiment of this post but I can't help but think about this specific part (3.48-4.10) of this vid
Just so you know. I was only saying that this interval of time in the video applied to some of your posts.
Anonymous
0db1105
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No.317496
>>317490
You do you, of course. I'm just giving you my opinion.
Anonymous
513e7d6
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No.317514
>>317493
That makes sense. Some of my advice is "There's a missed opportunity to add believability and variety to the setting here or exposit exposition better and elaborate upon and flesh out these bland one-note characters there" and some of it really is just "I'd personally enjoy this story more if it had sick awesome fights that made Dante Sparda's and Madara Uchiha's jaws drop" and "If I was rewriting this I'd cut out all the filler I can and then rewrite the parts I don't like to be cooler according to my literal-hitler weeb tastes since adding legitimate depth would require absolute overhauls to bring the setting and characters and actual themes of the story in line with what the author intended the themes and message to be".

I still can't believe the author intended the Enclave to be a metaphor for America's response to 9/11. I mean I can totally believe it because the author said it was, but I'd never guess that from reading about this pro-homosexuality but anti-ground ethnostate that wants to eliminate the same slaver army Littlepip hated at the story's start before taking absolute control over the Wasteland. I hear America/Jews had its troops eliminate tribal elders and other forms of authority they disliked and replace them with boy-fucking tribal elders loyal to America. I hear America/Jews bribed these tribal elders with Viagara so they could rape boys better. Where's the Pegasus Viagara tastelessly named after a horse word or fandom meme like Wingboner, Kkat? The NCR was an attempt to rebuild America going horribly wrong and learning nothing from its mistakes and their own, the Legion was the result of a man who thought he'd learned all there was to learn from history trying to rebuild Rome, an answer to questions raised by Greece's femininity. The NCR and Legion differed and mirrored one another in so many fascinating ways... but what is there to say about the villains in this tale? Kkat can't give nuance to any villain other than his favourite one, and despite the story's bloated size it didn't use its runtime efficiently to set up all the major factions involved in this war and their goals so Kkat is rushing the ending and speedrunning his explanation of who the villains are. It's a shame he's not a good speedrunner. What would the wasteland look like if The Goddess won? What if the Enclave won, or Red Eye? People out there still debate over FNV's best ending. Is anyone still talking about FE besides us and FE fanboys sucking its cock solely because this gives them a sense of belonging within the FE fanboy community?

On an unrelated note, why has there never been a scene where the Raiders hide in a faraday cage somewhere in a town they've taken over while setting up crippled and gagged and caged peaceful townsfolk/captured but useless slaves here and there to draw in anypony relying on their PipBuck NPC Radar and its ability to tell friend from foe? The PipBuck would only detect friendly NPCs trapped in town but not the raiders hidden from the radar. The radar would only consider the slaves red-marked Hostiles if they were hostile towards the wearer of the PipBuck. That seems like it could be used as a good excuse for why the Raiders would keep live captives in cages and put dead bodies up on sticks besides "our legendary cruelty gives us a scary reputation good for keeping threats away and convincing farmers and scavengers to give tribute to us for their protection".
Anonymous
513e7d6
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No.317655
317660
LessPersonality.jpg
MorePersonality.jpg
betterfightinggame.jpg
I'm probably making too many of these posts. I try not to make them unless I think of something new to say.

Ages ago, I said something like "Why doesn't the entire party get Power Armour?" and the response was "That would be excessive because Steelhooves's power armour is so OP. Plus these characters are defined by the weapons they use and roles they fill in the party so giving them all the same power armour and huge guns would blur them together".

and I just realized, that's really profound.

That's a MAJOR problem with this story.

Characters are defined by how they kill, but not why.

Littlepip=telekinesis, heavy objects, all sorts of guns, and sometimes stealth.
Xenith=stealth and unarmed melee.
Velvet... was it a lethal flechette needle gun or a nonlethal tranq dart gun? I forget. Oh and when super pissed she uses normal guns.
Steelhooves=power armour and Big Guns(TM).
Calamity=shotguns and flies in light armour when not wearing Enclave armour.

But they all basically fight the exact same way against foes who basically fight the exact same way. Nobody's bolder/cautiouser/sniperier.

They all basically point their guns and fire them at baddies who act near-identically at all times whether they're desperate raiders wearing scrap and using scavenged shitguns, dumber wild animal mutant monsters, organized trained military foes in power armour, the same but with flight and centuries of isolationism shaping their military doctrine and philosophy, or alicorns in a hive mind that can fly and use telekinesis and heal themselves with radiation.
(Speaking of which why haven't we seen alicorns carry barrels of radioactive goop around? Fucking hell Kkat expand your fucking mind for a change instead of your anal cavity. Unleash enough radioactive goo you're immune to and you'll never need to leave cover, it can cut off escape routes and slowly kill foes cruelly)

Many say fighting game characters are "Just" defined by how they fight, but it's deeper than that. They're recognizeed by how they fight, defined by why they fight, and how they fight is defined by who they are.

Street Fighter has Ken and Ryu, two incredibly similar basic fighters with mild differences between them to highlight where their personalities differ. Ken is Ryu with more flashy kicky style and less focus on the fundamental basics. Akuma (pure evil man who tempts Ryu into embracing the dark side of the force) and Evil Ryu (Ryu possessed by his inner darkness) have less fundamental basics and health but more combo-focused aggressiveness. Dan's a fucking joke parody of all the Ryu bootlegs out there. There are like 7 more less-important Ryu knockoffs like their sensei and some chick but explaining them all would be a waste of time. Street Fighter's incredibly basic as far as the fighters go and most characters are one-note cliches to embody their archetype. Fatass joke retard Rufus, evil chinese authoritarian Bison, traditional chinese heroic kick-chick Chun-Li, brutish black dirty-boxer thug Balrog, stylish british boxer Dudley, these simplistic characters fit a theme and it works for them.

Mortal Kombat? What really separates the two ninja rivals/friends Sub-Zero from Scorpion, when it comes to how they fight? One uses fire, one uses ice. Almost everyone is just their fighting style, personality is rarer than good animation here. However Liu Kang's "Fatality" has him uppercut a motherfucker over 10 feet in the air nonlethally, then as the fall kills the foe he gives some traditional chinese bow (I assume?) STRAIGHT TO THE PLAYER WHO TOLD HIM TO PERFORM A FATALITY. He's a Xiaolin monk, they don't kill. Monika and Sans fucking wish they had this kind of ability to refuse the player's will. In a world of killers taking their carnage beyond reason he's staying true to his principles (until they fuck that up in later games).

I shouldn't get started on Samurai Showdown or we'll be here for hours talking about how the American "I am justice" dude is unfazed by killing while Nakoruru visibly hates killing. The dude with many swords uses all his swords in one bullshit combo, because killing's art to him. His art. The Iaido swordsman with AIDS is still graceful while fighting and turns away because he doesn't want to cough his AIDS at you.

Now look at Littlepip's Littleshits.

What defines how Xenith fights?
Is she cautious, careful, fearful? Honourable or a dirty fighter? Defensive of her teammates? Is she overly aggressive and heedless of her own mortality? Does her undying loyalty to LP cause her to take risks LP would rather she not take?
Does she systematically disarm+kill or go in for the kill first?
She may have one bullshit Paralyzing Palm attack but that says nothing about her. Her martial arts skill is just there because she's The Unarmed One
Ain't like she carries her family line's centuries-old fighting style and keeps it alive even when everyone else uses guns out of "Loyalty"
Ain't like she learned ancient zebra-fu teachings in ancient books she dusted and secretly read inside Red Eye's museum, and combined that with how brutally ponies taught her to fight in the arena, symbolizing some quest to keep what's worth keeping about zebras while discarding the rest for what's pony enough to work
Ain't like she learned martial arts in secret beneath the noses of every guard to improve her chances at survival. or escape. or to become a better servant to Red Eye
Ain't like she worked hard to learn the way of a dojo an inferior family member was supposed to inherit before she was enslaved for RE
Ain't like she learned martial arts for any kind of character-specific reason
Anything I just said could have added depth to this meme character who arbitrarily fights unarmed for no reason.

Same with the others. Nothing character-wise connects Velvet to her needle gun, Calamity to shotguns, Steelhooves to his grenades and guns, LP to "Whatever's at hand".

Closest we get is Velvet=Armoured Dress, LP=Riot Armor, Steelhooves+Calamity hate wearing AJ's/Enclave armor.
Anonymous
513e7d6
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No.317660
>>317655
oh also the martial arts style Xenith champions could explicitly be "The style of Red Eye's goons".
And whether she uses this style out of pride or out of habit while hating the style and Red Eye would say a lot more about who she is as a person than this goddamn barebones imitation of a story ever will.
It would make sense for RE to teach nonlethal unarmed combat (Especially The Paralyzing palm, that's a godsend for slavers) to his goons. That'd be smart worldbuilding right there. So would RE giving all his troops (or at least the best, and guards/enforcers for slaves) cyber-enhancements so they can be better than their slaves and foes.
It'd also say a lot about Red Eye if his scientist buddy had some characterization as "The evolution-obsessed stereotypical evil social darwinist who loves eugenics and inflicting horrific experiments on people only the strongest survive". If Red Eye loved the guy for giving RE his own cyber-parts or hated the fucker and considered him a necessary evil, it would say a lot about Red Eye, that minor character evil doctor dude, and RE's society.

And if Xenith willingly trained the hardest learning Red Eye-Fu hoping to impress her beloved boss and become one of his bodyguards,
Or trained the hardest hoping not to be considered inferior and killed,
Or trained the hardest hoping to escape one day, or just survive as long as possible under Red Eye by winning his thunderdome fights,
That would express a lot about who this stereotypical loyal freed slave girl is.
Could subvert that cliche by making Xenith hate LP at first and wish she could remain working for RE forever, this would force LP to argue in favor of LPness (haha i said pness) instead of Red Eyeism and steadily convince this loyal slave to tyrannical forced labour that rebellion (and some nicer-seeming societal idea like letting people contribute how they choose to their towns and find their own Cutie Mark and setting-appropriate talent and destiny) is the better way.

This story pretends to be dark and edgy but the edge is just there for self-gratification. Is the story REALLY that dark when it comes to its OCs? Silver Belle the bootleg Pinkie got a happy ending. Nothing ever goes extremely wrong for LP besides that one filly who ran in fear from LP during an enclave attack, got zapped into ash, and filled a bottle of LP's for maximum "edge". It's not like that filly was a core character who had "Take me somewhere" or "If I die, use my body against who I hate, make me into a bottle of Pocket Sand and throw me at him" as his dying wish. That filly's death was a throwaway moment of shock value just like the death of Steelhooves, who LP once gave zero fucks about when he fell off their fucking airship. All the gore blends into bland mush and all the "shocking" injuries LP takes mean nothing when healing enough to forget about them forever is only a few health potions away. The corpse decor? Forgettable meaningless set dressing. LP's a boringly invincible hero and her victory is always assured thanks to her supreme strength and absurd luck. No pain is too great for her and no temptation is too temptation (unless it involves killing cannibals for making her feel ripped-off, by "making her" play the hero for them without admitting they were cannibals first).

This story isn't really all that dark at all. The invincible hero and her invincible friends can't die in a way that matters

Steelhooves accomplished his "dream" (make AJ's Rangers not evil) instantly long before he ended up with nothing to do and died

Has this hero ever failed? Has this hero ever been punished for doing the right thing? Has doing the right thing ever been hard for this MAREY SUE?
This crossover fanfiction is a paper skeleton with bloated fat imitating flesh and bone. It lacks intelligent ideas, it lacks original concepts, it lacks unique things to say about the fall of equestria, rise of the wasteland, and inevitable victory of LP.
I know a story doesn't have to be smart, but this one pretends to be smart and its fanboys/tranny fan"girl"s praise it like it's the smartest deepest saddest coolest most fun literary epic of all time.
I feel a moral obligation to take dumps on Kkat's so-called magnum opus.
The only "Magnum Opus"y thing (haha i said pussy) about this story? I doubt Kkat will ever make anything better than this, because I doubt he'll ever honestly listen to criticism of this story and create a better sequel/rewrite.
Then again ACTUAL SPOILER GLIM DON'T READ THIS A sequel would be damn near impossible considering how the story ends. LP becomes weather jesus, a later generation uses the Gardens Of Equestria offscreen to heal the world so hard the next generation openly doubts their PTSD mom+dads horror stories.

God damn it all, the building blocks for Kkat to write something smart with Xenith(who was practically kidnapped from her slave life mid-fight by LP and forced into life as an individual) and Velvet(who manipulated LP into helping her escape her comfortable singer "slave" life for a deadly life outside as a doctor) and Calamity(enclave soldier fired for wanting to help the ground-bound poners only to become nothing but another caravan guard until he met LP) and Steelhooves (Feels trapped by his membership to an evil organization he should have set on the right track 200+ years ago) and DJ Rugamuncher Ripoff(Radio whore useless lesbian with no skills besides badmouthing some and narrating the wasteland for others, still finds a way to be useful to LP and friends, can also make bombs for some reason out of Alien "Star Blasters"TM which she has for some reason) and LP (Was considered nothing but a toaster repair pony back home but became The Wasteland Saviour instantly outside) but Kkat just didn't feel like trying hard enough to see the deep themes of rebellion and freedom he could have inserted into his story and fleshed out instead of just declaring the Enclave and Red Eye and the Alicorns "Fascist" and calling it a day.
Anonymous
6edc71d
?
No.317663
317691
>>317493
>I didn't mean that the entire vid applied to you.
And yet, it does
Anonymous
6edc71d
?
No.317667
317732
Good news though, this one "totally doesnt" apply
https://youtu.be/-v4R2ZcxPlA
Anonymous
22cde73
?
No.317691
>>317663
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGvrMgUijX0
I'm a coward so I'll just stay on the sidelines.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.317732
317733 317976
>>317667
I don't know why this is said sometimes. When the criticism of the Silver fic got to parts where he was annoying and wasn't supposed to be I learned a lot about writing. It would be easier for you to justify hating me if I had more in common with detestable people. This thread is about a detestable fanfic. Would you like to say something smart about its failings as art, as entertainment, as a crossover, and so on?
Anonymous
6edc71d
?
No.317733
317734 317976
>>317732
>I dont know why this is said sometimes
I know, which is why its amusing to take the piss at interval
>where he was annoying and wasn't supposed to be
Theres that revisionism. I was sure it was there somewhere
>It would be easier for you to justify hating me if I had more in common with detestable people
Oh? Do I need to be justifiable in your eyes in order to not like something/someone? Is that how it works? Because you see yourself as not detestable, that makes criticism of you not okay?
>this thread is about a detestable fanfic
Ostensibly, however you have made this thread about you at every available moment. Sven however has been quite arbitrary is his positions and moderate on his anaysis/criticism, so when (not if) he opts to criticize you and you attempt to disregard his position, Ill be more than happy to reinforce it.
inb4 the usual deflections, false allegations, ad hominems, logical fallacies and false appeals, etc.
>would you like to
You will know what I would 'like' to do when I do it. Whether (you) approve or not is irrelevant.
Psssst, not responding is the correct answer
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.317734
317736
>>317733
If you call me gay, how is not responding the right answer? Afraid of me saying "No, you are gay"?
Then again it would save me time if I stopped replying to timewasting insults like that. And time is valuable when you're working on an indie game.
Anonymous
6edc71d
?
No.317736
317756
>>317734
Has anyone called you gay should they? Is that an admission?? I thought we were talking about your inability to take/accept criticism without deflection and logical fallacies; false equivalence in this case.
Anonymous
02d82b1
?
No.317747
317756
As an outsider, I recently started playing fallout new vegas and fell madly in love with it. So I might have to care a bit more about this thread in the coming future.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.317756
317786 317976
>>317736
Do you really think blindly agreeing with any criticism, no matter how valid or invalid, is the only correct way to take criticism?
Would your view on criticism remain the same if somebody criticized one of your accomplishments?
>>317747
One of us! One of us! :D
I bet this story would improve if it was all Fallout NV plus FIM and no F1-3. This story crams four games worth of iconography and references into one bloated story even though those four games take place years apart from each other, and many contain the remnants of organizations featured in earlier games or the consequences of actions that happened in them. Jacobstown would make no sense if Fallout 2 hadn't happened yet. FNV has the overall best worldbuilding of the whole series so that's a great starting point for crossovers.
Then again, Kkat would probably just shoehorn some OC copy of Oliver into being Oliver, showhorn Twilight into becoming House, and give Caesar a pony name. That's basically all the ponifying he did for the Enclave/Pegasus Enclave and Red Eye's Slavertopia.
Anonymous
0842bc4
?
No.317786
317812
>>317756
Since when doe not responding equate to blind agreement? Thats a textbook false equivalence.
>I bet you wouldnt't
No one lives their life free of criticism, but nice attempted tu cocque
If you're going to respond, at least abandon the logical fallacies
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.317812
317907
>>317786
What fallacy do you see in the post you replied to? Instead of calling speech you don't like a fallacy, try to explain what makes it seem fallacious to you.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.317904
hGXxtc.jpg
I was writing a longer version of this but my power went out. Enjoy the revised version.

Fallout Equestrias character design fucking sucks faggot dick like Kkat.

look at it. fucking look at it. I want all of you to look at it.

Good character design conveys character. Like how in Street Fighter Ryu's design conveys his ascetic monk simplicity to suit his "simple all-rounder dude for beginners" role and angry american fat bastard Rufus has a braid and body shape that reminds one of a cartoon bomb with a short fuse. Good character design can also subvert expectations like Red Riding Hood from Darkstalkers who seems innocent and harmless but represents the monster that is Man, all deceit and guns with cruelty and murder as a business. Or Leo Whitefang from Guilty Gear whose blonde lion mane and fur coat and lion shaped energy blasts scream Lion so loudly you'll almost forget he's king gorilla of assrape island.

But this shit? This lazily steals iconography from FIM and Fallout. LP wears the Stable/Vault suit and PipBoy because she is the main hero. Velvet has Fluttershy's cutie marks on her First Aid Box saddlebags and Calamity wears Braeburn's Jacket as seen in Pony Creator and AJ's hat despite being an Enclave Pegasi with no reason to talk and dress cowboy. Velvet has a green Phoenix named Pyrelight just like Celestia's normal phoenix which Fluttershy liked. Steelhooves is just ponified BOS armour without any customization or identifying feature or even AJ's cutie mark painted on him. The scarred zebra is a zebra.

Even though LP quickly put on other armours in the fic and got shot for wearing raider fashion and is currently wearing sierra madre riot armour no fanart author ever got that far into the story. They all just copy art from each other for the views. Guaranteed feature on Equestria Gayly, every time.

LP was never visually described besides her shortness and unicornness so the first artist to guess at her dull bland colours correctly was told so by Kkat and the fandom went with it. Calamity is brown because edge legally forbids you from making characters like him brightly coloured and he dresses like the wrong mane six member for no reason. He has no reason to talk cowboy and wear cowboy fashion, it's not even a disguise he canonically puts on to separate him from the enclave, ponies just talk and dress like that for the same lack of reason Zebras had Caesar's Legion and PreWar Communist China shit shoehorned into them. Nothing in Velvet's design screams singer or medic or pre war aristocracy or descendant of Rarity and Sweetie Belle unless you know to look for the white on her or know what Fluttershy's mark meant in the show and what it means now that Fluttershy was shoehorned into being the inventor of first aid boxes. And nukes. And MAD- oh sorry "CARE". And first pony to learn why these don't work. The spiteful will accept your mutually assured destruction offer and only fear plain old assured destruction.

Steelhooves is literally just BOS armour ponified. No unique branding or paint job or customization. Then there's Xenith the generic zebra but with a body coated in countless and equally meaningless scars. No interesting outfit or patch or brand. One big scar would serve the design by drawing attention but a coating of scars just says "this character went through some shit". You don't need to know what a scar or tribal marking means in-universe to know what it means in visual language but a coating of scars just means the character got scars somehow. Compare that to a burned eye like Zuko's or smaller more iconic scars like those of Guts and Shanks. There's a reason why we say "less is more" when designing characters! More doesn't always mean more and nothing ruins a piece of art quite like "MORE MORE MORE Syndrome"!

If you saw these characters and had no connection to or knowledge of pony or Fallout you'd think they were dogshit because they are. They rely on stolen iconography to turn these bland generic amalgamations of dull colours and meaningless edge into things visually tied to the two sources of this fic's "inspiration". Someone is expected to look at these grim dark edgy ponies who aren't your grandma's ponies and assume there's something worth reading about here. Nothing is visually said with these characters beside "our creator thinks we look cool and edgy in a good way". Kkat clearly went to the "bright colours makes your OC shit but dark colours and just using your favourite colour for the body without any theming makes your Pony Creator OCs brilliant, hurr durr at least its not a rainbow haired pink alicorn or red and black alicorn hurr hurr" school of character design. Which is a surprisingly common misconception in the mainstream "brony" fandom since it's full of pseudointellectuals who repeat whatever their favourite "professional analyst" amateur video essayist and tf2tuber with 200 subscribers says is true.

Fallout Equestria's character design is a failure of conveyance. Style over substance, and it's not even that stylish.
Anonymous
0842bc4
?
No.317907
317962 317974 317976 317977
>>317812
The assertion that not responding to criticism (specifically, if your responses are going to be logical fallacies) is comparable to or even in the neighborhood of 'blind acceptance' is a false equivalence and a bit of a strawman, both of which are logical fallacies.
As in, they are dismissible as not having any relevance, as they rely on rhetoric as opposed to logic.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.317962
317974 317976
d29jf8x-5d954d61-a17d-4bc0-98f2-ca245889a76c.gif
>>317907
You're using a lot of words on me because I won't behave exactly how you desire, but why do you feel entitled to the right to dictate how I behave? Does that sound fair to you?
Why do you obfuscate what you have to say with this pseudointellectual vocabulary? You're butthurt at me but you don't know why and can't explain it. If this was really about any legitimate criticism you'd explain your problems instead of trying to bait me into investing into a conversation. I don't feel like acting like the long-suffering father of a teenaged girl like you and trying to coax out your reason for your emotional displays. This is a thread for talking about FE and you're too obsessed with barking at me to notice where you're barking or remember why you're barking. I know you have nothing of value to contribute to a discussion about me because you're already engaging in your "plug your ears and just like a SJW critical theorist, insist any dissent is invalid and proof that you're right" tactic. It's tiresome. I don't feel like playing this game. And if someone else tells you to fuck off, you will.
Do you think everything you say is valuable no matter how you present it or conduct yourself? Why nip at my ankles no matter where I post instead of trying harder to stay on-topic? Why try to remind me of your feelings towards me? Are you really that bothered by the fact that I don't respect you? You haven't behaved respectably in this thread. You are a high-pitched persistent whining in the corner of a room where those more mature than you are remaining on-topic. Some people don't want to bitch about me or rant at me all the time, some people have hobbies and lives to get back to, and critiquing overhyped fanfiction is a valid hobby. It's not a fallacy for me to tell you I know you are still mad at me, and it's not a cromulent fallacious gastrointestinal double-blind prisoner's dilemma for me to roll my eyes and move on with my life instead of bowing down and thanking you for the time you waste trying to get me to validate your feelings. It's not a fallacy for me to tell you I don't care about your feelings. Now comes the part where you exaggerate with the "all"s and the "never"s and claim I'm ALWAYS like this and I NEVER respect criticism and it's NEVER your fault and ALWAYS mine and I NEVER take you seriously and I'm ALWAYS upsetting you and I'm ALWAYS insensitive for getting so worn down by your hyperfemininity that I just don't care about your histrionic spiteful whiny bitching any more. Maybe if you mix some smart-sounding words in there nobody will notice you're full of shit. I'm surprised you haven't been jumped by a gang of gays eager to suck the soy from your bloodstream.

I know there are good people on this site who won't be fooled by the dishonesty and persistence and jewish bullshit that constantly flows from the mouths of my haters. I know there are people who won't see a handful of clowns barking at an innocent man and assume he's to blame for the constant poor behaviour of his haters. I should probably pretend to take you seriously and keep asking you to clarify your statements even though your response already proved you're just a twat eager for a tiresome mud-slinging contest. Have y'all ever considered using /ub/ for something besides barking at me now and then? If I occupy your time in this thread you're not shitting up someone else's thread. But if you waste my time I'm not working on my game. After this many years of the haters and their constant irrationality I just don't see a reason to indulge them any more or hold back on the insults. I'm flattered that you respect me so much that you crave my replies and more than anything, crave my validation of you and your feelings. But you haven't been behaving like a respectable person in this thread. So please, stop trying to bait me into arguing with you over my quality as a person. It's getting embarassing. There are more respectable things you could be doing if you had the capacity. Like exercising, reading based literature, and deriding Kkat's masculinity based on his inability to write good literature.
Anonymous
f692d7b
?
No.317974
318017
>>317962
>Why do you obfuscate what you have to say with this pseudointellectual vocabulary?
While I can agree that this particular Anon does have a bit a of a tendency to, maybe not necessarily for the purpose of pomp but maybe sometimes he does (we're all humans afterall), use a big words in his posts. Perhaps it's my limited vocabulary that's talking but I think that one should use simpler language so that people can understand. Of course, concepts like "Differentiation" in math, can only be simplified so much before you have to explain a literal course in your speech.

However, in this particular case, I don't think it applies very well.
>>317907
This post was his response to you asking what fallacy he saw in your post so he explains what he thinks your assertion was and how it's a fallacy. I say thinks here, not really because I doubt him but because my brain doesn't really work right now and I have trouble comprehending what has transpired here on a whole so I haven't confirmed if his right yet, but this post in of itself still has a claim and a reasoning behind it.

I just think that,
>but why do you feel entitled to the right to dictate how I behave? Does that sound fair to you?
Doesn't follow. I mean how do we dictate how anyone should behave in the first place? He's pointing out why he thinks your argument is fallicious from an objective standpoint. You retorting that he has an obsession with you doesn't really prove his post wrong. Not saying he can't have an obsession with you because what do I know. I could be accuse of the same. but it's not really related to what he posted about, which was the fallacy he claimed you had in your post.
Anonymous
379f8e4
?
No.317976
317977 317980
>>317756
>>317732
>Do you really think blindly agreeing with any criticism, no matter how valid or invalid, is the only correct way to take criticism?
On one hand the individual in the purest sense
On the other the collective in the purest sense
>>317733
>Psssst, not responding is the correct answer
It is the correct answer. It's the nonanswer that means you prove one way or another through your actions.
>>317962
>>317907
Sometimes he has a fucking point. (That's more often than you might think.)
>BREVITY IS THE SOUL OF WIT
>Your REFERENCES and your stupid grimderp EDGE get in the way of the story,
>There's a reason why we say "less is more" when designing characters! More doesn't always mean more and nothing ruins a piece of art quite like "MORE MORE MORE Syndrome"!
You have to extract the essence of what you're saying. (You alao have to extract what others are trying to say as well.)
I understand every reference you make, but I find myself knowing it's a throw away way to explain something without reducing to the point you're trying to say.
Everytime without fail when anyone pokes you like this you respond like that.
>>317907
You do the same pokes time and time again. I know you've answered, but you gotta go the extra ten miles. Or you're just the cause for another spergout.

>>317962
>I should probably pretend to take you seriously
Yeah shit would get solved real quick.
>keep asking you to clarify your statements
Except you'll run into a problem is at a certain point you'll see a flaw and take it as something else, further more he states what he thinks the issue is. Previously through all of the previous posts multiple times.

My advice is to construct your posts as you would games. Every word, sentence, paragraph, green, reference, wholething, can be thought of that way.
Adding little Easter eggs, or a theme, or a style, or anything else. Polish it up have the gameplay (word/read feel) be excellent or just good enough. Who is this for?

You said something quite valuable that also applies to yourself.
>Do you think everything you say is valuable no matter how you present it or conduct yourself?
The answer is yes, and yes, and yes. It could be MORE valuable with presentation, and conduct. Because then you don't have to dig through all the other stuff.
<implying you have to dig
Or else something valuable is lost. Forever out of reach just because it's covered in muck when those tiny valuable fragments is the useful shattered pearls of wisdom.
I value wisdom and knowledge highly, sometimes my temper, disgust, loss, and pride get in the way but getting those immutable pieces of wisdom last forever.
Forever.
Unless you have amnesia in which case alternatives to just memory are needed.
Anonymous
379f8e4
?
No.317977
>>317907
>>317976
You've went beyond the ten miles you don't need to go any further.
It's just hooo boy. I get it.
I get it.
Anonymous
f692d7b
?
No.317980
317983
>>317976
>You do the same pokes time and time again. I know you've answered, but you gotta go the extra ten miles. Or you're just the cause for another spergout.
That's fair too. None of this comes from a vacum. Then again, usually on a imageboard one doesn't need to worry about stepping on a particular person's toes.
I shouldn't involve myself in this cause we have been here before and nothing will change. I'm just wasting my time.
Anonymous
379f8e4
?
No.317982
EawjmZkXkAEGzj3.jpeg
I haven't posted since I've said my piece about this work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLZvH1xXcvc
Quick refresh on my post.
This is just another already stated reference point for why so many like it. It's all in their own heads.
They know how it ought to flow, and where things ought to be.
>pic entirely related
Anonymous
0842bc4
?
No.317983
>>317980
The phrase "as long as it takes" comes to mind, unless I misinterpret your question
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.318017
>>317974
He basically called me a faggot and then says if I disagree with him it's a fallacy. He provides no reasoning for why "no" or "no u" would be an actual fallacy like "no true scotsman".
A fallacy is an inherently faulty piece of logic, not an argument someone doesn't like.
I know my posts are long and I'm working on that. Reminding me of that won't help. Now if they were new critiques pointing out something I hadn't noticed yet like "In chapter 2 of the silver fic you made Silver a prick during a scene where he was supposed to be a good guy" that would be helpful.
Critiquing a six hundred thousand word story takes time. If this was a cartoon I could say "animation bad" or "character designs are bland" without having to explain what I mean and compare it to better examples. I could edit bits of the animation visually and put them in a video essay. I could show pics of Rufus from Street Fighter instead of decribing this fat joke character's bomb themed visual design. But because this is text, everything must be text.
Except for the art of Pinkie Pie with a gun hat, that was a fun little visual aid.
But this story isn's a visual aid, it's literal AIDS.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.318085
318202
186-1862503_anime-battleship-girl-bismarck-hd-png-download.png
Aren't the Battle Saddles original? Look, here's one. Except instead of a horse using a sawn off shotgun meant for humans with the aid of a complex back-mounted worn mechanism that fires via a mouth trigger and aims itself via magic, it's a ship turned into a magical girl and the result is a chick wearing big guns that could blow Calamity and his baby shotguns out of the water.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.318202
318203
>>318085
Wait a second, no.

I've been a fool.

The problem isn't that battle saddles don't have enough gun.

The problem is that they break the setting.

This is a post apocalyptic hellish world where resources are scarce and food is damn near impossible to grow and incalculable amounts of information was lost.

but battle saddles are more common in this world than smartphones are in ours.

they're complex pieces of machinery that work perfectly all the time and are enchanted to swivel and pivot to autoaim at foes they somehow detect presumably via magic, making them basically turrets with straps. Except they don't autofire because if they fired faster than ponies could react it would make this combat "less fallouty". It uses a mouth trigger, a complex mechanism that pulls the trigger via a bitten thing, for no reason. Did the fic also say the mouth trigger contains a tongue operated joystick that lets ponies aim the battle saddles on their back? LP might actually struggle to defeat foes with autoaiming autofiring OP battle saddles until she realizes she can lift up heavy debris to block bullets for her. And then no gun-toting foe would ever be a challenge again.

I understand that there are unique challenges when combining new ideas. If you want to do fallout and ponies, how do the ponies use guns? That's a question with a lot of answers and magically animated mechanical arms would be less of a logistical stretch than these stupid horseback machines that just scream "Kkat thinks this is smart". These stupid machines would be realistically prone to jams and failures and misses. Ponies with their jaws blown off can't use them. Ponies with their mobility compromised can't use them. A man with broken legs and a glock could still wave his gun arm around and fire, these horses have shit.

It's fucking arbitrary, too. Why would ponies choose a mechanical solution to let horses fire guns instead of a purely magical one? Why enchant the saddles to swivel and autoaim but not autofire or instead magically detect when their wearer wants them to fire? Magic can do anything in this setting so why design something for the horses they would struggle to build and have no reason to mass produce and find damn near impossible to maintain and clean and repair in the post apocalypse 200 years after civilization fell? How do you reload such a retarded device?

I think the story claimed the guns magically teleport ammo from your saddlebags instantly so the horses never need to reload with their dumb horse hooves but if that's an option why not take it a step further and design a necklace that magically teleports any weapons or guns from your saddlebags onto you? Show me a cowboy who can swap weapons faster than anyone with an instant item teleportation necklace. Erza Scarlet from Fairy Tail called, she's saying what I just described ripped her off because it did.

Why would the ponies design iconic Fallout guns for human hands and then strap weapon mouths to their back and trigger-pulling mechanisms in their mouths instead of just designing a gun a horse could use, or designing a simpler battle saddle mechanism like a self-contained hoof-mounted gun holster that pulls the weapon's trigger when the horse's hoof-wrist is flicked upwards?

There have been stories where the pony races engage in civil war for bad reasons. Creative ones do interesting things, uncreative ones settle for making AJ princess of guns and a combination industrial revolution and worker revolt while RD uses clouds and Flutters's tamed beasts while Twi and Rarity use tactical maginukes and money respectively. There have been better stories that found better ways to implement guns in ponyland.

"Battle saddles" are a lazy daft unrealistic bad answer to a question with multiple better answers.

How do you get the ponies shooting?

A. Magic floating guns brought to life, will defend anyone they recognize as their current owner. Basically Jojo's but everyone's stand is a gun. Important chars get better guns with more interesting personalities.

B. Don't. Fallout is about more than the weapons people use to kill each other in an apocalypse caused by countries nuking each other. Fallout would still be fallout if all guns and bullets went the way of the dodo and everyone alive made do with golf clubs and tire irons and pneumatic power fists and rocks. Could still sort enemies into threat levels based on their tactics and arms and armour and bullshit extra powers.

C. Unicorn Master Race wins again. EPs can still invent guns but the Unicorns would get the most out of them. Nerf them, say gitting gud at magic takes decades of training if you're not related to Twilight and most Unis can barely keep revolvers on target so they compensate with wacky magical bullets and shotgun shells.

D. Out with the revolvers/shotguns, in with beltfed tripod mounted machinegun EP teams

E. Just let horses hold guns in their teeth. fire with their tongues, redesign guns to fit this ergonomically with silencers and flash hiders to protect their eyes and ears.

F. If you need to have your ponies wielding iconic Fallout 3 guns, just anthropomorphize them. Let them use their human fingers on their gun. It's not like this story relies on horse things. Just make them furries, make them fit humans with extra wings/horns/mascot costume-sized heads.

G. Trained armed monkeys with jetpacks made from wood barrels and fruit juice, plus peanut popguns. Monkeys are like orks, their wood propeller planes kickstarted by palm tree slingshots work if they think they do. BANANA SLAMMA.

214H. Battle Saddles but the slightly less awful (wrist mounted) ones I designed. Back mounted grenade launchers and homing missile launchers yes, miniguns duct taped to the sides of horses no.

I. No items, zero-recoil gyrojet pistols enchanted to turn missiles homing only, final destination.

J. Just let horses manipulate their tails like Milia Rage to reload and fire human guns, use keyboards and lockpicking tools designed for human hands, etc.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.318203
318584
Fallout equestria fans when they see pony skeletons.gif
>>318202
This story didn't need guns. Nothing that happens in this story relies on guns. Melee weapons, enchanted melee weapons, enchanted clothing, assorted objects enchanted into deadly weapons, summoned spirits, murderous flying hats, simplified horse-friendly grenades without guns, electrified spears, Pokemon-style tamed wasteland critters, psychic ghosts manifested from their fighting spirit (haha fighting spirit haha pun), there are so many things the Edgequestrians could be using to fight their battles instead of guns. But because Kkat wanted as much iconic Fallout 3 iconography in here as possible, the setting is full of guns and explosives and nothing is allowed to be stronger than them, not even giant dragons or cyber dragons or alicorns or deathclaws or hellhounds or anything else. He could have made the ponies anthro so they could wield human guns like humans, but he chose to only think on this until the first idea popped into his head and then shoved it into his story even though ideas exist that stress suspension of disbelief less and allow for more creativity and uniqueness.

Sorry for the long post but the Edgequestrians struggle to build a water purifier or farm yet they never seem to be starving. No indication is given that 200 year old bean cans are more valuable than bullets. "What do they eat?" and "Where do they get their food?" are incredibly simple worldbuilding questions this story fails to answer satisfyingly. We're told the wasteland is so fucked it can't grow food yet LP thinks making the Enclave rely on the edgequestrians for food will foster peace. I guess Kkat wasn't paying attention when someone or some TV show described the importance of trade for maintaining peace and forging organic connections between different groups and locations to him.

Edgequestria is a world without large-scale infrastructure. unless you're Red Eye. Then your slaves can make anything including cyberdog and cyberpony and cyberdragon parts. But nopony, raider or enclave soldier, nopony seems to have any problems keeping their battle saddles on at all times and always ready to fire without ammo, maintenance, part replacements, jams, or targeting glitches ever becoming a problem.

Horses without magic building guns you'd need telekinesis or complex machinery to operate... Just another stupid thing that makes this non-art feel less like a work of fiction someone passionately wanted to make and more like a calculated low-effort piece of prolefeed designed to get popular and suck along the way.

If Kkat made the horses anthro, some faggots in his target audience would be turned away by the lack of handhooves and they'd cry less at humanoid horse skeletons instead of crying their eyes out at fully equine pony skeletons. It would get in the way of the "uniqueness" of describing a constantly horny lesbian horse who lasts ten seconds in the sack and stares at horse ass instead of normal tits or patrician crotchtits. And if the horses used enchanted gloves or prosthetic arm necklaces to manipulate guns Kkat wouldn't get to feel smart for telling you about his awful battle saddle idea and then frantically wallpapering over "How do they aim?" with magic autoaiming mounts that defeat the whole purpose of the manual mechanical mouth trigger and focus on mechanical solutions for problems magic could solve faster and cheaper while expending less metal and engineering time and wasting fewer factories.

I don't want to sound like I'm demanding an unrealistic level of realism from this story. But if you're going to shun a creative challenge like guns meant for horse mouths and shun a simple handwave like tail-operated guns or prosthetic magic worn arms or living flying guns, something better than this overcomplicated reality-defying gigabortion contraption should be the result.

I'm not asking for paragraphs that describe the history of battle saddles from the First Generation back-mounted failure-prone pieces of shit to the second-generation wrist-mounted punch-activated revolvers to the third-generation back-mounted grenade gigacoomer to the modernized wrist-mounted magic-assisted thought-triggered gunstraps with multi-weapon-selection wheels and miniaturized shotguns and miniguns that magically fire full sized bullets and the ability to magically digistruct guns out of the videogame inventory.

Even though some meaningful history like that could go a long way towards making LP's PipBuck and Steelhooves's Power Armour and the battle saddles feel less shoehorned-in and more like natural parts of the world. And even though many stories have done the same for their giant mechs or magic wands or Knightmare Frames or magic/sci-fi supertech of choice.

I'm not asking for absolute realism in this story, but I suppose expecting any quality from this story would be absolutely unreasonable.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.318584
318593 318616
6238947__explicit_artist-colon-shinodage_imported+from+twibooru_oc_oc+only_oc-colon-calamity_oc-colon-littlepip_pegasus_pony_unicorn_comic-colon-fallout+equestr.png
6234711__explicit_artist-colon-shinodage_imported+from+twibooru_oc_oc+only_oc-colon-calamity_oc-colon-littlepip_pegasus_unicorn_comic-colon-fallout+equestria-co.png
6225514__explicit_artist-colon-shinodage_imported+from+twibooru_oc_oc+only_oc-colon-calamity_oc-colon-littlepip_oc-colon-velvet+remedy_comic-colon-fallout+eques.png
>>318203
Is it fair for me to judge this story on what it could have been? I keep seeing creative directions the story could have taken to explore what happens when "The magic of friendship" meets a cruel wasteland of violence and theft, but it chose rehashing Fallout iconography in a MLP skin over actually doing anything new with the ideas of Fallout, Ponies, or Ponies+Fallout. Still, I try to judge it for the text.

He makes sure to tell everyone his headcanons for how DJ Cunt sees and knows everything, and takes great care to show off his "Better" takes on some dumb shit people hated about F3 like Tenpenny Tower and the kid city Little Lamplight right next to the Super Mutant-infested Murder Pass(Remade into Zebratown right next to the Alicorn-infested Canterlot).

But I don't think that improves the story. Copying elements from F1-NV and trying to improve the F3 elements so universally-despised even Kkat could tell something was wrong with them... It takes time away from any rare original elements he introduces.

Little Lamplight is a town full of kids, right next to a Skyrim dungeon full of monsters that should eat the kids. The Super Mutants in Murder Pass have no reason to stay there. No food/water supply. It's just there to be style over substance, an odd kid-themed coat of paint for a generic town with generic decor right before another braindead dungeon. Any better version of this cliche would still be that, a basic idea fragment unless something more was added.

Imagine if it had good lore. Let's say the Super Mutants are a roaming band of bandits occupying a small cave-dwelling survivalist settlement they found, it was empty because the old man who lived there died of old age, and because it's right next to a slave mine kid slaves frequently escape from, the Super Mutants here like protecting the human children because "Squishing kids bad. Too small. No honour. Squishing adults good! They have good loot! When kids get too old we make them run away. If they come back we squish them!". One kid's also figured out how to talk the Super Mutants into doing whatever he wants, like farming how the kids tell them, because that kid was an ex-Vault Dweller educated in his youth on farming, water purification, building, assorted other rare skills. This is how the settlement eats, drinks, and survives in the Wasteland without being eaten alive by monsters or enemies.

Alternatively, forget the Super Mutants and Murder Pass, you can simplify it further and say Little Lamplight is just where some nice settlers have set up camp in the middle of a big cave system full of edible cave moss and clean water and they're famous for taking in all the orphans that arrive here. These nice generic people exist here because it's a nice place and believe charity and hospitality are nice.

You could say I half-assed this. You could say I minimized the work necessary on my part by combining the random cliches presented in F3 into a cohesive settlement and answering logical questions the player/reader might have when encountering it.

There's room for expansion, of course. There could be a subplot here where some kids aren't happy with how this place works and want to rule instead, there is plenty of room for sidequests where you help improve things for the settlements with fetch quests("Go to a ruined factory near here overrun with giant ants, and find us this important part from a thing we want to build!") and kill quests ("A band of slavers set up camp near us and are preparing to fight us. Kill them first and we'll pay you in radiation-free corn!") and more. There could be a faction of Super Mutants dissatisfied with the arrangement and nostalgic for their roaming murderer days. The shopkeeper could have a wacky memorable personality. There could be a friendly Super Mutant character who wants to travel with the heroes, or an obligatory street-smart thief kid character.

But Kkat didn't want to re-do Little Lamplight+Murder Pass and expand upon the locations, he just wanted to show off his "Better" version where they're all Zigger children who think sending away adults will stop Slavers from wanting to enslave them. This is retarded. Why haven't slavers already enslaved them? Lmao I dunno. Alicorns are there I guess along with assorted Dead Money hazards because Kkat wanted to speedrun Dead Money wrong and shove in a reference to that Ghoul place in F3. The references get in the way of crafting a better story from the bones of F3. Kkat goes with his first draft without revising anything or asking himself follow-up questions. It wouldn't surprise me if the first person perspective was just an excuse to vomit unedited stream-of-consciousness rambling into the tale to inflate its word count.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.318593
6218429__explicit_artist-colon-shinodage_imported+from+twibooru_oc_oc+only_oc-colon-calamity_oc-colon-littlepip_oc-colon-velvet+remedy_pegasus_pony_unicorn_comi.png
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>>318584
He clearly loves Fallout, yet he loves Fallout 3 the most for being the simplest shoot game with the simplest and most familiar cliche ideas
But instead of leaning into Fallout 3's main redeeming quality (your ability to "Make your own fun" by wandering off the beaten path into a random direction to find some enemy-infested locations with sick loot) and writing a story where LP does a lot of wandering around looking for the next main plot point and getting sent to enemy-filled skyrim dungeons with an important item at the end to take back to the questgiver, LP sometimes sort of just starts randomly deciding to clear out skyrim dungeons for the EXP now and then.
Sometimes ammo is infinite and health potions are absurdly plentiful. And sometimes "because loot" is such a big deal, it forces the heroes into a Hellhound-filled hellhole just so the author can exposit about Hellhounds and imply the Enclave's controlling them with what turns out to be sonic devices, even though this never matters because Hellhounds working for the Enclave never matter in any significant way.
Kkat just really wanted to brag about the idea he "thought of" and reference the trained (possibly talking? I forget) Deathclaws used by the Enclave in Fallout 2.
One moment he embraces what makes Fallout 3 fun despite its flaws, the next moment he's dragging it down and getting in the way of the shooty bang bang fun times with bad exposition and pointless lore that never matters to the setting or themes or characters and isn't really an improvement over F3's half-assed lore at all.
His attempts to address complaints others have had about the game's silliest parts (Megaton, the town with no food source built from scrap around a nuke inside a crater
DJ 3-Dog, the omniscient moral judge who plays 3 songs on the radio and calls you a bitch from the safety of his bunker. Little Lamplight, a slaver's wet dream randomly next to a monster-infested glorified linear corridor of enemies and hazards. The BOS Power Rangers and Enclave fighting a war over who gets to turn on a water purification-inator that deirradiates all water in the entire tri-state area) end up overcomplicating things and damaging suspension of disbelief.

Did DJ-Pon3 really need a change-voice-to-male spell AND a SECRET SOCIETY ensuring she keeps THE PENTHOUSE SUITE of a PRE-WAR OMNISCIENT SURVEILLANCE TOWER turned decadent luxuryfest that somehow trades enough overpriced luxuries away to survive their LACK OF FOOD PRODUCTION even though the tower's "leader" has NO IDEA Pon3 is Homage?
Did Little Lamplight really need to be MORE dumb superstitious ziggers being dumb and superstitious? You'd think Kkat WANTS you to view them as helpless retards in need of saving+coddling+policing in pony-controlled ghettoes/concentration camps.
What words can describe what was done to the BOS?
And aside from name-drops and minor references the Enclave come out of nowhere to be cunts and one last puzzle piece for Red-Eye's "Male Alicorn Prince of Weather" plan

gay.

This story started with an exposition dump on PipBucks, your diegetic excuse for a videogame HUD now used to justify the instant combat mastery of a civilian like LP...
And it was completely unnecessary because she's a telekinetic god who can waterbend radioactive goo/blood into shields/casts and melee anyone to death with a shovel or heavy object, and the first time she saw a gun used, she mastered it enough to get the upper hand on Monty "I may have abandoned my cheese store at Luxury City to scavenge near Raider-occupied Ponyville for no reason but I'd literally kill myself and leave my family homeless if it made Littlepip sad" Jack and kill all the raiders/slavers in her way until she eventually recruited Calamity McShotgunHaver
LP has no reason to be a combat expert when her party has Calamity the ex-Enclave soldier fighting for her AND it would likely improve the story if LP's inexperience and youthful optimism contrasted with Calamity's cynical nature. Of course for this he would have to have a nature besides bitch
then LP randomly obtains Steelhooves anyway, an even more overpowered fren
Smart writers have introduced OP frens before to kill them off when shit gets serious and the safety net goes away, especially when OP fren is the super-strong mentor figure has fulfilled his role, especially when the villain or his Darth Vader-style "Dragon" goon kills the char to piss the hero off and make things personal
but this just discards Steelhooves after he fulfills a dream he lacks an excuse to have put off for this long: un-evil-inating Applejack's BOS Rangers.
what was LP's journey again?
She cleared "Raiderville", goes from vomiting at the thought of looting one body to looting all its bodies casually, clears out a robot factory with RoboBrains that never mattered again, picked up Little Macintosh there, befriends Calamity when he shoots her for wearing Raider armour, finds a town with a mayor who hates her, takes Party Time Mint-Als for the first time for no reason, drags the town into a conflict with its sister town to free slaves, and finds Velvet.
Velvet played her into helping her escape, earning herself the life of a pariah or the choice of leaving the vault hoping to retrieve Velvet. She chose the latter but never grows from her "Childish crush on how she's soooo sexy" phase, never even resents the bitch for manipulating her and even trying to cheat on her man with her at one point. These aren't characters, they're hand puppets acting out scenes in Kkat's head.
Alex and Marty from Madagascar had a more realistic reaction to seeing each other after going through bad shit
Madagascar the funny penguins film with the fat fetishist giraffe had better character writing
LP doesn't want to take Velvet home, so she proceeds to stumble her way through a bloody trail of gore and loot until she's eventually told what to do until the endgame scenario where the Enclave attack.
Now Red-Eye's the new main villain, instead of Colonel Autism
gay
Anonymous
6edc71d
?
No.318616
318665 318675
>>318584
>Is it fair for me to judge this story on what it could have been?
Is it fair to judge YOU on 'what could have been'?
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.318665
318670
12e194a33175f787d76e9dc47244668b.gif
>>318616
Is it fair to judge you on how you could have been talking about the story all this time instead of me?
Have you even read any of FE or are you just here for me?
Anonymous
6edc71d
?
No.318670
318671
>>318665
You neglected to answer my question, the answer to which will answer yours
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.318671
>>318670
You neglected to answer my question even though you are solely here for me, not for the story. I hope you're a hot babe, because if you were a man it would be really fucking gay for you to exclusively think about me all day every day.
Anonymous
47e689f
?
No.318675
318676 318682
>>318616
Anon has a point, tbh. Judging a story based on what it "could" have been is an unfair assessment, as it is based on impossible/subjective standards. It's better to judge a story just for what it is, and how it attained or failed to attain what it was trying to do.
Anonymous
6edc71d
?
No.318676
318678
>>318675
Holy shit, a rational thought!
Anonymous
47e689f
?
No.318678
318683
>>318676
Dude...
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.318682
318683
>>318675
What's wrong with judging a story based on the potential its central idea had?
Anonymous
6edc71d
?
No.318683
318696
>>318678
That wasnt a dig against (you), it was emphasis
>>318682
He literally just explained it
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.318696
318703
>>318683
This story wants to be "an Epic". This story says it wants to be "Fallout... with Ponies!". It wants to be a story and the foundation for a role-playing setting.

One moment it's trying to use mythical-style vagueness and universal concepts like the temptation of evil and the little hero's struggle to resist it, and the next it's going for every base pandering trick imaginable, too wrapped up in pointless specifics to remember the grand applicability of myth.

One moment it's trying to reshape Fallout elements to fit within ponyland, the next it's trying to reshape FIM characters like Twilight and Trixie and Fluttershy to fit within roles necessary for the Equestrian Wasteland to turn out similar to Fallout's wasteland, and the next it's purposefully going out of its way to throw disliked Fallout 3 elements into the bin before reimagining them into new supposedly-smarter versions with answers for questions he's heard F3 critics raise.

One moment it focuses so heavily on worldbuilding and exposition it gets in the way of the story, and the next moment it's ruining its own setting, the balance of power, the powerscaling, and the suspension of disbelief for the sake of the story. The story is full of worldbuilding, but worldbuilding on its own is not storytelling, nor does it significantly affect the characters on display in any meaningful way. Velvet wasn't challenged or changed by the Wasteland, she's still the same shallow prick as always except something the author has her put her pacifism aside for a scene or two before picking it back up as if nothing ever happened. Despite all the focus this story places on the worldbuilding we are still left with unsatisfying answers for big questions or important questions left unanswered. The characters don't grow because they're one-note hand-puppets acting out a dull power fantasy in a nonsensical world full of contrivances and ideas no sane pony or zebra in the setting would go along with.

What is wrong with judging this tale by what it is, and what it wants to be, for how the setting breaks for the characters, for how rhe characters break for the setting, and by how much squandered potential there is to be found in the ideas and questions this story was built from?
Anonymous
6edc71d
?
No.318703
318706
>>318696
>by what it is
Now you're talking
>and what it wants to be, and all that other shit
Because you're trying to argue taste. The book is undoubtably horrible, and a Fallout playthrough with insert simplistic and not well defined ponies (you're not wrong on that). It could never have been an 'epic', even if Kkat wasnt incompetent; it never had that potential.
Kkat's extra-basic 'plot devices', hackneyed cliches, artist8c interpretations of canon characters, its unstable dynamics, are but a handful of its issues and if these threads have proven anything its that innumerating them all is a lengthy and exhaustive process.
And, to be fair, there is something to be said for criticizing the deliberate and responsible failure to implement some aspect or another. Or a whole book. But when you judge something on its 'potential', you have to be damn sure you know what you're talking about and not just opining about what you think would have been 20% cooler. The point is to emphasize what went wrong, and while one could suggest better ways to implement certain elements, its all just speculation as to whether it would be a hit or miss, especially depending on the author and their implementation.
My point is if you want to take shots at the book, knock yourself out. However, dont fool yourself into thinking that you're an adequate or suitable gauge of potential. This is not an insult to you, this is a reminder to be realistic with your expectations and attempts to ascertain the 'correct' implementation of Fallout with ponies. I dont know what a properly implemented FoE would look like, because the story is so schitzo in its portrayals that one could well assert that the only way to fix FoE would be a complete rewrite, by a competent different author.
Judge the book by what it is. Judge the implementation, judge the pacing, dialogue, and story, judge what it did (poorly) not by what it 'may have done better under completely arbitrary circumstances which are literally not possible so its all hypothetical'.
Unless YOURE gonna rewrite FoE, in which case I can see why youre so on about it. Not a dig, but you DO seem to have an abnormal animus toward some faggot's work that the fandom ate up and celebrate to this day. NGL, the mlp fandom can be observed to house not the best and the brightest at times. Just an observation.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.318706
318712
>>318703
If you think I hate this fic, ask me about Friendship Is Optimal. Or worse, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I said everything I hate abour FIO already but I think I feel a more personal anger towards those two pieces of LessWrong shit since when I was a teen I was almost suckered into joining that cult. Almost. I could also rant about what I hate about Harry Potter and its fandom but that would spoil shit. and be off topic probably. Just like a rant on Sasuke/Itachi and Naruto's worst writing mistakes in general.

I would love to write a better rewritten FOE some day, but I'm too busy with projects right now to think about it for anything other than fun. Plus I didn't want to announce I was even thinking about that until after this story's analysis is complete. You could improve FOE by trimming the fat, improve it more by rewriting the exposition dumps and altering the order of events to make things flow better, and you'd make a good Fallout and Ponies crossover by getting a good grasp of the themes of Fallout and FIM before combining them in a smarter way than Kkat.

I know this story is subjectively not to my taste. But whose taste is it for? Someone who wouldn't complain about the taste of the rotten asshole of a roadkill skunk as long as it was popular? Subjectively the fight scenes aren't to my taste but objectively long-winded explanations of battle saddles and sonic Hellhound controllers and Alicorn varieties who share the same abilities anyway and LP's rambling inner monologues and meaningless nonsense about corrupted kindness and why the Hellhounds dislike ponies and the backstories of the locations LP slaughters enemies in get in the way of the samey shootouts somebody here for those enjoys. Subjectively I didn't enjoy the part where LP found Little Macintosh but objectively why did the author bother with that gun and the offscreen training with Crane when the telekinesis she was born with and her overpowered friends ended up doing most of her work anyway? So much of this story could be cut out because it never fundamentally mattered to the tale or world and the story can't commit to setting up a cohesive and proofread world for further adventures or one big adventure in this world.

There are many villains scheming against each other but the Stone Prison arc was full of confused convoluted writing that could have done a better job setting up all three factions and making them fight in entertaining ways. Instead the Enclave still basically come out of nowhere despite getting wasted screentime now and then. When they met Spike The Watcher it wasn't to introduce the Enclave and its ponies or set up any conflict involving Calamity and his feelings towards his old family, it was just to watch Spike melt an Enclave poner that never mattered.

The pacing's fucked, LP's visit to the diamond dogs was sandwiched into a random spot in the "working for Red Eye to kill Trixie" arc because he was about to introduce the Enclave after countless words where Alicorns and Slavers and Raiders are just wasteland enemy NPCs. This story just couldn't put off telling us what Kkat did with the dogs for so long. Kkat couldn't resist waving around an idea that never came up again in a way that mattered. It was the perfect setup for adding a good Hellhound to the party and it didn't happen because Kkat instead wanted some Killing Joke aka Poison Joke but edgy to kill a Hellhound by turning him into a pony. That's all the species was really here for. Not for playing a major role and contributing one party member to a mare who's SUPPOSED to be searching for other elements of harmony, even though like Twilight she is "the spark that brings elements together". We're told she's not magic even though she clearly has great magic and being the spark is literally the role of magic aka friendship. This is just one of many missed opportunities to improve the story or its setting or its pacing or characters or any number of things.

I know I'm not an absolute authority on writing. I am but one humble man, one of many voices here who did not like this fic. Anyone here can contribute. Anyone here can disagree with me about this story. I do not mean to give the impression that I think I am a better writer than Kkat. I know everybody in this thread is a better writer than Kkat. Why else would anyone be here, in a thread dedicated to analyzing this story? Worse writers than Kkat would suck his dick and call him "the best female writer of 2006" or whenever this was abomination was penned.

I know this fandom's full of bad writers. I used to be one of them :3

I hear a while back, someone trolled the entirety of FIMfiction by pretending to be retarded and writing a bad HIE fic full of cliches copied from the most popular HIEs. He also made friends who defended him and his haters weren't used to that. He pissed off so many people on that site, a "better" story was penned by one of his haters to try and "show him how it's done". It ended up in the feature box and it was nothing but boring shameless smut where Twilight notices her sleeping human roommate has a big dick and sucks it without consent.
Not played for laughs.
Not written as a parody.
Just that guy's best attempt at writing something "better" than a fic meant to offend people
Sometimes I wonder what happened to that guy. Did he move on to fucking with other fandoms?
Or did his real life become interesting enough to pull him away from fandoms and fandom drama? Wherever he is I hope he's proud of what he's done.

To tell you the truth during my early years in this fandom I read this fic and thought it was good. I don't think I finished it because I eventually noticed it was bad. Anyway I feel a moral obligation to shit on this story and I feel an obligation to myself and everyone who helped me come this far to prove I've come a long way when it comes to writing knowledge.

I'm probably opening myself up to being called a huge faggot for opening up like this. Sorry.
Anonymous
181e8d6
?
No.318712
>>318706
Yes, very intresting but even though you wrote this entire post in response, you didn't actually answer his main point, which was that:
>Judge the book by what it is. Judge the implementation, judge the pacing, dialogue, and story, judge what it did (poorly) not by what it 'may have done better under completely arbitrary circumstances which are literally not possible so its all hypothetical'.

If you did this intentionally, it's called, "gashlighting". If you did this unintentionally, it's called, "bad reading comprehension".

>Paragraph one of your post: I don't hate this fic as much as I hate other.
<What he wrote in his post: Not a dig, but you DO seem to have an abnormal animus toward some faggot's work that the fandom ate up and celebrate to this day.
<some faggot's work
I think should be pural but the apostrophe seems to be place wrong but some indicate more than one, so Idk.

>I'm too busy but one day I'd love to write a version of FE.
<Unless YOURE gonna rewrite FoE, in which case I can see why youre so on about it.
?

>I know this story is subjectively not to my taste. But whose taste is it for? Someone who wouldn't complain about the taste of the rotten asshole of a roadkill skunk as long as it was popular?
Again, his point wasn't that you should find something more suitable for your tastes to criticise but that sugguesting hypothetical alternatives to the story that are the equivalent of saying, "What if we were reading a completely different story instead?"

Whether or not you agree with his post and if he is right is irrelevant. What matters is that you don't fail to response to his question.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.318789
318792
Would it be fair to judge this story based on what its fans say it is?

They love to call Kkat "the master of the chekovs gun" because he likes to create questions and mysteries answered slowly over time or answered suddenly out of nowhere.
But that isn't what Chekovs Gun means.
It is the principle that every detail in your story should matter. If Chekov has a gun on his fireplace it should be fired by the end of the story.
This story is full of details that fail this principle.
When this story introduced a robot factory and the robobrains early on it never came up again. Robobrains were not a frequently faced foe. Little Macintosh didn't do anything special one revolver she picked up in Ponyville could have done. Even the concept of keeping pony brains alive in jars didn't come up again, because when the ZAX Crusader Maneframes were introduced they were just supercomputers able to think for themselves or simulate copies of the brains of living poners.
Did we need to learn about New and Old Appleoosa, Derpy and her Absolutely Everything store, Red Eye Spritebots, Spike The Watcher and his love of communicating through temporarily hacked Spritebots, the BOS of AppleSteel Rangers and their goodie-baddie split and attack on LP's vault, the mad doctor with the experiments and Manticores, all the extra fat involved in the DJ's excuses for filling the same role as 3Dog...
When Team LP dragged the corpse of old man whatshisface around did any of that matter?
Why bother establishing Tenpony Tower as a location that trades overpriced luxiries for scavenged supplies while the idiot mayor hates DJ Pon3 and doesn't know it's Homage but a secret society keeps Homage in control of the radio and in the penthouse floor of the tower which was once a prewar surveillance system and also Homage owns an Alien StarBlaster(tm) somehow and once had a friend called Jokeblue who died from blue Poison Joke on the way to the tower? Did any of these details come up again in a way that mattered, besides learning she had an Alien Blaster which she took the power supply from and rigged to a bomb at one point? Why bother with all that crap about Monterry Jack and the laws of the tower and the drug plotline and LP ever taking drugs in general if all it ever did was bloat out a story that never planned a satisfying ending to any of these story arcs? LP had her addiction to PTMs cured instantly and then used them again a few times when necessary after that while M-Jack basically went out like a bitch and suicided just to piss LP off and make her explain what happened to a family rendered homeless by his pointlessly selfish and nonsensical actions. And to fucking think Kkat called him "corrupted honesty". What's honest about any of this? Wouldn't a better corrupted honesty candidate be a liar, or an authoritarian murderous judge and executioner who loves surveillance states and executing anyone who even slightly lies?
Kkat's setting is harmed by his need to make the heroes succeed constantly no matter how much they don't deserve it and his story is harmed by the constant exposition about setting details that could easily be made relevant to the story but weren't.
Anonymous
6edc71d
?
No.318792
318794 318798
>>318789
>Would it be fair to judge this story based on what its fans say it is?
Yes
Anonymous
b31e25e
?
No.318794
>>318792
to clarify, it is fair to refute those claims and illustrate how they are fallacious. Technically speaking it isnt the story you are judging, its the fanaticism and their entirely subjective claims and the reputation they've given the book. Because if their claims were valid, it would play out that way when non-fanatics read the book, but thats not how it goes.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.318798
318799 318801
>>318792
So if we were reviewing Twilight, we wouldn't be able to judge those shitty vampire novels based on its undeserved accolades as "the most famous love story ever before Fifty Shades came along"?
Could we judge it based on what we think made it so appealing to feminist and unfeminist women all over the world? When mocking its prose could we at least mention that these books made sixty nine million dollars and won eighty Emmy awards and twelve Oscars and a glowing endorsement from Peter Rabbitson and a foreword by Dan Green and four Gold Medals or whatever the fuck books get?
Twilight isn't just a book series. It's a significant cultural phenomenon. Twilight Mania might not have been as big as Pokemon mania but it still kickstarted a genre's worth of ripoffs and gave generations of new writers shit to intentionally strive for or intentionally avoid. To this day vampire fiction mentions that their vampires don't sparkle. To this day people have opinions on this series yet they've forgotten all about the Game Of Thrones tv show or Artemis Fowl.
Fallout Equestria is undeniably smaller than Twilight. It's not even close. Book ranking websites probably have no-name first-book cliche-ridden mini-novels with more purchases than this book has free readings.
At the same time in the tiny incestuous echo chamber that is the mainstream brony fandom criticism of this book is seen as unthinkable heresy of the highest order. This fic deserves to be taken down a peg. It has been held up as the gold standard "the best pony fanfics can be" for too long.
Fans of this story are still, after more than six years, building incompetent teams of the first amateurs who said yes and claiming to work on Fallout New Vegas mods and/or entirely original Unity games based on Fallout Equestria. And they've seen less progress than the average Pokemon fangame.
Fans of this fic deserve to be shown the flaws of this story AND the lies in their praise.
Anonymous
6edc71d
?
No.318799
318801
>>318798
You can judge the accolades, but the accolades are separate and apart from the story its self. All you would be doing is judging the people who made those claims, not the work its self. As with FoE, a fandom says alot about a work but thats not something that can be constructively criticized; who likes a thing isnt always an easy thing to determine, vs. the target audience (re: MLP).
Attack (judge) the arguments, not the individual(s) whether theyre FoE fans, twilight, MLP, Rick and Morty, or some random obscure asshole who wont leave you alone on a nazi hoerswhispering forum.
>t. random obscure asshole who wont leave you alone on a nazi hoerswhispering forum
Real talk. I dont dislike you. I never have, though Ive postured that way at interval. I want your arguments to be unassailable. You arent wrong about FoE et al, but critical review isnt about what could have happened, its about what did happen. Hypotheticals may be intellectually stimulating but thats a positive exercise (as in, "I posit that the story would be better if these things were done for these reasons") whereas critical analysis is about breaking down the story from a writing-mechanical sense. Positivity is the antithesis of negativity, and while I'll again acknowledge that hypotheses are intellectually stimulating, the point of the thread is to break the story down. If desired it can be re-built with all these criticisms in mind, but thats an exercise for a later date. Oh shit, Im still spoiler texting.
Anonymous
379f8e4
?
No.318801
ACEBADBD7DB9C4F55538D75960F6F6D6-94370.jpg
31A0B51FDC8F2CC4B149E0757AC70AF0-46245.jpg
>>318798
That's not the point though. The point is that tangible citations can be made one way or another about the fans' claims and your claims.
Through research and well constructed prose you can explain your position.
>>317490
>opinion
You talk around your points.
>holy order of based crusaders who want to murder their way out of this hell or die trying and end up in heaven.
But...
adding the latter would improve the story by providing a counterpoint to LP's murderhobo antics and asking what the world would be like if everyone could "fight their own wars against the world" like LP. Only Senator Armstrong from MGR asked Raiden that question as far as I'm aware. His goal was to create a world where anyone can fight their own wars, where the strong survive anything and the weak die. Has any other piece of media raised that question in that way? Direcrly challenging the hero and his methods by making the creation of more of him the goal of the villain?

<Fo:E NEEDS A FUCKING POINT THAT ISN'T DOGSHIT
<ANYTHING WOULD WORK BUT HERE'S THIS VERY SPECIFIC EXAMPLE PUNTED AT YOU WITH HARDLY ANY CONTEXT.
<YOU NEED THE RELATIONS BETWEEN WHAT YOU REFERENCE THE WORK ABOUT IT, YOUR POINT ABOUT BRINGING IT IN, AND HAVING IT ALL FLOW WELL.
>it's all about LittlePip the shit and stroking the 'awesomeness'
it doesn't do it that well in the first place
>>INSERTING WHAT A FINISHED THING COULD BR ONTOP OF THE PILE OF DOGSHIT
>See Finished product would still be marred by the dogshit, but let's clean that up
>>THE ORIGINAL DOG SHIT IS GONE, NOW YOU'RE NOT EVEN TALKING ABOUT THE STORY.

The references are attempts to explain a principal in literature, games, movies, or even life. However those moments Do have principals deep ones. A whole methodology, mythology, legend, life lesson, story, shared experience, everything. It doesn't always have to be deep, but yugio card that is edgy because story also edgy too robs everyone including you of an opportunity to say more with less.
You know what would be a better comparison, Kirby. Dark Edgy universe, murder hobo, ragtag group of side characters, evil bad guy. Ect ect ect.
Better yet Stigyan (darkness host cuck) and the Nightmare.
Or an in show screencap that talks about (shows or lack of) your topic.

Okay so what can be done is examine the story fans thought they read vs what is actually there.
The things the fandom focuses on and the fan interpretations and what they avoid is telling about what they imagined to be 'reading'.
To do a comparison and analysis. This too is also unfair, but the reasoning can be backed up with fans' logic and stuff.
What it does do it show how much salt is needed when someone highly recommends a work. Positively or Negatively.
>>318799
This. A study of fans and the reaction to a work is different than the work itself.

>Fans of this fic deserve to be shown the flaws of this story AND the lies in their praise.
But why though?
Anonymous
de41e7d
?
No.318889
Anyway, I feel we need to move back to what the thread is suppose to be about. So long as Nigel hypotheticals don't get completely absurd they don't need to be all bad either.
Regardless, what this site needs the least is stricktness with what can and cannot be posted on it.
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.318920
318921
Been thinking about this story from another angle, the romance.
LP and Homage get together because both are ideologically aligned lesbians. No entertaining dynamics there.
Red Eye's only relationship is with his cyberdog yet he dreams of becoming the alicorn prince of weather and uniting everyone.
Trixie loved only herself. The Goddess didn't act like an unhappy compromise between a neurotic bookworm and an egotistical desperately lonely showmare, it just acted like a bigger Trixie. Her goal was supposedly to get male alicorns and she hoped tbe Black Book of blood and darkness magic could help with that somehow... I think? I forgor
but
What relationship does this story focus on sometimes?
Calamity and Velvet.
Sometimes they sing. Sometimes they bicker over him sniping rapey colts. Sometimes she goes on myopic moralfag murderboner m'rampages. Sometimes they compliment each other or complain about each other and how these characters see each other doesn't remotely match up with reality.
https://youtu.be/hQPES7vdQnQ
But this got me thinking
Maybe if Calamity was a proud Enclave soldier for most of this story, assigned to hunt down and kill LP
But at one point his life is saved by Velvet. Maybe twice. And they dont know it.
Early on, could introduce The Calamity, an armoured pegasus badass who never speaks and only focuses on killing
LP flees from him early on and gets to New Appleoosa where the locals tell her his name
LP fights him 2 more times and eventually shoots him down
he goes down and seemingly crashes
then at the next location Velvet heals a nice dying Pegasus called Deadshot who's hiding his Enclave affiliation.
The two bond. Calamity never expected to meet a "fucking filthy ground-pounder" (geddit like pounding sand but also pounding the ground with hooves because you lack wings) who isnt an illiterate barbarian raider or selfish travelling trader/mercenary.
and when he finds out Velvet is on Team LP he is torn.
Next time they fight Calamity takes off his armour. He and LP talk. They have a proper argument over the benefits of a military dictatorship built on the ruins of the wasteland vs a free trade union of the least shit citystates still standing after LP is done murderhoboing.
Eventually Calamity Deadshot decides the best thing he can do is team up with LP and kill General Cunt in charge of the Enclave because he's turned the isolationist technologically advanced micronation of the Pegasus Enclave into a pointlessly evil expansionist military force that's wasting lives which goes against the core principles the Enclave was founded on.

The Pegasus Enclave would also need a better backstory than "all pegasi fucked off and nice ones like RD are so rare they get branded and exiled". Maybe Fluttershy or RD was put in charge of a batallion despite her military incompetence and when a ton got killed the 69th Wing Division decided to occupy an old but self-sustaining military base and call itself a seceeding micronation. Tons of Pegasi fucked off over there because war bad or soldier pay low or super-low taxes or "because griffons made media that said so" or whatever. Depends on the individual. The Pegasi become a soldier revolt intent on fucking off and living alone away from a nation that's lost its way and keeps making war blunders with the lives of drafted soldiers who never wanted to be here and volunteer soldiers sick of their shit supplies and nepotism/cronyism in the govt.

Kkat clearly wanted Pegasi to be rare in the wasteland because superspeed flight makes long distance travel easy but making damn near all of them join the Enclave wasnt the answer.
How fucking hard would it have been to say "because the world is sadder and has less life and friendship its magic has become weaker therefore Pegasi and Unicorns are no longer OP"?
If you're going to make one pegasi pull the Sky Bandit, sure, they are OP and should be rare. But this is a solvable problem.

Anyway I think Calamity and Velvet's overly-easy yet boring bickering-filled romance would be better if Calamity started off a villain but became a hero when the heroes were nice to him because "yay friendship and love bringing warring sides together" or something.

If nothing else, it would improve the pacing if LP avoided random dungeon crawls because "The Calamity is hot on our tail and could start shooting at us any moment".
Anonymous
513e7d6
?
No.318921
>>318920
Ideally Calamity and LP would unite to make a Service Guarantees Citizenship nation because that's awesome and it would be a wild departure from the usual "solve problems with violence for your boss and fuck off or get rewarded handsomely" route Fallout player characters usually take. Teaming up to make the villains less evil then using their army to civilize the wasteland? That's not something traditional heroes do.

Although any story direction could be taken with the building blocks here, I think this configuration of "Calamity as an enemy agent who turns to the side of good" would help flesh out and humanize (ponify, whatever) the Enclave before they become a footnote in Red Eye's schemes.

Although if the heroes stumbled into an Enclave operation involving General Autism it would be a good place to introduce him. Alternatively save time and build him up by making traumatized characters LP encounters rant about the shit they've seen and what evil shit they saw General Autism do.

Perhaps it would improve the story if LP constantly heard "Red Eye is pure evil, he's like a ticking time bomb that could blow up any second' from numerous other characters before meeting the dignified, shockingly mature, driven character he's supposed to be. It would be a shocking moment. Perhaps every scene involving him as a non-villain would have the Hitchcock time bomb effect? It would make this story morally greyer if Red Eye's policy was "criminals and raiders become my slaves because what else are we going to do, make a nice safe prison and feed and clothe them 24/7?" instead of "he is slavery because Ashur was".
Anonymous
7265938
?
No.319180
319190
Unusual question time

Would it harm the story if every mention of Battle Saddles were removed completely, and the "how do ponies use guns" question was answered with "unicorne have telekinesis in their horns and everyone else makes do with the tactile telekinesis that lets their hooves lift heavy objects and finely manipulate their naturally prehensile tailhairs. Ponies can run and gun with revolvers lifted by their raised tails, hairs around triggers firing at will"?

Battle Saddles seem a bit silly in retrospect. How they work never matters to the story. The heroes aren't special for liking or disliking them. Nobody's overclocking their saddles or struggling to maintain it or upgrade it. No slaves have battle saddles grafted into their bodies to penetrate their bones in a way that permanently makes them weapons of war unable to look at anypony without also aiming their guns at them. Nobody goes out of their way to risk their lives for a sicker cooler battle saddle in a way that says a lot about them as people.

The battle saddle mechanism is an overcomplicated immersion-breakingly silly handwave for a question with simpler answers and far more creative answers.
Anonymous
7265938
?
No.319181
In a similar vein of questioning, would it harm the story if everything involving magical enchanted stat-boosting statuettes were removed and the Mane Six statuettes were just tragic keepsakes LP feels like collecting rather than invincible stat-raising videogame powerups infused with chunks of Rarity's soul and the copied soul data of her friends? The setup for those items, how they are wedged into the backstories of different poners, how that Brotherhood Of AppleRanger Steel guy wanted to put his soul into a ZAX Crusader Maneframe supercomputer hoping to become immortal and make his computer shell invincible but that never really went anywhere, would this story lose anything valuable if this idea was pruned by a professional editor looking to bring this work's word count to a more normal number?
Anonymous
19f8cd0
?
No.319190
319201
>>319180
As much as I detest them (battle saddles), I think they're one of those story concepts you can simply drop in with no explanation and have things function fine. Would they not function at all in a realistic scenario? No, and they absolutely crumble under scrutiny. But as a writing device they're a "Good enough" and so-so solution to the problem of how do ponies use guns. They don't warrant an explanation because the story doesn't go into or need to go into depth about them.

That being said, they DO hold a very strong purpose in the story, and make little sense, so perhaps they may warrant more scrutiny. I think it functions fine enough as a handwave so long as you don't emphasize it or put story focus on it. However, certain mentioned details can make concepts stick out as being extra-retarded. A good example is the specific mention of mouth guns, tongue-triggers, and ponies trying to speak while mouthing a pistol. All these elements lead the reader to thinking about the how's and whys, and that is where it becomes an issue.

Actually this is kind of a mess, because Calamity does similarily retarded shit by flying around and swooping about while firing an anti-material rifle slung under his belly with saddle, so who fucking knows anymore.
Anonymous
d3755be
?
No.319201
319239
>>319190
That's the problem. A good handwave is used to handwave away a problem with a good-enough explanation. We don't need to know how the health potions work, we just need to know that they do.
How do the health potions work? An alchemist did it.
How does this floating island float? A wizard did it.
It's fine for "How can everyone understand Roranoa Zoro with a sword in his mouth" to be answered with something silly like "because he speaks from his heart" because One Piece is that kind of setting.

If there's a plotline where everyone is getting addicted to a drug and the hero scientist creates an addiction-curing drug we don't need to know how it works but it's nice when the answer is something scientific like "It bonds to neurotransmitters and blocks the addiction craving signals while restoring the usual dopamine balance".
"The ponies can use guns built for human hands using their tails" is a short and sweet handwave.
"The ponies use a mechanical gun mount bolted to a saddle and operate it with mouth triggers and... oh shit I have no idea how it aims or is reloaded. Uhhhh magic. Also I have no idea how they talk with these mouth triggers in tbeir mouths and never thought of that. Oops" seems like bad writing to me.
"Why would ponies design American guns at the same time? Why would they build things ergonomically designed for appendages they lack? Also Fallout is alt-history america with weird guns but AJ just invented them all in a few years for no reason" is a plot hole
It could be answered with something like "Daring Do saw some ancient ponegyptian heiroglyphics about a human with a gun being summoned to save ancient egyptian poners from giant monsters and sent home so she wrote a book about meeting a human with a gun and this gave AJ the idea for a gun upon accidentally discovering a brilliant gunpowder recipe. Twilight tried designing a smarter gun ergonomically designed for horse hooves but they didnt catch on because everyone wanted le cool human revolvers and shotguns as seen in Daring Do"

a handwave can even be something retarded. "AJ's company made a shitton of money making stupid guns and the atupid battle saddles necessary to operate them and she owned a legal copyright on the concept of guns forever so making ergonomic guns for horse hooves seemed like a waste and all guns literally came from her factories or black market bootleggers with cheap chinese zigger knockoffs"

Also I'm the same british guy I just moved.
Anonymous
efb3efc
?
No.319239
319281
>>319201
>"The ponies can use guns built for human hands using their tails" is a short and sweet handwave.
Not, really. It's seems like they're both equivalent to me. How does it make more sense that they hold a human gun with their tail and then somehow firethat thing, by what? Whipping it in the air in the direction they want to shoot. Sorry, but both seem ridiculous.
>"Why would ponies design American guns at the same time? Why would they build things ergonomically designed for appendages they lack? Also Fallout is alt-history america with weird guns but AJ just invented them all in a few years for no reason" is a plot hole
I..? Yeah, but it would have worked if they used their tails?
>Daring Doo guns
That could be a fine answer yes, but again, so could a billion other answers but I do suppose that this provews kkat doesn't have excuses.
>Also I'm the same british guy I just moved.
Well, I'm flummoxed.
Anonymous
d42122b
?
No.319281
319282
>>319239
I don't think I've explained it well so far. (also I am that british guy again)
A glock is built for human hands ergonomically.
If ponies invented their own guns it would make no sense for them to build their guns like that unless they had some way to mimic the human hand.
Sure, Unicorns can use glocks telekinetically.
But Pegasi and Earth Ponies?
Maybe Pegasi can fly to free up their forehooves and aim/shoot guns like that.
But Earth Ponies?
Either say their tails can lift and aim the guns and pull the triggers and reload their guns just fine, or you have to write a lot about the mechanisms and operation of "Battle Saddles" before the audience can understand how they work and follow fight scenes where they are used.
Kkat thought he was clever when he designed a saddle with metal bars that hold guns up and a mouth trigger to bite on.
And then he ran into questions (how does the horse reload? How does the horse aim?) he couldn't answer with such a convoluted system. So he decided the battle saddles should be enchanted to make them less retarded. Now the battle saddles can autoaim and teleport ammo from your backpack into the weapon.
But
Nobody acts like they have auto-reloading auto-aiming guns because that would make them far deadlier than enemy Fallout 3 NPCs with pool cues and handguns and rebar clubs and shotguns.
And
If you're going to answer a challenging mechanical question with "uhhh magic" anyway, why bother with any part of the mechanical solution?
Why use battle saddles enchanted to autoaim and autoreload the guns they mechanically hold while a mouthpiece squeezes the trigger when bitten?
A battle saddle enchanted to also magically lift and aim the guns without any metal gun mounts would require less metal, less crafting time, it would be easier to repair and maintain, and if the battle saddles were enchanted to squeeze the trigger when the wearer wanted, the silly mouth trigger wouldn't be necessary.
At this point the "battle saddle" is basically just a necklace that lets whoever wear it use unicorn telekinesis on their own guns. But not on rocks or the guns of others for some reason. Maybe Twilight designed it that way because she didn't want to make Unicorns less special. Or didn't want a Zebra stealing one and becoming a gun-stealing god of telekinetic death before eventually being put down.
Magic can do anything. That's why relying on it to solve mechanical problems is cheating. Still there are times when "because magic" is the fastest and most elegant solution to make your story happen the way you want to tell it.
But half-assing a clunky and inconvenient and uncreative mechanical solution and then wallpapering over every challenge it faces with "I don't have to think about that question because the answer is magic"?
That stops Kkat from revising his battle saddle and thinking of interesting solutions to the reloading problem like "the guns are designed to make reloading easy for hooves" or "the guns are always belt-fed from large internal ammo drums".
There is beauty in simplicity.
In short answers that do a lot of problem-solving and convey a lot of vital information in as few words as possible before letting the story get on with the plot now that the audience is caught up enough to know things necessary to understand the story. Things like "raiders bad, heroes good, nobody farms because radiation and cloud covering, Enclave bad and they made the cloud covering, Red Eye's goal is to become an edgy red and black cyborg male alicorn OC".
You've seen at least one gun ergonomically designed for horse mouths, right? Creative fans willing to reimagine the Fallout guns for ponies to let "Fallout with ponies" firefights happen ended up with more unique and interesting guns. Littlepip's Little Macintosh is just a scoped handgun with a cutie mark. But it would be more unique and iconic if it was designed for tactical horse operation.
Kkat didn't feel like reinventing the guns to suit the setting even though that would have been more creative and original. He just wanted to shove iconic Fallout guns into ponyland after making it like the Fallout wasteland but uglier.
Kkat wanted his characters to run and gun despite being horses...
And instead of designing guns a horse could invent and use or designing a way for horses to use guns meant for human hands like wearable magically-moving fake arms of wood or steel with interesting extra bonus enchantments on the rarest and most expensive best arms...
or a tail with hairs so naturally manipulatable Milia Rage is seething with envy as she reads this and Flank Worship And Tail Jobs General...
This unhappy compromise between "shut up magic lol now lets get back to the story" and "allow me to grind this story to a fucking halt as I infodump at you about the machine I designed to help horses carry glocks even though it adds nothing to the story and doesn't go anywhere interesting or enhance the fight scenes or help tell a vital part of the story I want to tell" was the best he could think of at the time and he never felt like improving upon it.
Anonymous
c88010a
?
No.319282
319307
>>319281
We actually talked about this in the first part in this review series and no, prosthetic limbs with hands attached to ponies somehow is just plain stupid looking. I'm autistic enough as is. Next, you'll tell me that they should have plates just below their neckand when a button is pushed a pair of red boxing gloves shoots out by power of springs.

While I appriciate the effort posting, your explaination didn't add any information I already didn't know. I will just stand by my former point and say that both are handwaves that are equivalently illogical or at least both are illogical enough for me not to care which is the most unreasonable.
I suppose it's intresting to wonder why Kkat start with something mechanical like a battle saddle but then settled before deciding on how such a thing should function in world with ponies.
It's still one thing to say that the battle saddle is illogical and another to say that a better illogical solution would have been better. Like why? Why would it be better if ponies used their tails to fire guns rather than battle saddles?
Anonymous
d42122b
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No.319307
319308 319321 319343
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>>319282
The author wants the FIM ponies to fire recognizable Fallout guns.

He could have just let the ponies use their tails to fire guns. Quick and simple. "the horses use their prehensile tailhairs to aim and fire guns".

But instead he wasted a lot of time talking about battle saddles. A mouth trigger is autistic as fuck. A saddle with metal mounts for guns is autistic as fuck. It can't even reload or aim without the use of do-anything magic handwaves.

But if you're going to rely on the handwave we call "magic" why bother introducing battle saddles in the first place instead of letting magic horses use their tails to manipulate precise tools like lockpicks and guns?

We are expected to believe 200 years after the bombs fell damn near every Earth Pony and Pegasus in the Wasteland is firing their assorted weapons with the aid of Battle Saddles in absolutely perfect condition. No gun jams. No mouth trigger degradation. No glitches in the magical autoaim system. No friendly fire. The enchantment that teleports ammo from your saddlebags to your gun never fuck up and load the wrong ammo, resulting in your shotguns firing buckshot when you wanted slugs or blowing themselves up by teleporting a missile inside your shotguns and triggering it.

"Enchanted wearable arm necklaces" are quick and easy to explain.
"pony tails are prehensile enough to fire and reload guns" is quick and easy to explain. It lets you spend one sentence describing a horse tail lifting and firing a gun before reloading, and boom. All horses can do that. LP could remark "I didn't know we could do that" only to be told "most unicorns never bother using their hooves or tail for anything their horn can do. But an Earth Pony named Applejack invented guns specifically for Earth Pony tails, and she started with revolvers because those are the easiest things for a beginner to fire and reload".
"The horse guns were built for horse hooves/horse mouths" would require an explanation for how each gun is designed to be operated by horse mouths or hooves.
"The Battle Saddles(tm) let ponies use whatever human guns they want"... this requires an explanation of this device and because it is the only canon way for non-unicorn ponies to use guns it means functional Battle Saddles in the post apocalypse literally have to be more common than canned food. This is a larger stretch than anything else I just said. This stupid fucking contraption lacks any obvious way to aim the guns without relying on the user to physically lift and rotate his body so that at least one gun will be trained upon the target even if that means balancing on one leg and sticking much of his body out of cover.

For the ponies to invent arm necklaces they first need to know what human or humanoid arms and hands look like and then design accordingly. And that isn't much of a stretch compared to the battle saddles and their fixed mechanical limbs.
Monkeys canonically exist in FIM and ancient heiroglyphics could always depict long-dead humans with firearms to provide the inspiration. The result? Horses that can flip you off. Perform other hand gestures. Perform military tactical hand gestures. Pet other poners. Masturbate. Write. Punch. Shoot guns and swing weapons and lockpick. Speak sign language. Build shit. And do so much more. The wearable set of arms... Such a revolutionary device would be loved by disabled and abled ponies. It would be entirely reasonable for many of these things to survive 200 years after the nukes fell. There could even be rarer enchanted arms that do bonus things like shoot laserbeams from the fingertips or blast fiery tornadoes out of the palm. Introducing these arm necklaces let ponies do all sorts of things with their hands that ponies couldn't do in most stories. Some characters could even give themselves multiple arms.

But Battle Saddles are stupid and cumbersome awkward devices that are difficult to maintain and aim and utilize. They are the dumbest shit possible. And they are only useful for shooting. Why would these be so omnipresent 200 years after the bombs drop?

I would sooner respect the retarded blind tanks in Fallout 4 that lack windows for the driver and lack Drive Sprockets necessary for making the tank treads turn which is necessary for making the tank move. Please, watch this https://youtu.be/_fspez15Pkk so you will know I am not kidding. This stupid fucking tank sucks gay nigger dicks in hell. There are obvious design flaws but a lazy creator could handwave those away with "do-anything sci-fi future tech solves all issues I can't be bothered to solve". That would not make this a good tank. Time was spent designing the tank. Time was spent making it look "unique". Just like with the battle saddles. They were not necessary and better options were available. But laziness resulted in design flaws like "battle saddles cannot reload or aim" and they were handwaved away with "magic".

But if you are going to reject the challenge to create a purely mechanical solution to the "poner hoofs cant shot gunz" problem why bother half-assing it when you could just say "their tails can use guns, each hair is like a trained snake"
or "hoof telekinesis means they can pick up guns and pull their triggers and spin their chambers without needing to touch them. Tactile telekinesis bitch! If an earth pony touched a piano his telekinetic field could hit whatever notes he wanted without moving a muscle".

Kkat wanted to be praised for his mechanical solution even though it had so many holes he could only think to patch them with magic
Every stupidfucking Fallout Equestria fic is forced to include these stupidfucking things
There are simpler answers to the "how do pony shot gun?" question like "with their tails"
and more interesting answers like "with wooden or plastic or steel prosthetic arms attached at the shoulders to necklaces ponies can wear to control those arms"
Battle Saddles are a worse solution for "hoof no fit in revolver cant shoot" than a lazy option
So they=gay
Anonymous
379f8e4
?
No.319308
319316
>>319307
Use of tails as a usable limb is played for gags/convenience in the show. Just like magic the point isn't the functionality it's a setpiece for moral story telling.
The battle saddle is an attempt (a poor one mind you) to merge the aesthetic of Fallout (kkat's thoughts about the franchise) to force MLP FiM into filling those shoes. Without changing everything (which kkat did anyway).
>Tank
Is a set piece to be the manifestation of an icon and symbol. As an actual tank, yes it's crap. The problem is that it's all about aesthetics. It's not a practical problem, because the stories don't deal with practical problems only philosophical conundrums with practical set pieces.
In that case the practical is akin to magic or tail usage or Pinkie doing Pinkie stuff or Twilight burning in white fire for a moment or Starlight Glimmer doing a thing or Discord or the Tree of Harmony or Flurry Heart or any number of competent ponies/creatures/things.
MLP FiM does a down to earth practical step by step consideration to assist in friendshiping good, because it's messy and real.
Fallout as said earlier is an exploration of ideals, dreams, and stereotypes combined in a way to explore them in such a combined setup.
Neither are overly mired with being sidetracked with said practical practicalness, it's about the story and the characters.
Kkat doesn't have characters nor does he have a complete story.
It's a piece of work that has the illusions of being something by the merits of what it takes things from.
I've said this multiple times it pulls from the reader to make itself 'more complete'.
When it uses Kkat logic there is no warning it's either solution or problem. Resolving 'off-screen' meaning YOU have to fill in the gaps between A and B. A Kkat logic barges in and breaks that suspension with something stupid.
Fortunately both franchisees deal with problems and questions and situations pertaining to not physical concerns. As such Kkat has his solution violance, but done poorly. That's the solution everytime the question is who will the violence be enacted upon usually that's the audience and then a character or two.
The battle saddle for what it could do is not limited to just violence, but it is.
This isn't about how things work or about solutions that make sense or even about moral positions.
It tries signaling that it's either, but at the core this is a story about Kkat (and a few others that polished the shit).

The story is definitely for someone and if you fill in the blanks it's alot more enjoyable and skip over a few works/sentences/paragraphs/ect.
Fo:E is about appearances not any substance only appearances. Top to bottom inside and out its about appearances and if you see depth that's because you (or any audience member) put it there.
Anonymous
d42122b
?
No.319316
319320 319343
>>319308
Correct!
I understand that fictional weapons and vehicles don't have to be perfectly optimized before we can take them seriously. Zeppelins can be a big deal in settings where nobody's invented RPGs yet or energy shield tech (or its magic equivalent) has rendered zeppelins invincible.
When you really want giant robots or swordfighting in your modern or scifi setting it can be necessary to handwave away problems with these things. Mechs can be lighter and tougher and faster than they should be because of magic or some impossible alloy. Swordfighters can see the future and deflect bullets and lasers and slice through anything with their laser swords. For this BS to make sense on the battlefield it has to be as good as a tank or better.
Tanks can look cool by having too many small guns even though one big gun with more ammo is better for tanks. But just as the tank in that video lacks any way to propel itself or see the outside world because the artists never thought of that (or did but some colleague or boss fucked the tank up) the battle saddles lack any way to aim or reload.
If a pony can aim and fire her gun with her tail she can reload it too. But a battle saddle? If her hooves and tail can't reach the guns held out by the metal bars of her saddle, how is she supposed to reload it?
Battle Saddles could have used a mechanism for reloading similar to the Walker Gears from MGSV. Mechanical arms for guns plus ammo storage mechanisms.
But giving the pony mechanical drone arms connected wirelessly to your PipBuck or magically animated metal arms would have been too smart for Kkat.
So instead we get this bullshit. Instant ammo teleportation from the saddlebags, except for no apparent reason this doesn't turn all firearms into ultra-speed rapid-fire full-auto things.
I think duct taping exercise bars to the hips of an upright man and then taping glocks to them and building a mouth trigger for him to bite down on would be almost as absurd as these battle saddles. It would still be too stupid to do, just like battle saddles.
The thought of the battle saddles getting undue praise sickens me. Whenever I'm working on my game or pony fanfic and start doubting myself, I think of this story and its unearned success just because it shamelessly pandered to the right consoomers. That pisses me off and motivates me.
What argument can there possibly be against replacing battle saddles with mechanical or magical arms? They would allow for more interesting fights where characters aim and fire from behind cover without needing to be Unicorns.
It's not like giving the ponies human arm substitutes will make this story feel less like FIM and more like Fallout. FIM was never important to this story at all, aside from the "fim but edgy" aesthetics.
This is already a story about violent asshole OCs killing NPCs all over the place for fun and loot in a mishmash of Fallout 1-NV elements we're told used to be Equestria. The horses already shoot their guns like humans because Kkat put no thought into how the positives and limitations of the quadruped equine body plan plus magic and guns and battle saddles would significantly reshape battles.
FE OCs don't fight like awkward horses doing their best with clunky graceless gun mounts. They don't fight like super-fast horses trading perfectly-aimed shots from their autoaim rapid-fire instantly-reloading bullshit machines. They fight like gun-toting action movie humans with varying degrees of plot armour, some of whom have telekinesis or flight or both plus magic shields, because Kkat decided "because magic" should make all battle saddles into autoaiming god machines that make ponies as good at fighting as humans and no better.
If you're just going to make nonhumans move and act and fight and talk and think like humans, why bother making them ponies in the first place?
If you need your ponies to hold guns, why not give them unique equine ways to hold guns like prehensile tailhairs or localized psychic fields around the hooves, or just give them prosthetic arms? It's a simpler and more elegant solution that means fewer words spent on how the ponies shoot their guns so you can get back to the words where they shoot their guns.

Is Glim enjoying his vacation? I miss him. I wonder what he thinks of battle saddles.

I was also thinking about the memory orbs and terminal entries...
Kkat loves to drop these sometimes-unfinished short stories in at random even when they have nothing to do with anything going on now thematically or directly. He likes using them for exposition on background details too.

If Kkat promised himself he'd keep all memory orb scenes in optional bonus chapters and simply have characters who use them quickly summarise what they saw and learned for them, it would help this story's pacing and infodump rate.
Kkat would be forced to write in a way that ensures everyone can understand the story even if they skim or skip memory orb scenes.
Kkat finds a diary, her eyes zoom across the screen, now she knows the computer terminal password. Bonus chapter covers what she read in that diary. Or all of it.
Can do the same with LP activating a memory orb. Her eyes go blank for a while, then she recovers and blurts out what she just personally learned or thinks of what she saw.
Plus Kkat could do longer bonus chapters without having to worry about his target audience getting bored after a few thousand Littlepip-free words. Instead of juggling the present and past in this awkward "I found six memory orbs and watched them at inappropriate times before returning to the middle of a fight" way be could save the past for bonus chapters and restrict what LP learns from viewing them to the present.
He could even write bonus chapters where books and terminal entries and other information sources LP finds are printed in full outside of chapters that had their pacing damaged by the sudden introduction of new throwaway side characters and their bullshit stories.
Anonymous
379f8e4
?
No.319320
>>319316
It's not even being feasible for even logical it's about what it represents.
Because it's not about how it actually functions its the story element represented. Both should be valid and combined, but this is Kkat.
>If you're just going to make nonhumans move and act and fight and talk and think like humans, why bother making them ponies in the first place?
So you tap into the fictional market.
>I think duct taping exercise bars to the hips of an upright man and then taping glocks to them and building a mouth trigger for him to bite down on would be almost as absurd as these battle saddles. It would still be too stupid to do, just like battle saddles.
Because if it was the point of being actually viable... such things would matter.
At that point being a battle saddle pony would make LittlePip valid. But again that's not the point.
>He likes using them for exposition on background details too.
Yeah all his story elements are lacking.
Anonymous
19f8cd0
?
No.319321
319349
>>319307
>Kkat wanted to be praised for his mechanical solution
Again, like your last theory about Kkat specifically designing something, I think you're giving them too much credit or reading too far into things. The full extent of Kkat's thoughts on battle saddles probably amount to "Hmm how do ponies use guns? Idk i guess they'd be mounted on their side". At no point have I gotten the impression that they wave around this concept as some kind of insurmountable technical achievement. It's more than likely just something they thought of and moved on.

Tail guns sound way dumber than battle saddles to me. Battle saddles are a way easier to accept solution, though imperfect. It even sounds pony-like, on the surface: Horses mounting guns on saddles, an item built for and used on horses throughout history. However it all breaks down when you actually look at it deep enough, but again it's a quick and simple solution that you can then move on with the actual important story.
Anonymous
b949bb5
?
No.319343
319344 319345 319350
>>319307
>>319316
This is an excerpt from an essay I just wrote which I'll paraphrase here:
>Those pics on mgs and dmc are not related. This is not hard.
>This is proof that you do not change and this time I really understood that you won't.
>I suppose you don't think that these unwritten rules that us, your peers, keep refering to are worht a damn and sure we don't have any authority and could just be talking out our asses but please tell us so in that case so we don't go around with the impression that yo're trying to change according to these rules.
>My criticism of you doesn't come from a place of ill will but from a place of good will, since I do think you do make insightful and clever posts at times.
>While it's true that one shouldn't be so insecure that you never post due to that you doubt it won't be good enough it also true that one should force oneself to post as a means to increase activity, like you do with this thread. It's fine. More activity doesn't equal higher quality. Case in point, these battles saddles posts of yours, which I would deem more trivial than nitpicks.
>I promise myself I won't explaining my criticism in a extensive manner to you anymore since it doesn't go through to you anyway and I'm just wasting my time.
>If you continue to be a spazz(which you obviously will), then I don't know. Maybe I'll start calling you names or something.

I couldn't bring myself to post it in it's entirety for some reason.

>Is Glim enjoying his vacation? I miss him. I wonder what he thinks of battle saddles.
He probably still agrees with the sentiment that putting prothetic arms on ponies is goofy like he did in the very begining of the first thread in this review series.

That's because it is. You keep repeating the same argument that they are a more elegant solution. You know what would have been a more elegant solution something that wasn't also a handwave.

Why would prothetic arms be a better solution than batle saddles? I guess it could be, but not by much. You talk about how battle saddles logistically don't make sense like, "How they have to reload through magic," and shit. But like, I'm reminded of, "What came first: The chicken or the egg?"

Ponies needs these arms to manipulate small devices because their hooves and mouth don't cut it, therefore they build them? How did they build these intricate robo arms in the first place?That seems way more difficult than for them to hold a gun. Was it the unicorns that did it for them? Aren't we back at square one with the whole magic solves everything and the other races must rely on unicorns for everything?

And while I'd enjoy reading a fic where ponies thrust and shake their hips just above cover as Deagles are whipped by their tails back and forth while the gun muzzles flash and go, "BAM! BAM! BAM!" it's again both asthetically silly and logically nonsensical.
Anonymous
b949bb5
?
No.319344
>>319343
>it also true that one should force oneself to post as a means to increase activity
*Shouldn't
Anonymous
b949bb5
?
No.319345
>>319343
Maybe I should just ignore all this. Idk anymore. I tired of talking about this and that's why I promise I won't go too deeply into this. I guess if you post a bunch of trash post in thread that doesn't really destory the thread either. They can just be ignore.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm right. I really can't tell at this point.
Anonymous
d42122b
?
No.319349
319395
>>319321
But the horse gun saddles aren't used like horse gun saddles. They magically autoaim but not like a cheating aimbot-using Tf2 player, because that would cause the ponies to fight better than Fallout NPCs which harms the story's ability to rip Fallout off. they autoaim exactly like a human would normally aim. Nothing positive is added to the story by the battle saddles, yet it stretches the suspension of disbelief for all these battle saddles to still operate perfectly 200 years after a goddamn apocalypse. There are probably more battle saddles in the Edgequestrian Wasteland than there are male ponies. In a world with such common Battle Saddles why wouldn't PipBucks be even more common?

If ponies used guns with their tails, how they fire could depend on who they are. How strong and fast and smart they are. Whether they fight with endless aggression or methodical caution. Whether they prefer covering fire to make fights safer or running into melee with a shovel to conserve ammo. But when everyone uses battle saddles everyone fights the same because machines are doing all the work and aiming for them. That's why this story relies on giving enemies silly powers and awful strategies it's the only way to make enemies that deal damage but can't kill the heroes or meaningfully wound them. Remember those Alicorns that held water back until the heroes got close and then teleported away? You know instead of doing something smart like opening fire on the heroes with miniguns while using shield magic to keep foes still and cut off their escape.routes... Something smart magic beings in a hive mind could actually do...

Come to think of it, Twilight is supposedly a part of The Goddess along with two twin OCs, even though Goddess is just ugly Trixie and she has a Corrupted Twilight flying around doing nothing now. But a big black book of evil magic is Trixie's best hope for turning Alicorn chicks into dudes/futas for the sake of alicorn repopulation, rather than Twilight and her encyclopedic magical knowledge? This seems silly. Perhaps if The Goddess actually acted like a confused mix of Trixie and Twilight struggling to manipulate the world around themselves to get an edge over the other and LP was sent into Canterlot for a brain-hacking device, LP could use it to jump into The Goddess and purge Trixie from Goddess so Twilight and her OC twin subordinates can take things from there. Or perhaps save Twilight from The Goddess, pulling her out of there as a tulpa now in LP's head to boost her magical power and justifiable plot importance. That would be a more creative way to work pony elements into the Fallout universe.

Right now Fallout Equestria feels like a fucking stage play. The Master is played by Trixie and the role of the obligatory wise d mentor is played by Spike and the mane six are arbitrarily handed roles in fucking everything up for the future but none of this organically feels like anything these ponies would ever dream of doing outside of stupid outdated fandom memes where Pinkie is a crackhead and Fluttershy is a tree and AJ loves her guns almost as much as she loves inbreeding.

Anckent fandom memes like "20% cooler" and "hahaha fluttershy wants to be a tree ahahaha" might only be about a decade old but I'd sooner laugh at a twenty year old meme like "Judgement Nut" or a thirty year old meme like "So long gay bowser".
Anonymous
d42122b
?
No.319350
319358
>>319343
The pics were examples of outdated shit memes in other fandoms. Seemed fitting for the story that unironically did Fluttertree. Sorry.

The Earth Ponies invented gunpowder and coal and kickstarted the industrial revolution. But for some reason they designed guns that only human hands can use. And then built awkward metal contraptions to help them hold and fire these guns... and then begged unicorns to enchant them to autoreload and autoaim.

I want to give Kkat the benefit of the doubt and say he tried to avert the usual "Unicorn master race" thing. Red Eye and his all-Earth Pony stable invented cyborg upgrades for people and dogs after all.

But then Kkat gave Unicorns better achievements, like inventing better Super Mutants(alicorns) and supercomputers that can simulate brain-copies of someone forever or get the soul of someone shoved within it to make the computer invincible and possessed by that guy's soul.

And the guns thing kind of falls apart once unicorns are needed to make the battle saddles work anyway.

It's just ergonomically retarded for horses to design guns for human hands instead of horse limbs. How hard can it be to design a mechanism strapped to a horse limb with velcro that, when the wrist is flicked in a certain way not normally done when galloping, will fire the gun? Sitting down behind cover to reload with both hands wouldn't be that hard. Or you could flick your wrist another way to make the ammo clip eject and fall out of the gun only to slam your gun down on another ammo clip held in place by your bulletproof vest. Rapid tactical one-armed reloads by a horse.

Purely mechanical AI arms that read the wearer's brainwaves or stab themselves into the shoulder joint to read nerve signal data would let ponies have arms and fire guns and build more precise things without needing any unicorn help. Though unicorns able to magically reshape any material would be immensely helpful in any factory.

Magically animated mannequin arms on a magic necklace would be a purely unicorn and lower-tech solution, both of which still allow a reason for ponies to fire guns without needing to rely on prehensile tails.

Prehensile tailhairs would be the simplest way to let ponies use guns built for human hands if you don't want to use that "just strap guns to horse hooves that fire with one wrist flick and eject their ammo clip or drum with another flick" system.

If you've seen Pinkie Pie pick things up with her tail or Millia Rage from Guilty Gear reshape her hairs into weapons or Tangle The Lemur from the Sonic IDW comics pick things up with her tail you know what I'm talking about. It would be silly if pony hair acted like human hair and required ass shaking, but if pony hair could move freely like countless octopus arms it wouldn't be any sillier than a horse flying fast enough to break the sound barrier with impossibly tiny wings.

All of these options are less cumbersome and time-consuming to write about than Battle Saddles, which are so omnipresent and all-consuming that they rob individual gunfighters of their personality and individual capability.

This isn't even used for a symbolic intentional bit! Imagine if LP called it symbolic that all these horses have to use mechanical tools before they can handle guns they were never meant to use. Every gunfighter relies on their simplified, rationalized machinery to kill with the same precision and speed as everyone else. Individuality and equinity dies as the Battle Saddles effectively make mechanically assisted predators out of all ponies in this world, the act of biting down upon a mouth trigger symbolically referencing the act of a wolf biting down on the neck of helpless prey. If this story WANTED battle saddles to be symbolically retarded to make a statement it would be good writing. But the author doesn't seem to find anything wrong with these half-handwaved half-TMI shit machines.

This may be a retarded nitpick.

I might be running out of shit to talk about regarding FE.

But an easier and faster option results in less headaches and suspension-of-disbelief-straining than omnipresent clunky identical battle saddles somehow more resistant to the ravages of time than Equestria, its ideals, and the equine spirit itself.
Anonymous
b949bb5
?
No.319358
319360
>>319350
>The pics were examples of outdated shit memes in other fandoms. Seemed fitting for the story that unironically did Fluttertree. Sorry.
Well, I don't feel bad about what I say if that's the case because honestly, how was I suppose to know that? I'm pretty sure you didn't even mention Fluttertree in that post so it wasn't really related to it but I guess it was to the thread overall. It's fine I guess.
But holy shit. This is the kind of thing you put a detective on. Even if I was involved in these fandoms, which I'm not and even if I knew about the fact that they were outdated, it would still be unlikely for me to piece together that you were refering to Fluttertree.

>Battle Saddles.
<If you've seen Pinkie Pie pick things up with her tail
Yeah, sure I get how you imagine it now. Still don't like it aesthetically. Instead they will basically all have scorpion tails, it's also that that was kinda Pinkie Pie'sthing because she's Pinkie. I suppose other ponies could do it as well but still.

So here I'm still voting for battle saddles or well neither I guess.

But you make a point later that since these battle saddles are machinary they remove the skill involved with using firearms, like aiming. That is a good point. If there is no skill in how you aim with these battle saddles, then a it would be preferable if the ponies used their tails.

>I might be running out of shit to talk about regarding FE.
That's fine. I lost instrest in this fic forever ago. I'm just lurking for GG and the folks here. This fic is a slog. Your Silver Star story back in the day was way better because at least things fucking happened in that story.

This whole story is a just a blur to me. I don't really recall much but specific events but even of those I don't remember in which order they came.
Anonymous
d42122b
?
No.319360
319380
>>319358
this story is terrible so don't beat yourself up for not remembering stuff. I've been writing notes with a text document, writing down everything that happens and colouring text differently if it never mattered again ever or only ever "mattered" once or twice more in the sense that characters mentioned it once or twice again.
The author has no idea what to emphasize and what to skim. Just a barrel of bad ideas to chew up and vomit back at us.
What even happened to that old BOS AJ Ranger fag who wanted to possess a computer or something? If Spike was the one kept alive via Crusader Maneframe for getting Dragon AIDS it would explain why he hacks spritebots and give him an excuse to never leave his cave. "I want to defend the Red Herring GOE" is stupid. By making Spike already inside the machine Kkat gets to explain how soul-jar ZAX Crusader Maneframes work without having to introduce the BOS of AJ Rangers or write them giving LP the "carry the old man somewhere" quest.

Remember the rock-breaking prison arc? A total clusterfuck. Diamond Tiara ran a prison and poners spontaneously became evil cunts once shit hit the fan. Villains were... sort of fighting, I think? Someone turned out to be a giant dragon whose existence would be impossible to hide and LP killed it. I think memory orbs were offered as a reward only for that to be changed after the deed was done?

And it's all easily revised into "This was a gem mining camp but they found a sleeping underground dragon and covered it up and stopped mining and sold the land. Then it was used for a penal labor camp for war criminal soldiers but they escaped when the bombs fell and the prison guards fled or died. Now this place is used by Red Eye as a training ground for penal labour, this is where new slaves are sent to be "broken" and trained to obey. But the boss in charge of here, a unicorn named Mr Big, discovered the dragon and wants to awaken it and magically make a Soul Jar of it to possess it and make it invincible and become the biggest baddest king of the wasteland. Talon Company are there providing defense but one Talon was killed by Mr Big for uncovering the truth, this pissed Gawd off and made her want to rebel against Red Eye. LP stumbles into the area blindly and Velvet is captured as a hostage by the Talons to force Calamity and LP to try and assassinate Mr Big with stealth. Gawd expects them to fail and they do because the goal is to get herself close enough to kill Mr Big. She does, the end, Gawd takes over the prison camp and is about to release Velvet when Red Eye says "Thank you for killing that traitorous pawn I always knew about. Gawd, LP, I invite you two to my sick mansion to talk further".

Now LP gets to visit Red Eye without all that "The BOS of AJ Rangers help LP sneak into Red Eye's lands disguised as a slave unarmed and naked except for her PipBuck and she does sidequests for him until she decides to rebel and eventually get to talk to him anyway" bullshit.

Red Eye sends Gawd to Tenpony Tower with an alliance request, her focused personality means no spa day sidetracking bullshit or lesbian degeneracy or retarded Monterry Jack misadventures.
Red Eye also convinces LP to help Red Eye kill Goddess by taking Xenith with a Nuke Timebomb to the Goddess tomorrow while LP's memory of the plan is erased so Goddess can't read it. Xenith tells a memoryless LP "just go to the Goddess or the bomb Red Eye put in your cunt explodes" then vanishes because StealthCloak. LP provides the distraction and Xenith does her thing.
Everything goes as planned and now Red Eye's in charge of the only remaining Alicorns because HE decided to blame the Enclave. War breaks out, he also cyberized and soul-jar'd that Dragon from earlier everyone forgot about. The invincible mind controlled dragon is his and the Soul Jar invincibility now matters to the plot without any need for Pony Statuettes or a Black Book in Canterlot. It no longer comes out of nowhere.
Now it is actually foreshadowed and LP does not have a retarded "kills a giant dragon then struggles to deal with pony raiders" scene. Skip Zebratown, skip Red Eye's Thunderdome and Fluttershy's Thunderdome, skip Arbu, skip fucking everything until we get to where we are now with Red Eye's alicorn weather plan and Colonel Autism the Literal Who in the same room as actual characters like Red Eye and LP.
Giving Autumn plot relevance before he shows up here would mean making up new shit and this story needs less shit since so much of it is meaningless tedious filler.
Hmm... maybe Autumn could be the voice of Enclave Radio which is constantly calling LP a faggot and reinterpreting her actions to make her sound like a wimpy stupid selfish murderous bleeding-heart anarchotyrannist twat?
If Autumn also talked about good shit the Enclave did on the other side of the continent it would help make the Enclave more of a credible threat and alternate possibly-good viewpoint for where the future of Equestria should be taken. Could even give Calamity and Velvet some more development by making them yell at the radio together. Or yell at each other when they disagree about what True Enclavist Radio has to say.

Come to think of it while I'm changing shit I'd personally prefer Tenpony Tower to be the "Capitalism good, free markets based, radio musician earns her keep" location instead of the "hurr durr capitalism and rich people bad, laws stupid, non citizens lack rights and their words mean nothing, these rich cunts trade away overpriced luxuries and 200 year old canned meat disguised as small-portioned fancy cooking to gain money it spends on 200 year old canned meat, secret society appointed the radiowhore of Supreme Surveillance Tower and she didn't have to earn the right to shittalk the tower's in-name-only mayor or replay the same 4 songs or shittalk the rest of the wasteland too". But my personal preference isn't a valid reason to change that. "my AnCap Tenpony is more realistic" would probably be tho.
Anonymous
d42122b
?
No.319380
>>319360
Is it right for me to say "This could be cut" and "This should be cut" and "the story would flow better if LP avoided that town entirely since nothing important happened there and the end of chapter 6 could be half the length and neatly flow into the start of chapter 14 if all filler was removed"?
On one hoof it seems reductive and mean to say "Fallout Equestria would be better if there was less of it".
But on the other hoof this story is over 620k words, most of which is first-draft stream-of-consciousness drivel and bad ideas never thought through and vapid nonsense that never matters to the character or plot or themes.
If you read at 200 words per minute like an average person (wtf thats so slow) that's 3100 minutes. Or 51.66666 (repeating of course leeroy jenkins) hours.
Watching all 222 MLPFIM episodes (22 minutes each) back to back would take 4884 minutes or 81 hours.
All good LOTR movies extended? Over 600 minutes, 11-12 hours total.
That's still an extreme time investment and Glim deserves a goddamn medal for leading us through this. If he wanted someone else to take over the next book club session or story or choose a good book to work through together instead of Harry Potter 1 or an overhyped fanfic I'd understand completely. This is more than I'd ever have the patience for. Over 50 hours... Holy shit, that's too much. We all deserve a goddamn medal each, and Glim deserves more than one. This story is held on a pedestal by a fandom of pseudointellectual tweenagers full of edge and confusion signifying nothing.
The only thing harder to do than getting through Fallout Equestria is saying something positive about it.
Besides "Kkat is HIV positive".
Anonymous
19f8cd0
?
No.319395
319434
>>319349
>But the horse gun saddles aren't used like horse gun saddles

That wasn't my point. My point was that saddles are a longstanding piece of horse equipment, so the average person would probably accept "horses use this key component of horse equipment integrated into their weaponry" and not think twice about it. I know how retarded these devices are in actuality, I was just offering an idea of how this concept would probably be taken by the average person.
Anonymous
e66b622
?
No.319417
>>311813
>>311857
>muh anime drama
literally no one cares, also, this is a pony website which is from an anime website.
Anonymous
d42122b
?
No.319434
>>319395
Yeah, saddles are a longstanding piece of horse equipment and guns built for human hands aren't. I understand why Kkat thought "just strap guns to the saddles and add a biteable mouth trigger and- oh fuck now they cant reach or reload or aim their guns. Durrr magic solves those problems I swear" was the best option available.
I still think it was gay.
Making tails into prehensile hair masses would let ponies manipulate all sorts of tools including guns made for human hands without needing mechanical or magical enhancements of any kind. Giving them hands via magical or mechanical means would also require less magic.
Sure you'd need magic in a factory that makes wearable wooden prosthetic arms. But after that it's all mechanical.
meanwhile the autoaim and autoreload enchantments should be turning bolt-action snipers into instantly-reloading cheat guns. But of course, the existence of Battle Saddles and their magical reality-warping capability didn't influence the shape and style and function and evolutionary path of guns in Equestria at all. Because why would 200 to 350 pound horses in heavy armour and sometimes even power armour carrying over 80 pounds of guns and ammo each collectively decide all-piercing big guns are better than tiny handguns that barely dent a radscorpion's hide?

Ever read The Martian? It would be a very dull book if the hero wore a Space Saddle that magically met all his bodily needs.
Anonymous
cad96a9
?
No.319449
319453
>I want some okay stuff. --GG I'm paraphrasing.
This is my recommendation.
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/25125/the-keepers-of-discord
It's short too.
Anonymous
d42122b
?
No.319453
1572228554-comic638.png
>>319449
I recommend this fic with awesome flying pony combat https://www.fimfiction.net/story/24736/ace-combat-the-equestrian-war

You don't have to know anything about the Ace Combat plane games to enjoy this fic about awesome Pegasi doing awesome military things.

I think this is the superior way to crossover ponies and a video game.

Fans of pony can enjoy Rainbow Dash and pals being awesome even if they don't care for planes. It might even attract new fans to the series.

Fans of cool planes and military shit can enjoy tactical plane action reinvented by pegasi in Equestria, even if they haven't played every Ace Combat game enough to get all the subtle references.

Fans of Ace Combat will appreciate it all.

But there will never be a moment where you say "why the fuck is this happening?" prompting xXx_SoloWingPixtynine_XyZ to explain "He's copying everyone's least favourite part of Ace Combat 4: The Quest For Peace only he's trying to make it less retarded by overcomplicating it" or "because it happened that way in Secret Mission 7 of the Genocide Route of Ace Combat 10: Fast-10 Your Seatbelts". References are exactly that, just references and not all-consuming cancers that damage all aspects of the story. Looking at you, Fluttertree and the Statuettes.

Fandom memes should be tasteful and subtle so those who don't get the reference won't realize there was a reference. Like if Rainbow Dash showed up for a party in full military getup and a character commented "Rainbow Dash always dresses in style! ...When she's not naked" that would be peak comedy. People who don't know about the fandom meme with older-gen RD can still laugh because a pony said naked.
Anonymous
d42122b
?
No.319844
I hope Glim doesn't feel like this was all a colossal waste of time. Because this was a good time. And a good deed.
Sure, Kkat might never read this and use the knowledge here to write a superior shorter smarter rewrite named Fallout: Equestria: Re:Write: Ultimate Wastelander: Storm: Super Legends: Ultra Hyper Turbo 358/69 Days Edition.
But the writing lessons taken from this dumpster fire of a story will always be useful to anyone who reads them now, or ten years later when going through the archives nostalgically.
We didn't know we were making memories. We just thought we were having fun.
But we will always treasure these memories.
I will never forget how funny it was when Littlepip levitated a cumstained blanket under herself when flying into the rock-breaking prison because she thought this would result in a less suspicious silhouette against a cloud-coated sky barely any guard would be likely to see in enough detail to notice her either way.
I will never forget when Calamity immediately dove for cover under that cumstained blanket and shot at enemies from it.
And I will certainly never forget when LP used the cumstained blanket as a burial shroud for one of the many dead fuckers present in a show of maudlin self-aggrandizing fake compassion from a pony so bloodthirsty not even being "tricked" into using intimidation and murder to get something for ponies she never bothered to investigate (who turned out to be cannibals) and slaughtering them all could fundamentally shake her out of her ways or shake the author out of his glassy-eyed empty-headed consoomer-goomer button-mashing trance.

Gentlemen, it has been an honour. Fillies and Gentlecolts, this review has been an experience and this thread has been a wild ride.

While we're recommending fanfics, this https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WebAnimation/DiamondInTheRoughTouhou takes the piss out of self-insert fanfiction written for Touhou.

Turns out their fandom writes HIE crap too.
With a surprising number of badfic cliches in common with this fandom's badfics.
And this fanfic shits on their cliches cleverly by making a tragedy out of things.
Basically the overly influential universally beloved hero guy is an idiot who has no idea why he is here.
He is being played by someone who wants this fantasy world to become less trusting of outsiders.
Other stuff happens too but anyway you don't need to know anything about touhou to appreciate it.

I wish something like this existed in the mainstream brony fandom's consciousness.
A deconstruction of the typical HIE/OC "my guy in Equestria gets all the bitches and is a god and probably a human or former human turned poner" formula.
Maybe it would turn people away from the trite and easy emotional porn and literal porn that gets into the feature box on fimfic.
Imagine waking up every day only to eat breakfast and then spend the rest of the day reading HIE wish-fulfillment drivel and wanking except when eating or sleeping or giving bad writing advice and expecting to be taken seriously.

I once wrote a HIE parody where a human goes to Equestria and decides the only logical course of action is to become so godly and beloved no good story could ever be told involving him because he wants ro force a permanent happy ending for the story he found himself in and all ponies involved. It works.
Unfortunately a constant barrage of pop culture namedrops turned people away, probably. I assume that's why it didn't get popular. Maybe the premise alienated fimfic.net consoomers who want simple HIE and anyone who'd like it didn't feel like reading what seems like HIE ponyfiction.

Anyway, I love all of you. Even my "biggest fan".
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
ad85887
?
No.320105
320122 320124 320129
bender.jpeg
>>314703

Anyway, Littlepoop seems to have figured out the essence of Red Eye's plan and revealed it to the reader through her inner monologue, so the conversation really doesn't need to keep going. It should therefore come as no surprise to anyone that kkat keeps it going for several more paragraphs.

>“As did I,” Red Eye told him. “Poor, little Autumn Leaf. A middle child, trapped between the perfect son, the loser and the mistake. So you took the only path left: the over-achiever.
>“You have the drive, the ambition, not to mention the charisma and force of will, to become the leader of a massive military force. One of the highest ranking officers in your entire country. And yet… it’s all born out of a desire for approval.”
This armchair psychoanalysis of Autumn Leaf is probably accurate enough, and I'm sure it would be gripping if kkat had bothered to establish him as a significant character. However, since we hadn't even heard this faggot's name mentioned prior to Chapter 41, it's awfully hard to give a shit. Red Eye might as well be talking about his Great Aunt Mel here.

After a short back and forth, Colonel Rumplebumpkin gives a standard "I will never join you" response to Red Eye's plan. Obviously, Red Eye anticipated that this would be his answer and thus gave him no choice; a nearby cup explodes, detonating some kind of disruptor grenade thingie I've completely given up trying to keep track of all the ridiculous devices in this story and what they all do exactly that incapacitates his armor somehow and renders him immobile. And Jesus Christ, this conversation that should have been over at least half a page ago just keeps going and going. Colonel Farty-Pubes "Rue" McClanahan keeps right on talking shit to Red Eye even though his cyborg armor is disabled and he is effectively paralyzed.

>“What you are planning is nothing short of annihilating an entire country’s crops. Your megalomania threatens the pegasi with massive famine and starvation. You are attempting to become the greatest mass-murderer in Equestria’s history just so you can claim credit for a sunny day!”
Well, at least we kinda-sorta know what Red Eye is planning to do. We still don't know why he's doing it, or what ultimate end he is trying to accomplish, but we understand the 'what' at least. It seems that as soon as Red Eye has control of the weather machine, he intends to remove the cloud cover, effectively decimating the Enclave's method of food production.

>Oh Goddesses. Is that what I was doing too? My own plan was not so far different.
What exactly was LP's plan again? Something about wandering around the wasteland slaughtering random strangers, until something-something-Equestria-is-saved, as I recall.

>Was that the cost?
That, plus about tree fiddy.

Anyway, it seems like the basic idea is that both Red Eye and Littlepoop are in agreement that the Enclave's cloud cover needs to come down, because the world needs sunlight (I guess) and because the Enclave needs to be stopped from doing whatever they are trying to do exactly (I guess). However, while LP had simply not considered the sort of tragedy this might inadvertently inflict on the Pegasi, Red Eye seems to be well aware of it, yet is callously indifferent. It seems the author is trying to draw yet another half-assed parallel between his protagonist and his (I guess) main villain. "Corrupted kindness" and so forth.

And sweet mother of merciful nigger dicks, these buttnards are still fucking talking. The evil-villain-banter goes on for a few more paragraphs, and then Red Eye concludes by tying up the last logical loose end in his plan.

One might wonder, since he is planning to combine three individual consciousnesses into one, how he plans to ensure that his will be the dominant personality in the new Goddess. Logically, one would assume that one of the other two could just as easily end up in charge. Even more logical would be to assume that the combination of the three personas would give birth to a new fourth persona that would have attributes of all the other three, but would not be any of them individually.

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

However, it seems Red Eye thought of this in advance:

>“Four ponies became the templates within the Goddess, but they didn’t form the Goddess equally. The Goddess was dominated by one mind, one will. And it wasn’t the most powerful of the four. No, that would have been Twilight Sparkle. Instead, it was Trixie. And not just Trixie, but Trixie the Showpony. The most charismatic of the four.
Knowing kkat, he probably means that literally the pony with the highest charisma stat gets to be the leader. If this is the case, Littlepoop should just pop one of her stupid mints before diving into the goo; that would learn him good.

>“I’ll be sharing Godhood with a martyr who wants to save everypony and a gutless tool.” He smirked. “I’m feeling pretty confident in my chances.”
Which one is which again?

>Red Eye turned his gaze up towards the cage. “You can come out now.”
>What? my little pony stammered. I… but… oh, forget it. Her head slumped in defeat. I disengaged the StealthBuck and stared down at the wasteland’s other Stable Dweller.
Wait, did she honestly think that Red Eye didn't know she was standing there the whole time? You'd think after wandering around this shitscape for 400,000 some-odd words she'd have a slightly clearer picture of how these kinds of hackneyed scenes are supposed to work.

At this point, one would expect Red Eye to wrap up his evil monologue and activate whatever overly-elaborate mechanism he plans to use to stitch the three of them together, so that LP can thwart him and we can move the fuck on. However, it's kkat writing, so it seems we are going to have to endure yet another lengthy armchair psychoanalysis from Red Eye. This time, it's Littlepoop's turn on the couch. Stay tuned, we'll have plenty more of your favorite cartoon pals after these messages.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
ad85887
?
No.320122
320126 320129 320206
6202427__safe_artist-colon-emberslament_imported+from+derpibooru_starlight+glimmer_pony_unicorn_blushing_coffee_cute_female_grumpy_heart+eyes_high+res_levitatio.png
>>320105

Red Eye informs LP that, unlike Colonel Sanders, he is giving her a choice as to whether or not she wants to become part of the new Goddess. In a somewhat-amusing blow to her self esteem, he tells her that the reason for this is because she is not at all special. He has an entire cage full of unicorns behind her, all of whom have been carefully selected to ensure their suitability, so he doesn't need her specifically. Plus, he doesn't want to have two-thirds of his new body at war with the remaining third, so he wants to ensure that the unicorn part is either someone who agrees with his aims (whatever those may be exactly), or, at the very least, is someone he could easily dominate.

>Twenty-five hoof-picked chances for a good unicorn template. One of them is bound to be sufficient.
Though Red Eye's overall plan makes sense more or less, we're beginning to veer off again into kkat-land with the haziness of some of the details. How does this work exactly? The implication here seems to be that if LP says no, he's just going to keep trying unicorn after unicorn until he gets one that does the trick. Would that even be possible? I might be misunderstanding how this process works exactly, but the way I picture it, all three of them have to get dunked into the goo at once in order for the synthesis to happen; seems like this would be a one shot deal. But whatever; we'll see what happens I guess.

>But you…” He snorted bemusedly. “You’re a sure thing. Imagine my surprise when fate dropped you right in front of me at the seventh hour.
The expression he's thinking of here is actually "the eleventh hour." He is probably getting it mixed up The 7th Guest, another video game, the sequel to which is called The 11th Hour. Both are probably better games than Fallout 3, if this story is an accurate barometer of its content.

Anyway, with the preamble out of the way, he gets down to business with the armchair psychology. Red Eye's entire plan was essentially a calculated gamble: he wagered that because LP's aim is apparently to save the wasteland, she would readily volunteer to become part of his wacky scheme. As a backup plan, he wagered that even if she didn't want to volunteer, she would anyway, simply to prevent the nasty consequences of having a Goddess comprised of Red Eye, some apparently evil pegasus she just met two chapters ago, and some random third unicorn who may or may not be evil, I guess. It's a carrot-and-stick approach: if she says yay, she gets a say in how the new Equestria operates; if she says nay, she only gets a powerful new enemy to fight.

>“Oh very true,” Red Eye told me. “But I’m not the one who will be ruling Equestria. I told you before, I’m too much of a monster for the world we are creating. I have no place in it. That will be your job, remember?” He chuckled. “Besides, I’m going to have my plate full controlling the sun, moon and weather.”
>My jaw dropped.
>”Oh dear,” Red Eye laughed. “How else did you think I was planning for you to take over my work? My forces and my followers aren’t going to be loyal to a new leader just because I tell them to. But they will be loyal to the new me, and any part of me.”
At this point I have once again lost track of what the fuck is even going on. Is the "Goddess" supposed to be one pony, or three? How is this division of labor between the separate personalities supposed to work, exactly? Do they take shifts? What is Colonel Flappy-Cheeks supposed to do in this arrangement, just sit there being a moody bitch while Red Eye and LP run Equestria? If that's the case, why does Red Eye insist that he specifically needs Autumn Leaf for the pegasus portion, but is willing to give LP the option to say no? There are so many what-ifs here.

>"Really, Littlepip, did you ever take the time to seriously think this through?"
Did the author?

>I felt numb, removed, like the world was a distant, far-away place. I was in a cocoon of else-ness, staring out at reality through hazy gauze.
I don't have any remarks here; I just wanted to highlight this passage as yet another example of the kind of horseshit prose I've been slogging through for the past year of my life.

Anyway, if Red Eye thought he could cage LP with something as simple as a logical argument, he's obviously never met this psycho. In a surprise twist that should surprise absolutely nopony, LP decides to go for Option C: whip out Little Macintosh and start poppin' caps.

>“You’re kidding.” Red Eye looked up at me, shock dissolving into contempt. He stared down the barrel pointed between his eyes. “You’re kidding, right?”
Hurr durr that's what Nightmare Moon said to Twilight Sparkle; cue stock footage of bronies clapping their hooves together and giggling like retards. Although I will say that as the references to the show in this story have gone, this is one of the least obnoxious. At the very least, it's subtle and fits with what's happening in the scene right now. Red Eye's exclamation here makes sense in context; he isn't just randomly spouting dialogue from the show just so the author can reference something herp derp it was under E!!!1!.

>“No,” I told him sternly. “I’m taking option three. The one where I don’t have to worry about what the ponies in the Godhood are like because there isn’t a new Godhood at all.”
>“Take the shot!” Autumn Leaf growled. We both ignored him.
Why is LP ignoring him? Autumn's suggestion is perfectly reasonable. The smart thing to do would be to simply kill Red Eye before he has a chance to react, but instead LP elects to continue arguing with him after pulling her gun. Why? There is no reason for her to do this beyond kkat's desire to keep the scene going. If he wants this "dramatic" moment to play all the way out then fine, but if that's the case he should finish the conversation and then have LP pull her gun and start shooting.
Anonymous
08beda9
?
No.320124
>>320105
Welcome back!
I understand that Kkat wants to write a parallel between LP and RE by giving them both the "eliminate the Pegasus race's cloud cover even though they farm in it because the cloud cover blocks sunlight the ground could use to farm, hopefully if the Skylanders have to rely on the Groundlanders for their food they will be friends and won't just eat or enslave the ground-bound and steamroll their settlements to make room for farms" plan.
But LP just looks stupid here for not thinking that countless Pegasi may die waiting for the barren Wasteland, hellish monster-filled Everfree Forest, or burned-down ashes of the Everfree might need to become a functional farm. If they ever do wait for the Wastelanders to make farms and don't just try to conquer the ground to fight for scavenging rights or war to reclaim weather control.
Surely if you had control of the weather you could poke holes in the cloud cover where there are no farms and build farms on the ground that's getting sunlight?
Or you could just take some mind-enhancing drugs and invent sun lamps to render the whole argument moot.
Red Eye is a cyborg with industry and slavery in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. To make a villain like that work he needs to represent everything good and bad (or just bad) about industrialization, modernization, and industrial society and its future. The elimination of tribes and communities that grew over 200 years as they are dragged into a gruelling grind for the sake of old-world ambitions. Kkat's constant attempts to make him "the hero of his own story" and "Just like LP" get in the way of actually making him a coherent character and making LP a coherent rejection of Red Eye-ness with her own goals and ideals.
Kkat couldn't think of a good thing for LP to fight for and he forgot about the Gardens Of Equestria completely so he thought of one evil "destroy enemy farms to make them rely on ours" plan even though as far as we're aware Edgequestria lacks farms and even though it's not guaranteed to work, and he thought it would absolve LP morally if she simply never thought about the consequences of (or morality of) inflicting starvation on a nation and destroying its self-sufficiency to manipulate it?

Perhaps if the Gardens Of Equestria required six special Mane Six statuettes designed to work like nuclear keys and carry shards of each Mane Six pony's soul, the villains could have a coherent and easily understood race to find them and war over them to determine who gets to hold Equestria's future hostage and de-nuke desired areas at will while the heroes want to denuke all of it at once. None of this bullshit about becoming an alicorn and Enclave weather control machines and "cloud seeding" and warring personalities and personality fusions or Soul Jars and invincible Crusader Maneframe computers and Black Books and wannabe-futa Alicorn Trixie with Twilight and two OCs along for the ride or Rarity copying soul data to make many statuettes just so the hero can randomly obtain one of each for no real reason at alll. Just a simple clear goal for the heroes and villains to have as they clash over a set of Jackie Chan Talismans or whatever.
Anonymous
6183881
?
No.320126
>>320122
>Is the "Goddess" supposed to be one pony, or three?
Spoilers? for a 20+ year old game, but the Master that Trixie (The Goddess) is based upon seemed to have a primary, driving consciousness, and the other personalities that were assimilated occasionally cut in and interject during his speech, but he very much was in control. For example, when he's speaking angrily about something, an angry male voice will interject, or when he's speaking of kindness, a soft female voice cuts in. But it all "flows" in such a way to imply that there is a primary control personality with the others acting as integrated parts of it that flare up occasionally.

I guess that's what Kkat wanted to refer to the reader's knowledge here for. If I remember correctly, though, the Goddess used the royal we and spoke of themselves in the third person, so I guess the idea is they merge into a new "whole" consciousness?
Anonymous
fa2c4ec
?
No.320129
320441
307DDAD8E16A471C995124D043DD4A97-188393.gif
>>320105
>>320122
Always enjoyed what you do.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
50302d0
?
No.320206
320211
6207998__safe_artist-colon-deroach_imported+from+derpibooru_starlight+glimmer_pony_unicorn_cutie+mark_magic_show+accurate_simple+background_transparent+backgrou.png
>>320122

Anyway, instead of doing the sensible thing and just capping this cyborg sumbitch, as she's done to hundreds of nameless baddies throughout the rest of this story without a second thought, LP continues her banal argument with Red Eye.

>“Really, Littlepip?” Red Eye asked. “Would you doom the ponies of Equestria to the Wasteland? To another two-hundred years of futile struggle, poverty and hardship… all ending in death, usually at the whim of the Wasteland’s raiders and monsters? They need us, Littlepip. Where will they be without our leadership? What will become of them without our guidance?”
As I've said before, the author's efforts at having these two characters' motivations run parallel to each other has been hit or miss, with an emphasis on miss. That said, while I'm not sure about "corrupted kindness" and all that, the one thing these two do have in common is an ego larger than the diameter of kkat's well-traveled rectum.

>“They don’t need us. They don’t need a God to save them. They can save themselves.”
>"I admire your faith, Littlepip. So… childlike. But now it is time to grow up.”
>Was it? Was I just being naïve? “No,” I said slowly, not sure where my thoughts and words were going. “Maybe… I think… it’s time for them to grow up.”
I think this was meant to be Littlepoop's big "revelation" moment; Red Eye finally holds a dark mirror up to Littlepoop and she realizes that she's the same as this lunatic, and that she needs to change. Not necessarily a bad idea, but as usual the execution is bad. What's at issue here is Red Eye's megalomania and hubris, not necessarily his methods; LP doesn't seem to realize this, so as usual she ends up learning entirely the wrong lesson.

Red Eye has essentially made it his life's mission to "fix" the wasteland by subverting all of reality to his will through force. His view is that, in the prewar era, the two Princesses were responsible for maintaining order or harmony or something, but they lost control somehow and everything went to shit. He sees himself, and maybe Littlepoop as well, as some kind of reborn version of Celestia and/or Luna, destined to assume godhood and put everything to right, with "right" defined by his own ideals. His faith in himself is unshakable; he was chosen by God, or Fate, or whatever you want to call it, to "fix" the wasteland. Thus, any act, no matter how heinous, is justified as long as it is done towards achieving that end.

While LP seems to recognize on some level that Red Eye is completely nuts, and is disturbed that her own goals (such as they are) seem to mirror his, she still fundamentally agrees with Red Eye's worldview. Her "revelation" here doesn't change this; the only thing the two of them disagree on is methodology Even this is a bit murky. Neither of them have a problem with unrestrained murder and mayhem; the only difference between their values is that LP draws a couple of arbitrary lines in the sand at things like slavery and cannibalism. The basic tenets of Red Eye's worldview she takes for granted: that the state of the present world is "wrong" somehow, that reality needs to be fundamentally altered in order to return it to its "proper" state, and that only the enlightened can see this and take action.

This could potentially be interesting if the author was going somewhere with it, but I don't get the impression he is. Kkat takes Red Eye's worldview for granted too; it's baked into the very logic that his world operates on, and it causes problems from the ground up. Let's take a closer look at this line:

>“Would you doom the ponies of Equestria to the Wasteland? To another two-hundred years of futile struggle, poverty and hardship… all ending in death, usually at the whim of the Wasteland’s raiders and monsters?
This takes us back to one of my earliest questions about FoE: why is it that after 200 years these ponies are still eating old expired cans of beans and living in rusted-out buses and crumbling ruins? Why are there roving gangs of edgelords running around in bad Warriors cosplay, decorating their houses with guts and making foals fight each other to the death? It may be unrealistic to expect the idyllic Equestria we know from the series to have been rebuilt, especially with the aftereffects of the megaspells and whatnot, but you'd think that in 200 years at least some semblance of civilization would have begun to reassert itself, right?

The problem is that kkat, and by extension most of his characters, see the state of the world as an all-or-nothing type deal. On the one hand you have Edgequestria, where everything is dark and gloomy and irradiated, and on the other you have the happy Equestria of Yore, which resembles what we know from the show. The world can only either be one or the other; there's no middle ground. Subtle nuances of culture and economics, which might explain why things like slaver groups and raiders have come to exist in this world, are never explored; it's just assumed that if Equestria is in its "bad" state, then everyone and everything in it will be "bad" by default until someone "good" comes along and fixes it.

It's a little easier to explain if we delve into the next thing LP says:

>I thought of the Twilight Society sitting on a treasure of magic and not using it to help anypony. Of the Steel Rangers preying on other ponies in their selfish drive to hoard the technologies of the past. Of New Appleloosa willing to trade with slavers and not lifting a hoof about the horrors of Old Appleloosa not so far from their door.
In other words, the various factions that make up the wasteland are at fault for its general crumminess, because they use the resources at their disposal to achieve their own goals, instead of directing them towards building the world LP wants. Her fundamental view of herself as wasteland savior hasn't changed at all; she's just transferring the responsibility for building her utopia onto others now.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
ad85887
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No.320211
320217 320219
6209514__artist+needed_safe_imported+from+ponybooru_starlight+glimmer_pony_unicorn_bust_female_looking+at+you_mare_portrait_s5+starlight_simple+background_solo_.png
>>320206

I'd actually like to look at this last statement of LP's in a little more detail.

>I thought of the Twilight Society sitting on a treasure of magic and not using it to help anypony.
The Twilight Society, as far as I can tell, is a mostly-harmless group that likes to larp as freemasons or something. I've never been clear on whether they are meant to be the actual governing body of Tenpony Tower, or else some kind of shadow-government that runs things secretly from behind a puppet regime. It's one of many, many details that kkat was not especially clear on.

However, what is clear is that Tenpony Tower is probably the closest thing Edgequestria has to a functional society, and the Twilight Society has played a significant role in creating and maintaining it. My understanding is that they keep their trove of prewar technology a secret partly to prevent it from attracting invaders like Red Eye, and partly so they can research it and learn a little more about how it works before attempting any practical use of it. Both of these seem like reasonable positions to me; I'm not sure what LP is getting at with her criticism here. As I said above, LP's latest revelation hasn't altered her fundamental worldview at all; she still views herself as the "wasteland savior" tasked with rooting out all the badness in the world and putting things to right. The only thing that's changed is that now she's pushing the responsibility for creating her utopia onto others.

It's also interesting that she criticizes "The Twilight Society" as a whole, but doesn't say anything about her little girlfriend's role in this group. Homage is a member of the Society and operates her radio show with their blessing. She also uses her show to openly criticize Tenpony Tower for hoarding resources instead of using them to "help" the wasteland at large. She clearly shares LP's "ideals" about how the wasteland needs to change, and has the power to affect this change at least in part. However, instead of using her position to take action, she just sits in her ivory tower doing her radio broadcasts. She badmouths Tenpony Tower from the safety of its penthouse, not only enjoying the protections of its government but a role within it, which she notably does not use to advance her own stated ideals. She also actively deceives her listeners by presenting herself as some kind of "voice of the people," when in reality she's about as privileged as it's possible to be in Edgequestria. No wonder she and LP got together; they're pretty much cut from the same cloth. These two insufferable narcissists deserve each other.

>Of the Steel Rangers preying on other ponies in their selfish drive to hoard the technologies of the past.
The Steel Rangers have always been a half-baked idea in this story. As I've said numerous times, I've never completely understood what their mission is supposed to be in the first place, or why they are carrying it out. It seems to be one of those areas where kkat expects his readers to be familiar with the Steel Brotherhood from Fallout that he's referencing, and to fill in the blanks on their own. From what kkat has given us, it's not really clear why exactly the Steel Rangers are so interested in hoarding prewar technology, nor is it clear what they intend to do with it. Thus, it's a little difficult to form an opinion of their actions one way or the other.

>Of New Appleloosa willing to trade with slavers and not lifting a hoof about the horrors of Old Appleloosa not so far from their door.
The Old Appleoosa slavers were another hazy area that kkat fudged a lot of the details on. It was never clear just what the relationship between the two towns was supposed to be. They apparently had some kind of trade deal going on that involved sending a train back and forth, but what exactly was traded? Old Appleoosa was presented to us as basically an armed compound that served no purpose beyond corralling slaves; it wasn't even a proper town. We are told, albeit in vague terms, that the New Appleoosans didn't particularly approve of the slavers' practice, yet it didn't seem that any other industry of note went on in Old Appleoosa. What exactly did they trade for? For that matter, why did the slavers bother to trade with NA at all? Why not just invade them, capture all their citizens, and sell them to Red Eye as slaves?

I've already given extensive commentary on that part of the book and how the relationship between the two towns could have been better fleshed out, so I won't go into detail there. The important thing here is that once again, despite outwardly attempting to distance herself from Red Eye's worldview, LP displays the same kind of hubris that he does. Her criticism is that NA focused on the well-being of their own town by forming a mutually beneficial trade agreement with OA, instead of invading OA and slaughtering everyone the way she did. She takes it as a given that her views on the evils of slavery are a universal moral constant; she condemns New Appleoosa for prioritizing the needs of their own community over fighting for her universalist ideals.

In her own words:

>“It’s time for the ponies of the wasteland to stop being so selfish and short-sighted. To start caring about their fellow ponies. To raise their hooves in aid and communal support. To work together to build something bigger and better, not because they’re being forced to, but because they want to, for themselves and for their children...”
In other words, LP's personal ideals are still the gold standard that define morality for everyone, as far as she's concerned. She hasn't changed her basic view that it is her destiny to "fix" Equestria, she's simply decided to change her approach. Instead of it being her life's work to go around slaughtering baddies and imposing her will upon reality, she's decided that it's everyone's responsibility to do this. Her goal from here on out is to ensure that this is what they do.
Anonymous
08beda9
?
No.320217
>>320211
Perhaps this story would have turned out better if Kkat played Fallout 4 before writing this.
F4's story is a mess of stolen cliches and half-baked ideas but most of the gameplay in the game is clearing out Enemy NPC-infested locations before building them into Settlements, places you control where you can build houses and walls and water pumps defense turrets and trading stalls. Can even set up trade routes between settlements. You recruit to your settlements by allowing in any wandering cunt who wants to join and be assigned a job as farmer/trader/guardsman/whatever. It's incredibly basic without mods but if LP actually used her OP telekinesis to build something now and then instead of roaming blindly and destroying whatever she encounters like a rampaging freed wrecking ball, she'd be a better protagonist because she'd actually help to "Build back better" instead of just berating other groups and settlements for not doing so.
It would also help provide a purpose to those random encounters where LP stumbles upon enemies and slaughters every last one of them instead of killing who she has to while sneaking through as quickly as possible. It would help random slaughters feel more like a plot-relevant goal. It would add valuable worldbuilding info and characterization for each location.
More like "I must clear the scorpions out of the cave locals mine and make gunpowder in" or "I must clear the feral glitchy robots out of this factory so a nearby allied settlement can repurpose this place to build war robots for defense" and less less like Flashpoints from Saints Row 4(an open-world-game activity type where you visit a place and slaughter all enemies before moving on to the next one).
We're often told LP is this beloved "Wasteland Saviour" and New Appleoosa's mayor suffered for not being a loving fan of hers, but if she formed an army of NPCs she could order around and build houses for and even call upon in battle, her reputation as a world-changing hero would feel more earned and meaningful. If you're going to give your heroes infinite ammo why not say scavengers that love her for killing so many raiders are told by Homage to put that ammo in collection boxes at towns that like LP? And if she had her own faction helping and funding her and maybe even offering her training, it'd be more realistic that she'd be so good at killing her way anywhere she wants to go. Homage and her Bullshit Tower Society can handle the day-to-day mundanities of running the organization whenever LP is off killing again, and it would make LP less of a sue if she was canonically a figurehead manipulated by a radio host and secret society that wants to rule the new world with its own evil(?) plan.
Of course this would mean more characters to write and Kkat isn't good at writing those.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
ad85887
?
No.320219
320221
6209769__suggestive_artist-colon-pi_imported+from+derpibooru_starlight+glimmer_pony_unicorn_butt_chubby_dock_female_frog+28hoof29_glimmer+glutes_looking+at+you_.jpg
>>320211

Couple more things in this section and then I'd like to move on. If I can manage to finish this book by Christmas I'll consider it a gift to myself.

>I remembered the words of Life Bloom: This is us helping.
Italics are the author's. I've complained about this quite a bit, but it's worth mentioning again: kkat has a very bad habit of referencing obscure parts of his own text and assuming the reader will just remember what is being referenced. Even the most attentive and interested reader which is not me at this point is going to have a hard time keeping track of everything that happens in this book, and without a photographic memory it's pretty much impossible to remember every single line of dialogue from every single scene. Life Bloom is a minor character who doesn't appear very often, and this remark is presented without any context whatsoever. What are we supposed to take away from this exactly?

Thanks to my old friend Ctrl-F, I was able to locate this line in Chapter 41. This is from the scene where Calamity comes up with his goofy plan to kidnap the Enclave ponies and force-feed them Littlepoop's memories. Life Bloom is offering to come along with them in order to conduct the memory-feeding spell due to its complexity. LP asks if he is sure he wants to risk his life like this, and Life Bloom replies that she asked the Twilight Society for help, and this is his way of helping.

Even in context it's a little unclear why this particular line is being quoted. Essentially, Life Bloom is saying that he approves of LP's mission and wants to help, which seems to paint the Twilight Society in a more positive light (from LP's perspective, at least). A mere two paragraphs earlier, LP was criticizing the Twilight Society for hoarding magic and refusing to help the wasteland, and this quote doesn't do much to reinforce her point.

All in all the meaning of this quote is ambiguous, and it diverts the reader's attention away from what's presently going on in order to reference a fairly unimportant event from the past. If I were kkat's editor, I'd probably suggest he cut this.

>“…It’s time for the ponies to tell the wasteland to buck off!”
This line probably sounded a lot better in kkat's head.

Anyway, LP blathers on for several more paragraphs, and it's really just more of the same. She recalls a few other out-of-context passages from earlier in the story: something about the Steel Rangers, and something from one of Homage's broadcasts. She concludes with yet another display of massive hubris, thinly cloaked in her trademark false humility:

>“And you know what?” I continued. I couldn’t have stopped; it was like an avalanche had started inside of me. “I think they want to. They’re ready to. You’ve shown them that rebuilding is possible. I’ve…” I’ve what? I knew what. I’d been an example. I couldn’t listen to Homage without her drumming it into my head. But saying it, accepting it, was another thing entirely. I knew I was nothing special, but my reputation had become something powerful.
>“…I’ve been their Lightbringer.” I said finally, coating the concept in Homage’s words and hoping it didn’t sound conceited. “We’ve done what we can…”
This line is hilarious enough on its own, but I'd like to remind everyone that she has had a gun pointed at Red Eye the entire time she's been babbling autistically about what an inspiration she's been to the wasteland. I have no idea whether or not she still has any actual intention of shooting him, but in any case the element of surprise is long gone. Red Eye could have made himself a hot sit-down breakfast in the amount of time it's taken her to get through this speech.

However, it doesn't matter much, because everyone in this story is fucking retarded. Red Eye continues to stare politely down the barrel of Littlepoop's gun while his erstwhile captive continues to prattle on. Littlepoop ends her less-than-inspired speech on this lame note:

>“…and now it’s time for Daddy Red Eye and Mommy Littlepip to get the fuck out of their way.”
I'm guessing this line also sounded a lot better in kkat's head.

And Jesus-almighty-tit-fucking-Hindu-Christ, they're still fucking talking. Seriously; I'm starting to wonder if the remaining 100,000 some-odd words of this story are going to consist entirely of this one conversation. At this point I don't care whether Red Eye tosses the three of them into the rainbow goop, or if Littlepoop blows Red Eye's brains out, or if all the two of them decide to just stop fighting and fuck already, but for the love of God, somebody fucking do something.

Anyway, I'm going to move as quickly as I can through the rest of this scene, or we're going to be here until Ragnarok.

Red Eye, who I will remind you still has the barrel of a goddamn revolver pointed squarely between his eyes, responds to LP's pseudo-philosophical babbling with some pseudo-philosophical babbling of his own. His position is that blah blah blah, if the NPCs of the wasteland could save themselves they would have by now, they need us, herpity derp derp, yada yada yada, eat the pudding. Littlepoop responds with a herp and a derp and a derp-de-derp, because we all make mistakes, and we all have flaws and weaknesses, and we're all stronger together because we all flibbidy dibbidy floopy woop doop, I'm-a-gonna-eat-dat-pudding. Derp.

This goes back and forth in exactly this fashion for several paragraphs, and then, finally, Red Eye decides to end the conversation and go back to what he was doing before all of this started. LP cocks her gun and tells him that she will drop him if he doesn't promise to stop doing what he's doing and cleanse the doo-doo from his icky soul. This threat would have probably had a lot more impact if she hadn't been talking his ear off for the last 25 minutes or so. Then, Red Eye reveals the latest exciting twist in the story, which will have to wait until the next post because space. Eat the pudding.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
ad85887
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No.320221
320224
6226355__explicit_artist-colon-br333_imported+from+derpibooru_starlight+glimmer_pony_unicorn_anatomically+correct_anus_butt_dock_female_glimmer+glutes_large+but.png
>>320219

It is at this point that Red Eye reveals his final ace-in-the-hole to ensure that LP does what he wants: he has placed a bomb collar around his own neck, programmed to detonate in the event that he is killed. His collar is linked to the identical collars worn by each of the caged unicorns, who have apparently been standing quietly in the background while all of this was going on. Presumably, the idea is that if LP kills Red Eye, she also kills these random NPC unicorns. Plus, if 25 bomb collars exploded at once in close proximity to each other it would probably cause a lot of collateral damage, and kill LP and Autumn Leaf in the process. However, I'm not sure if this matters or not, because I'm still not 100% convinced that kkat understands how explosions work.

>“You’d have to disarm them all simultaneously,” he told me. “You? You might just be good enough with telekinesis to perform separate delicate operations on two dozen devices at the same time. But how skilled are you with explosives?”
>He had me. Dammit, he had me!
*** SPITS OUT TEA ***
Ayyo, hol up. What you sayin' is...what you sayin' is...that there's actually...there's actually...something...that Littlepoop...isn't the absolute best at?!? I am shocked and appalled, sir.

Anyway, it looks like the gist of this is that Red Eye has Littlepoop by her metaphorical balls, and she now has little choice but to do what he says and dive into the goo. Despite the fact that he's already won, Red Eye elects to pointlessly inform her that he also has her friends tied up or captive or something somewhere, and that he can also do butt stuff or whatever to them. This reminds me: I've completely forgotten where the fuck all of the other characters in this train wreck are supposed to be right now. I remember they all split up for some reason shortly after the Dr. Glue incident, but I don't remember why, or where everyone else was supposed to be going.

At this point, LP goes off on another of her rambling inner monologues, where she babbles incessantly to the reader about anything and everything. I'm assuming she still has her gun pointed at Red Eye, though by now she is probably just staring off into space and drooling slightly as her derailed train of thought goes plunging into the goddamn ravine, so I doubt he's particularly worried about being shot. In the space of a single paragraph, her narration jumps from SteelHooves, to Friendship City, to the Arbu massacre, to Monterrey Jack, to the crack mints, to the bloody-butt-fucking-Princesses Celestia and Luna. I once again have absolutely no idea what the fuck is going on in this story, but it looks like she's having another of her flashes of pure autism that will enable her to save the day somehow.

>Red Eye was appealing to my virtues, both corrupted and true; he knew me better than I knew myself. He always had.
>But what Red Eye did not understand -- had never understood -- was friendship. Alone we were weak, at the mercy of our failings. But together, as friends, we were strong. We buttressed each other. We shared our strengths, protecting each other from our vulnerabilities. Even when apart. I thought of my friends, and I thought of their virtues. Loyalty and kindness, perseverance and humility. Red Eye’s offer flew in the face of all of them.
This is what kkat actually believes he's been writing about this entire time. Incidentally, I'm still not quite clear on what everyone's 'virtues' are even supposed to be.

Anyway, it gets even dumber from here. Red Eye attempts to jump into the goo, on his own for some reason, without taking either of his two captives with him, and is suddenly caught in LP's levitation beam.

>“Forgot you might do that,” he admitted. He sighed again, giving me a plaintive look. “Why?”
Yes, you read that correctly. Apparently, this Machiavellian mastermind anticipated every possible outcome for this scenario, but somehow forgot the single most prominent and obnoxious thing that LP can do, that she literally does all the time, at every possible opportunity, to get herself out of nearly every goddamn problem she encounters. Seriously, could he not think of anything to counter her levitation spell? Disruptor field? Some new kind of wacky anti-magic grenade? Something?

And believe it or not, this still isn't the end of it:

>“There is something else you are forgetting,” a voice called up from below us. Autumn Leaf had been silent long enough that I’d forgotten he was conscious. “Scissors beats paper.”
This line probably sounded a lot better in kkat's head.

Anyway, for reasons I cannot even begin to fathom, the magical shield trapping the three of them in this room is suddenly broken by a bunch of hellhounds wearing goddamn Enclave armor. They kill the alicorns casting the shield, and then start fucking up the room with lasers or something I guess. Red Eye gets hit, and LP panics because if he dies he will explode and so will the unicorns and they will all die probably. Also, the Enclave airship that was parked outside is now bombing the fortress.

Naturally, LP thinks of a solution in the nick of time. She pulls out one of those haunted broadcaster radios, which she has for some reason, and plugs it into her PipBuck. The broadcast makes everyone start bleeding from their eyeballs metal af, and disrupts the collars so they can't explode. Red Eye falls into the vat; it's not clear if he's dead or not. Meanwhile, LP uses her stupid levitation magic to pick the lock on the cage and lift all 25 unicorns into the air. Being her usual magnanimous self, she wants to leave Colonel Fudgecake to die, but he convinces her that she needs him to disarm the collars.

>I glowered, staring at the pony who had been behind the destruction of the Canterlot Ruins, the murderer of Star Sparkle.
As an aside, it's still unclear why the Enclave blew up the ruins of Canterlot; there was no obvious motivation, and the author hasn't explained it.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.320224
320225 320226 320273
1632096817502.png
>>320221

>I glowered, staring at the pony who had been behind the destruction of the Canterlot Ruins, the murderer of Star Sparkle. The pony who had ordered his own brother, my best friend, to be hunted and killed. Who had sent the Wonderbolts after us. Ordered the attacks on Friendship City, New Appleloosa, and more.
I'm going to say this one last time: if kkat wanted Autumn to be a significant character, he should have made him one. He was not even mentioned in the story prior to Chapter 41, and he didn't appear in a scene before (I think) the current chapter. We're supposed to sympathize with LP here, as she wrestles with the *cough* difficult moral choice of whether or not she should kill this guy. It doesn't work, because we have not been given enough time with him to form an opinion; all we have is a short list of offscreen events that he is supposed to be responsible for.

Anyway, LP agrees to take Colonel Autumn Poon along with her on one condition:

>“Tell me how to rig that star blaster’s battery to explode!” I ordered.
Literally what? What star blaster? Is she talking about that weird ray gun that Homage has for whatever reason? Why does she have this with her? I'm completely lost.

>Doctor Glue had indicated there were tunnels beneath the Cathedral. The hellhounds were already spilling taint into them. How much worse would the Everfree Forest become once this room was torn apart and all of this, a million tons of pure I.M.P. released into the environment? I couldn’t even imagine what that would do to Equestria. It would be more devastating than a megaspell.
Yeah, this explanation doesn't clarify much. As far as I can tell, the issue here is that the Hellhounds spilled the taint-vats while they were fucking up the room, and LP is concerned that it's going to get into the catacombs underneath the fortress and then seep into the ground. So, I guess she wants Colonel Alistair "Creamy Buttocks" Saucy-Sam McFudgington "Poopy-pants" Smith-Hutz-Terwilliger "Additional Silly Nickname" Bandersnootch-Pumpkin-Tits-McClure to rig up some kind of space-bomb that will stop it. The fact that blowing up the tunnels would probably just make the situation worse seems completely lost on her; again, though, I'm not 100% sure that kkat understands how explosions work.

Anyway, finally, this ridiculous scene comes to an end. I think that was supposed to be the climax of the story or something.

Page break. We rejoin LP an indeterminate amount of time later, in what was formerly Dr. Glue's office. She has managed to remove all of the collars from all of the unicorn NPCs, presumably under the direction of our good friend the Colonel. She keeps them from exploding by switching on her haunted radio for the few seconds it takes to remove each one. Some of the NPCs died during the process of collar-removal, and she's all sad about it; her attitudes towards the preservation of life seem as bipolar as ever.

>I crawling over to him, turning my attention to the alien fire blaster. “Okay. One more bomb to deal with, and then I’ll set you free.”
First of all, this should say "I crawled over to him." Second, can anyone tell me what this alien fire blaster business all about? I feel like I might have actually missed something here. These kinds of super-autismo details are usually the ones that kkat gets right, so I'm sure that this blaster was mentioned at some point, but I can't for the life of me recall where or when. The only alien space blaster I remember appearing in the story is the one that Homage had in her apartment for some reason or another, which she used to kill an alicorn or something that was attacking Tenpony Tower. By my recollection, LP should not have this weapon.

>Removing the alien fire blaster and rigging its power core was far more complex than I had imagined. It spoke volumes to me, realizing how skilled Homage was to have done what she did.
Okay, it seems that she really is talking about Homage's blaster, but I'm not sure why it's in LP's possession now. Also, I'm not sure what act of Homage's she's referring to here. What did she do that required so much skill?

Anyway, whatever. She whips out the mysterious space laser's flux capacitor, and rigs the hoohah to the hoosafudge, glim glams the jim jam, and gives it a good hard blast from her spice weasel. Bam! She's got some kind of quantum interface bomb or some shit now. Alrighty, then.

Again making use of her ridiculously OP telekinesis powers, she floats her stupid bomb back through the maze of hallways into the late Red Eye's rainbow goop chamber seriously; is there not even a limit on the effective range of this spell?. She sets the timer on the bomb, giving herself ten minutes to escape where does she come up with these numbers, anyway? Last time it was forty minutes.

What she does next is fucked up even for her. She made a simple, transactional arrangement with Colonel Fappycakes: he helps her get the collars off the unicorns and shows her how to make a bomb out of her girlfriend's ray gun, and in return he gets to live. He upheld his end of the bargain. I mean, sure they don't like each other, but a deal's a deal, right?

Well, unfortunately for the dear Colonel, LP's bipolar respect for life has swung back into murderboner territory. She blathers out some nonsense about Applejack that she seems to think is appropriate for this situation, and then shoots him point blank with Little Macintosh. There's no moral ambiguity here at all; she literally just flat-out murders this guy in cold blood after using him to get something she wanted. Moreover, as I've already explained I don't know how many times, this character's death does not have the emotional impact that kkat wants, since he didn't bother to work him into the story until two chapters before he was supposed to die.

I didn't think kkat would be able to make his cunt of a protagonist any less likable, but somehow he found a way.
Anonymous
08beda9
?
No.320225
>>320224
If Kkat wanted us to approve of LP double-crossing this villain, he should have been established to be a lying backstabbing bastard before this, right? That way the betrayer would die by being betrayed.
Perhaps if he somehow betrayed Calamity when Calamity worked for the Enclave, perhaps if he was the reason Calamity lost his whole squad and was blamed for everything while Colonel Cunt got a promotion out of it, that could work. It'd also make Calamity's backstory less stupid and he could have a "I don't want to get close to new poners just yet... ok now im over it and I love you guys" character arc.
It still seems like a bit much... maybe Colonel Autumn should say something like "Well, that was fun. Time to go do more evil deeds!" or "mwahaha i saw this scenario coming a mile away and rigged it to favor me unless you kill me-ow fuck you shot me-ow oof ouch you shot me again-aaaa the pain-guhhh *dead*".
Anonymous
6183881
?
No.320226
>>320224
By the way, the whole reason this bombing of the cathedral exists is because you... bomb the cathedral in the "standard" route in fallout 1's endgame. Just another story beat that exists to be a reference.
Anonymous
08beda9
?
No.320229
I know! Maybe if Calamity was the one to unexpectedly shoot General Autumn despite their deal, it could improve the story. Calamity could be all "What? I know him and I know that look on his face. The second he gets within range of an Enclave soldier with a radio he's going to call up the tsunami of Enclave soldiers in the area and direct them to our location! He's betrayed people before and he'd do it again. Besides, now that I've killed him, I'm the new Enclave general. I'll make sure the Enclave will be a force for good, Pip".
Anonymous
08beda9
?
No.320238
"Littlepip, stop! That's a comical amount of crack mints!"
https://youtu.be/IUeFRJxQ-Y8
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
ad85887
?
No.320273
320283 320286
6212740__safe_artist-colon-t72b_imported+from+derpibooru_starlight+glimmer_pony_unicorn_alternate+hairstyle_bust_clothes_crown_fine+art+parody_hat_historical+ro.png
>>320224

>Standing back up, I slid Applejack’s gun into its holster and began floating the twenty still-living ponies in the room.
>For the longest time, I had thought of myself as Red Eye’s reflection (granting one of Pinkie Pie’s particularly warped funhouse mirrors). But I was comparing myself to the wrong pony. I wasn’t Red Eye.
>I was Applesnack.
This comparison probably sounded better in kkat's head.

To be fair, if you try to visualize it from kkat's point of view, it kinda-sorta makes sense. What LP is probably referring to here is the time when SteelHooves, nee Applesnack, pushed AJ's chariot driver off the roof in retaliation for his failed assassination attempt on her. Applesnack probably didn't tell AJ about this because he was worried about it changing her view of him, and similarly I imagine that LP does not intend to tell Calamity that she murdered his brother. I think kkat's basic idea is that killing the chariot driver was a cold-blooded thing to do, but at the same time it made sense strategically, and Applesnack did it in order to protect someone he cared deeply for. LP seems to believe that killing Colonel Sugar Balls was a similar sort of move made for similar reasons, in that she was killing someone who hurt Calamity, and simultaneously preventing him from doing further harm.

There are some pretty obvious issues with this, of course. Applesnack killed his girlfriend's would-be assassin in direct retaliation for an attempt on her life; LP killed Calamity's brother for no reason beyond the usual laundry-list of arbitrary moral shortcomings she uses as justification for all her other killings. Autumn Leaf has not directly harmed Littlepoop or her friends in any significant way during the course of this story (this can mostly be attributed to his having had virtually no role in the story at all). He and Calamity had their differences, but all of that is part of Calamity's past and has nothing to do with Littlepoop. If anyone has a right to take revenge on Colonel Poon Pounder, it would be Calamity; LP greatly overstepped her bounds here, and her excuses for doing so are pretty flimsy. She is being extremely generous to herself in comparing her own actions to Applesnack's.

Personally, I would rewrite her monologue at the end of this scene as follows:

>But I was comparing myself to the wrong pony. I wasn't Red Eye. I wasn't even Applesnack.
>I was Littlepoop. And that is the worst kind of poop you can be.

Page break. We rejoin LP outside in the yard again. We are told that she somehow managed to gallop up through several levels of sub-basement, as well as the main levels of the Cathedral which is presently being bombed into oblivion by the Enclave airship, while carrying 25 unconscious full-grown unicorns in her horn aura. How she managed to do this is left entirely up to the reader's imagination.

While the actual fate of Red Eye himself is still technically unknown (last we saw him he was falling into a vat of taint; we were told that he was "dying," but not necessarily dead), it seems that his empire is basically finished. The Cathedral is in ruins now, and most of his soldiers have scattered to the winds. Calamity asks about his brother, and LP informs him that he died, though she omits the details of how it happened. Calamity seems slightly pained but not surprised.

The team shuffles back inside their new flying wagon, which you may remember is called the Tortoise, and prepare to head home. Apparently, the Enclave either doesn't notice them or isn't interested in trying to stop them. LP observes that the hellhound they rescued is still on board with Velvet Remedy, and that he has a new cybernetic leg for some reason. There is some brief explanation of what happened while LP was doing her dungeon crawl, but I can't really make sense of it. As I mentioned earlier, I lost track of where all the other characters in the story were supposed to be while LP was exploring the Cathedral, and in any event it doesn't seem terribly important. The present situation is this: Velvet, Life Bloom, and Calamity are manning the ship, Reggie is receiving medical attention, the hellhound is unconscious and/or sleeping, and Xenith is back at the jungle hut with Velvet's pet bird.

They are about to take off, when they notice that one of the Enclave Raptor ships is behaving erratically. LP, who is literally, physically incapable of minding her own damned business, tunes into the Enclave's radio channel and listens to their chatter. The rogue ship is apparently named the Lenticular, and the main Enclave ship, which the Lenticular is trying to ram, is ordering them to stand down or be fired upon. The Lenticular ignores its orders and continues full speed ahead. The Enclave fires on it, but to no avail. They punch some holes in it, and it begins to leak Pink Cloud, but it doesn't stop. It is at this point that LP realizes that, for reasons I can't even begin to fathom, the Lenticular is filled with Pink Cloud.

The Lenticular collides with the main Enclave ship, and the resulting explosion destroys both ships and causes the Cathedral below to get swallowed up in a mess of Pink Cloud. It is at this point that Calamity wisely decides to start flapping his little horsie wings and pulling them all to safety. Meanwhile, a strange voice shouts "for Canterlot!" over the airwaves, and LP observes the silhouette of a lone pony escaping out the back of the Lenticular using a pair of bat wings. Not quite sure what that was all about, but I suspect we'll hear all about it in due course.

Page break. They make it almost the entire way back to Zecora's old hut in the Everfree Forest, when they are suddenly shot down. Calamity takes a hit in the wing, and everyone falls out through the back of the wagon. Littlepoop breaks a few ribs (basically nothing in this story), and then she bumps her head and loses consciousness.
Anonymous
1a98810
?
No.320283
>>320273
This assassination could be made to work if this was LP's character arc: going from a goody two shoes who respects deals and gets fucked over for it to someone willing to bloody her hooves even if it means she'll hate herself for it later. General Ironcunt could be all "Well that was fun. Same time tomorrow? Let's have a big honourable war tomorrow, with you and all your friends and all your settlements against by Enclave. The perfect crescendo to this climax! Oh, it'll be everything you and I ever wanted, Pippy. Mass death, incalculable bloodshed, a glorious meat grinder of a battle full of war crimes, all survivors will have survivor's guilt, we'll have an epic battle for the fate of the world just like good heroes and villains and whoever wins will be justice and the hero while whoever loses will be called the evil one, we'll be legendary generals for all time!"
Then LP could say "No. No more epic battles. No more war. At this point I'm ready to end all of this one way or the other". and shoot him.
Better yet, shoot him and THEN say the line.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
ad85887
?
No.320286
320334
6218193__safe_artist-colon-dearysnowy_imported+from+derpibooru_starlight+glimmer_pony_unicorn_-colon-3C_chest+fluff_cloud_cute_eye+clipping+through+hair_eyebrow.png
>>320273

LP wakes up, and finds that Velvet has already healed her broken bones with magic. The party is currently surrounded by Wonderbolts; it was actually one of them that was responsible for shooting their wagon down.

From here it gets pretty weird. Calamity is facing off against a Wonderbolt named Gutshot, who is described as his exact doppelganger, down to the voice. For some reason, Gutshot is dead set on killing Calamity. He claims that this is because of the mission they were given, but the other Wonderbolts claim that the mission has been canceled, or the time limit ran out, or something. It seems like Gutshot's motivation to kill Calamity is personal. He keeps talking about how "Deadshot" (Calamity's Enclave codename as I remember) is a traitor and needs to die. My best guess at this point is that he is going to turn out to be Calamity's twin brother or something; idk. This story is pure weapons-grade autism.

Anyway, somehow, for some reason, somebody shoots Regina Grimfeathers. Also, it seems that those blue rape vines from earlier are crawling in again, so they've got that to worry about, too. From here, the narration gets pretty confusing and I can't guarantee that my summary of events is accurate.

Littlepoop levitates herself, Velvet Remedy I think, and Regina into the air, while Velvet casts a shield spell that keeps the rape vines pinned to the ground. LP hollers for Life Bloom, who immediately casts some kind of spell on Regina to keep her from dying I guess. Suddenly Calamity uses Little Macintosh, which he has for some reason, to shoot Gutshot's battle saddle and disable it. Gutshot tries to tackle Calamity, and Calamity shoots him in the leg, which seems to stop him. Calamity makes a lame joke about shooting yourself in the foot when your plans go awry, and then this extremely weird and baffling scene comes to an abrupt end.

Alright, I went back and reread a couple of paragraphs, and I think I understand the doppelganger business at least. Gutshot is not Calamity's biological twin; he's just an ordinary Wonderbolt. He first appears in the story in Chapter 21, when the Enclave shows up at Spike's cave and starts trouble. It's not clear if he's one of Calamity's blood relatives or not, but they clearly know each other. However, the reason he looks exactly like Calamity in this scene is because of this:

>“Ya fell inta the blue plants, didn’tcha Gutshot?” Calamity snapped back wryly. “Ah knew it burned yer feathers t’ be second best, but Ah never imagined you’d want t’ be me!” His voice was slowly rising. “Have ya met me? Have ya seen muh life?”
I'd forgotten about it, but the blue rape vines mentioned earlier are Poison Joke, or whatever Poison Joke is called in this story, and the implication seems to be that Gutshot fell victim to it and it changed him into the twin of Calamity.

The "joke" the plant is playing on Gutshot is that he transformed him into the pony he most wanted to be; the implication being that Gutshot's animosity against Calamity is based on extreme jealousy. In order to understand what he was jealous about, we have to go waaaay the fuck back to Chapter 21, where he first appears:

>“Oh yeah. Winner of the Best Young Sharpshooter competition four years running? You don't forget the pony who beat you."
>"Gutshot?" Calamity whispered, eyes going wide.
Basically, Calamity beat Gutshot in some kind of shooting competition way back when, and Gutshot is still assblasted about it. As usual, kkat is referencing a very obscure detail from literally 20 chapters ago and assuming that we are just going to instantly remember what he's talking about.

Anyway, this scene is confusing and stupid. Nothing in it has any apparent bearing on anything important that's going on, and it relies heavily on the reader's presumed familiarity with the minor details of a minor side character's backstory, none of which have even been mentioned for, again, literally 20 chapters. I don't know why kkat felt compelled to write this scene, and at this point I don't fucking care. Moving on.

Page break. They resume their journey back to Zecora's hut in the forest. It seems their wagon was destroyed in the Wonderbolts' attack, so they have to walk again.

>Velvet Remedy’s shield shimmered beneath us as we walked. Between the crash and the Everfree Forest, we’d lost ten more of the ponies I had rescued, most of them unicorns.
What exactly do these ponies keep dying of, anyway? Malaria? AIDS? Prolapsed rectums? Also, as far as I'm aware, all 25 of the ponies she rescued were unicorns. Anyway, if I'm keeping an accurate count, she should still have about ten of these faggots that she is (presumably) still lugging around using her all-powerful levitation bubble.

>Of those who survived, four had wrapped themselves in cloaks of denial and galloped off.
Welp, it looks like I spoke too soon; she's down to six unicorns now. It looks like at least some of them are conscious at least, so I'm assuming that they don't need to be levitated. Also, I have to ask: is "cloaks of denial" meant to be taken literally? There are so many goofy devices and accoutrements and wearable artifacts in this story that a literal Cloak of Denial doesn't seem like it would be that much of a stretch. In any case, it's a bit of a weird expression. What are they in denial about, anyway?

>Red Eye couldn’t be dead, after all. He was going to be a God. He was going to bring Unity.
It's very clumsily done, but I think I get what kkat is trying to say. Red Eye's unicorns are in denial about their overlord's death, so they go running back to the Cathedral to be at his side, or something like that. The "cloaks of denial" are metaphorical.

Part of what makes it confusing is that the unicorns have essentially been background props this entire time. It was never clear if they were meant to be Red Eye's underlings or simply his victims, so we don't know their loyalty or motivations.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
b6c2865
?
No.320334
320350
d49l9ze-94f2eab3-9f77-41b7-a603-730146f572b6.png
>>320286

Anyway, here's the current situation: Red Eye is (probably) dead, and the Enclave is...kind of defeated for the moment I guess. The death of their commander and the loss of two major airships probably set them back a little, but I doubt that would be enough to defeat them. Calamity basically confirms this:

>...the Enclave was mounting a massive assault on Fillydelphia. Calamity assured me that the Colonel’s death wasn’t going to prevent that. They had their orders, and another pony was already groomed to step into Autumn Leaf’s position. The Enclave wasn’t like a Canterlot ghoul. It didn’t die when you cut off its head.

In any case, from where I'm standing, it looks like Littlepoop's tasks are basically complete. Red Eye tasked her with killing the Goddess, and the Goddess tasked her with...stealing the Declaration of Independence or something; I've pretty much forgotten what she wanted. Both Red Eye and the Goddess are dead, though, so LP doesn't really have anything else to do in this story, right?

Well, if that were the case, this text would be about 50,000 words shorter and we'd all be a lot saner. However, it seems that this convoluted autism is going to drag on for quite a bit longer. I'm not sure what's next on the agenda exactly, but it sounds like it's got something to do with the Single Pegasus Project.

Anyway, they tromp through the woods for awhile longer, and eventually they get tired and take a break. For literally no fucking reason (again), LP suddenly decides to listen to some random audio recording she has saved on her PipBuck. This one is apparently a message that Sweetie Belle left on Zecora's answering machine way back when. It's literally nothing but a few short lines in which Sweetie Belle informs Zecora that she's been thinking about rocks. I feel like it's hinting at something significant, but I'm not entirely clear what. "Rocks" might have something to do with that magic meteor that fell from space and supposedly caused the war, or it might refer to that rock that was in Zecora's trunk; I'm not sure which. In any case, in his typical style, kkat ends the chapter abruptly, on an anticlimactic and somewhat confusing note.

Chapter Forty-Four: Galvanize

Today's Fortune Cookie:
>“The spark didn’t work.”
>“But it did. A different kind of spark... The spark ignited inside me when I realized that you all are my friends!”
As ever, kkat provides no clue as to who the fuck is being quoted here or what the context is. Presumably it all has something to do with friendship being magic.

Welp, here we are. Home stretch. This chapter is about 27,000 words long, the next one is about 10,000, and after that there is an Epilogue of about 2,700 words and an Afterword of about 4,000. This brings the grand total to about 50,000 words. That is, of course, enough words to count as a full-length NaNoWriMo novel, but when you consider the length of the novel overall, it isn't that bad. We're almost there: Mount Doom is in sight, our grim task is nearly complete, and all we have to do is slog across a few more miles of dreary landscape. That cobwebby tunnel that Gollum is leading us through doesn't look so bad; I'm sure we'll be done and out of here in no time.

Anyway, as usual, the chapter opens with one of LP's delusional monologues. This one is about "faith."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EKDHQfEn-c

There's nothing super-quotable here, but this monologue is a mildly interesting example of just how far this lunatic's perception of herself is from the reality we've been observing. Basically, her whole spiel here is about how important it is to have something to believe in; a feeling to hold on to, if you will.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k8craCGpgs

Alright, I'll stop with the songs now. Point is, this is probably the last subject on Earth or Equus, I suppose that LP has any right to be lecturing anyone on. From the point this story began up until literally this very moment, LP has had no clearly-defined goals she wants to accomplish, and no obvious motivation for doing any of the things she does. What does she have faith in, exactly? As far as I can tell, the one thing this character has real faith in is her deeply-ingrained belief that she is a hero chosen to save Equestria from itself.

What's supremely ironic about this is that she doesn't even consciously acknowledge this; she's endlessly whining about how insignificant she is, and how she's not the wasteland savior and she wishes the ponies would stop worshipping her, and so forth and so on. Her behavior, obviously, puts the lie to this attitude; regardless of how much she might outwardly denigrate herself, she clearly believes that the task of "saving" the wasteland falls squarely on her shoulders. However, again, she won't consciously admit that she feels this way about herself.

This is exactly what makes her such an unhinged character. She doesn't think she's anyone special, yet she behaves as if the world starts and stops with her, and that her every decision she makes is going to alter events on a macro scale. Egotism is the driving force behind every action she's taken in this story.

As an example, consider the situation early in the story, when she decided to invade Old Appleoosa and kill everyone. There was no external reason for her to do this; the situation didn't affect her, and no one involved in it on either side ever asked for her help. However, her thought process basically went like this:
>Old Appleoosa practiced slavery
>slavery=bad
>I must kill all the slavers and free all the slaves

The action she took was not done out of an outward, conscious desire to be a hero. In her mind, this is just how anyone should respond to this situation. The possibility that she might not have any business interceding in this situation, or that there might be other points of view to consider, never crosses her mind. Running out of space, will continue.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
ad85887
?
No.320350
320356 320366
6220031__safe_artist-colon-maren_artist-colon-sina_artsnstuff_imported+from+derpibooru_starlight+glimmer_pony_unicorn_book_glowing+horn_horn_purple+background_s.jpg
>>320334

This attitude persists throughout the entire story. As we've seen, the events of this book are pretty discordant: LP escapes from the stable because she's horny, goes looking for her girlfriend, can't find her, and ends up captured by slavers. She escapes, wanders around for awhile, ends up in some random town, decides to randomly invade a nearby town and go on a killing spree, escapes, decides to go to another random town to go on another killing spree, gets sidetracked on the way, ends up fighting a dragon for some reason, and so forth and so on.

The whole story is just a string of bizarre actions taken by this character: she does one random thing after another, constantly throwing herself into fights that have nothing to do with her, attacking characters who have shown her no direct aggression, continuously putting her own life and the lives of her so-called friends in danger. She has no overarching goal other than a vaguely-defined belief in "good" and an unexplained desire to somehow "fix" the wasteland. However flimsy this belief may be, though, she is clearly quite driven by it, and that drive pushes her from one situation to the next. In other words, her actions make no obvious sense to the reader, but they clearly make sense to her somehow. In short, she's deranged.

The simplest comparison I can think of is this: imagine a story about a space hero who is fighting to save the earth from alien invaders. The aliens keep coming, constantly threatening the hero's life and the lives of the people he loves, and he keeps fighting them. No matter how many of them he kills, the aliens keep on coming and coming. There are piles of dead aliens all around him; he's tired, he's hungry, he's thirsty. All he wants is to go home to his nice little farm in Oklahoma and live a long, peaceful life with his three-legged dog Bootsy. But he can't, because the aliens keep coming and he has to keep killing them, or else the Earth will be destroyed.

Then, the M. Night Shyamalan twist: turns out there were never any aliens. There is no invasion of earth, no threat, no danger. There's not even a farm in Oklahoma. The "space hero" is just some lone schizo who escaped from a mental hospital and shot up a mall.

That's basically Littlepoop in a nutshell: she's not heroic, she's just crazy. If you don't believe me, read her unhinged blather about "faith" at the beginning of this chapter and compare the substance of her words to her actions so far.

It's important to understand that LP's derangement exists separately from any tangible action she takes in the story, and from any tangible consequences her actions produce. Even if she manages to accomplish some kind of overall "good" by the end of the story, she's still deranged, and her motivations for every action she's taken in this story still make no sense. Imagine if instead of shooting up a mall, the schizo from our example had inadvertently wandered into a bank robbery and foiled it. He technically accomplished something good, but does that make him any less deranged or dangerous?

Protip for authors: this is why you need to thoroughly consider who your characters are and what drives them, rather than just narrating their actions and assuming we will naturally grasp the why. It doesn't matter what their ultimate goal is, whether it's saving the world or getting promoted to assistant manager at Arby's; if you can't easily explain why they are pursuing the goal that they are pursuing, then the reader will have no choice but to assume that your character is insane.

As an ironic aside, LP could actually have been kind of a fun character if kkat had actually realized how mentally unhinged she is, and explored it. Unfortunately, this would never happen, since her derangement is actually the product of kkat's.

Page break. It's becoming gradually clearer that LP's first-person narration is actually part of the story. We are now getting some pretty strong hints that she is not telling her story to the reader in the meta-world, but to another character in the story. Whatever final action she intends to take, that (in her mind at least) is the one thing she can do to save Edgequestria from the horrible doodoo that threatens to consume its soul, has yet to be taken. The individual to whom she is narrating this is probably essential to whatever she has to do next, and she felt it was necessary to tell her story to this person before taking the final plunge.

Anyway, this microscene begins with this heading: "two days ago." The gang is apparently back in Zecora's old hut, having some kind of meeting. We are given a brief recap of everything that happened between the end of the previous scene and this one: basically, they kept walking, found the hut, took some healing potions, and rested a bit.

>Several of the ponies from the Overcast’s prison had worked together to dig a grave for the foal who had died in captivity.
I think I'm gradually beginning to remember what was happening in this story before I went on hiatus. When LP talks about the ponies she's "rescued," I've been assuming she is talking about the 25 unicorns that Red Eye had in a cage. Though she did indeed rescue these, she also rescued some captives from the Enclave ship Overcast when they were in there earlier; I'd just forgotten about it.

In my defense, it's partially kkat's fault that I've forgotten about these other captives. Not only because of how long and convoluted this story is, but also because he's been treating these captives the way he treats all his other NPCs: as complete non-entities. These characters have had little, if any, spoken dialogue, only a couple of them were given names, few of them were given more than the most bare-bones description, and literally none of them were made remarkable enough to remember. Their only purpose in the story is to give Littlepoop another batch of random background characters to rescue.
Anonymous
6183881
?
No.320356
320357 320441
>>320350
How do you feel about the fact many fans have been giving this story praise for how it handles its narrator, citing the fact that it's a retelling of events by the protagonist of their journey as her being inherently delusional/ unreliable and thinking of herself to be a hero when she's actually not, and how this is brilliant and well-written? And that the flaws in her characterization and the plot and such are explained by this fact?
Anonymous
c35ed5d
?
No.320357
320441
91173702_0.jpg
>>320356
Something's been bugging me about this tale for a while now.

How many heroes have "i defend this city/planet/universe because I live here" as their motivation? Batman and Twilight want to protect their homes.
Then there are heroes with something to gain. Edward wants back what Alchemy took from him. Naruto wants the respect of his village.
Then there are heroes with a precious person to protect like how Jotaro wants to save his mother.
There can be heroes with multiple goals. Lelouch hates Britannia and wants his sister safe.
Then there are reluctant heroes just here to do a job like "retrieve that person" or "get this character to x location.
Joel from The Last Of Us just wanted Ellie where the Fireflies wanted her, until they bonded so much he said no in the end and saved her.
And then there's Littlepip.
She was manipulated by Velvet into removing Velvet's PipBuck, helping her escape the vault without any way to track her.
LP was loathed. Felt like she had to go out into the wastes to retrieve Velvet. Even as she's told on her way out "don't leave or you will never be allowed back in".
LP's life was basically ruined at least a little by this selfish bitch. Learning Velvet had a stupid motive and has flexible morals should piss her off nore.
And then when LP stumbles into meeting Velvet they get along instantly.
LP isn't pissed. Doesn't call Velvet a selfish whore. Doesn't try to drag Velvet home kicking and screaming. We don't get a scene where LP is injured and Velvet saves her life by surgically removing the bullet and sealing the wound with a campfire-heated knife on the condition that LP lets Velvet be free in the wasteland and takes her to Tenpony Tower.
We don't get a scene where LP drags Velvet back home only to be told "Velvet the celebrity can come back but fuck off, Littlepip. If we let you come back with awesome tales of murder and heroism everyone will want to leave this vault and be just like you. So fuck off. Sorry, you're a hero and you have to leave", prompting LP to say "fuck this" and leave with Velvet.
Littlepip decides she has to kill all the major faction heads in the area she doesn't like even though she has nothing to gain except ammo and sicker guns.
LP isn't going around looking for a place to settle down. She isn't carrying an all important mcguffin and she isn't one either. LP isn't on a mission with a time limit and stakes. She's on a self-appointed crusade to slaughter everyone she doesn't like for fun and profit.
She's the one who wants to visit the radio tower that sucks LP cock constantly and giving her Velvet's music is a bonus. Going through a monster infested radio tower for old vinyls for said radio tower is also a bonus. She takes it upon herself to sneak into Red Eye's land as a slave hoping to get within killing range of him. It's not like she's a pawn masterfully played by Red Eye or Homage. She's just a wrecking ball out of control, a powergaming munchkin looking for loot and EXP...
EXecution Points.
Littlepip never fundamentally changes enough as a person to start being a coherent hero with coherent goals, she's just a bored murderhobo and there's no reason why a person like this wouldn't have created a more interesting backstory for herself in the Stable.
LP was sold to us as a nerdy cowardly snarky everypony who once woke everypony up at a slumber party in her childhood by screaming after a nightmare about leaving the Stable and falling into the infinite nothingness beyond it. She is also a telekinetic god with maxed stats in everything except Explosions.
But besides occasionally blabbering to herself about a fear of heights or wide open spaces she fears nothing, not even death or the loss of her friends, and the author doesn't seem to see anything unusual about this. Calamity didn't have any complaints when he was dying from poison and LP put off treating him until after she'd looted everything in the chimera "misoginist" stable that wasn't nailed down and blew the place up too. The death of Steelhooves didn't make Velvet question LP's ability to keep her safe or make Calamity doubt his own ability to keep Velvet safe. The slaughter of cannibals and BOStards at Arbu didn't change these ponies fundamentally or seriously damage LP's reputation in anypony's eyes.
Kkat has no idea what kind of hero LP is supposed to be or what kind of better world she's supposed to be creating through the mass slaughter of anyone who doesn't meet her moral standards. She just knows she needs to gun down villains until she is told there are no more villains to kill, while smarter ponies than her do good for the Wasteland and build trade routes and relationships that can form the foundations for a new country. Societal change is big and confusing and it happens offscreen and we're told it's a result of her actions. We're told society made ponies become raiders who decorate their homes with piss and shit and gore and cum splattered beds and we're told society is improving thanks to Littlepip's "inspirational" mass violence. She's never said anything particularly inspirational about peace or war or rebellion or fundamental leaders or human(pony, whatever) rights or building a better world through mutually consensual deals. She's never said anything politically or economically wise enough to inspire anything intelligent like the rejection of monarchy and leaders in general and the birth of capitalism/anarchocapitalism. She has nothing smart to say about how or why Equestria fell. She has no solution to the Zebra problem and if she existed in the prewar era without postwar knowledge nothing she could or would have done would have saved anypony. LP only started killing when she thrust herself into a world of killers to escape her unpopularity in a safe stable.

We're told LP is nopony and LP tells us she is nopony. Then she demonstrates OP violence. Then we're told she is an inspirational wounded hero fighting for a better world.

k

Kkat can't design one. Or policies that'd build it.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.320366
320369 320425 320760
6221959__safe_artist-colon-arby_lakeripple_imported+from+ponybooru_starlight+glimmer_pony_unicorn_chest+fluff_ear+fluff_ears_female_fluffy_long+glimmer_long+pon.jpg
>>320350

Anyway, the team appears to be having some kind of war council to discuss Littlepoop's latest deranged plan. For some reason, that hellhound with the robot leg has been allowed to join, and seems to be considered a member of the group now.

LP announces that she intends to pull a reverse Mr. Burns and bring back the sun. Pause for astonished gasps. Her reasoning is that this will kill a few different birds with one stone. The Enclave relies on the cloud cover to grow their crops, and taking it away would deal them a fatal blow, since not only would they no longer be able to feed themselves, but they would also no longer be able to keep their population from descending to the surface.

>“Open the sky and they won’t be able to stop all the pegasi who look down and then decide to buck off the government who has lied to them,” I proclaimed. “Open the sky and they no longer have a reason to slaughter ponies out of fear that one of us might remove their precious clouds.”
So basically, the Enclave has been bombarding its citizens with propaganda for years, claiming that the surface ponies are evil villains who want to take away the pegasi's farm-clouds and starve them. LP intends to expose these lies...by doing the exact thing that the Enclave said she would do, thus proving that their propaganda was actually right all along? Brilliant as ever, LP.

Anyway, the other part of this is that removing the cloud cover will bring the sun back, and everyone can enjoy natural light again. While this would no doubt make the wasteland a bit less dreary, LP seems to have overlooked a couple of details; namely that destroying the Enclave's only food source will probably cause widespread famine and death. We've already been told that the Enclave employs population controls on account of how they can't farm enough food to feed their population. We also know that food is scarce in the wasteland in general, since the population seems to mostly subsist on scavenged prepackaged food from before the war. LP's move will likely double or even triple the number of hungry mouths wandering around the wasteland, without doing anything to improve its food production. But hey, at least they'll all be able to enjoy the warm glow of Celestia's sun again.

Velvet seems to have caught on to this somewhat. She points out that the cloud cover is a food source that the pegasi depend on. However, it seems LP is just too darned clever for both Velvet and myself. She now reveals the cleverest part of her plan: she's not going to blast away the entire cloud cover, just some of it. Her plan, literally, is to "get in there, analyze the situation, and trigger a cloud-sweep from as many of the towers as we can without causing famine." It's okay folks; she's only going to nuke half of their crops.

Calamity isn't quite convinced either. He points out that the pegasi have razor-thin margins on their food supply as it is, which is why they engage in population control. His prediction is basically the same as mine: getting rid of the cloud cover will have a cascading effect that will likely result in even more chaos and bloodshed spreading across the wasteland. LP's answer to that one, naturally, is a song we've heard many times before: "I have a plan, but I can't tell you what it is yet. Just trust me and it will all work out." If the world wasn't a nuclear wasteland, this loony twat would probably be a very successful politician by now.

Since every one of these characters is a complete fucking idiot, this answer is enough to appease them. Life Bloom has no helpful comments at all; he just babbles autistically about how nice it will be to have the sun back, and of course takes the opportunity to heap fawning praise on ol' Mary Sue the Glorious Lightbringer™.

Anyway, with that out of the way, there's nothing else to do but hash out the details of how to gain access to the Single Pegasus Project, a feat which the best minds of Edgequestria have tried and failed to do multiple times. Fortunately, LP has a plan for that as well.

Like all of her plans, LP's strategy is so simple an idiot could have devised it. She plans to hit the base really hard and really fast with a front-on attack. Her party is of course, ridiculously outmatched in terms of both numbers and firepower, and the chances of this working, even under the most favorable conditions, are pretty much zero. So, Calamity's reaction to it is perfectly understandable:

>“Ah surgical strike,” Calamity suggested, pondering. “Could work. Assumin’ ya c’n find a way past the two shields.”
Well, in his defense, this idea really isn't that much stupider than any of the other ridiculous stunts they've pulled over the course of this ridiculous, ridiculous story. So, what the hell; let's just get this shitshow on the road already.

Anyway, the hellhound, whose accent I already hate even worse than Calamity's, suggests that they enlist the aid of one of his comrades. The name of this character is unironically "Fluffykins." However, if they wish to procure the services of Ms. Fluffykins, they will need to bust her out of the clink first. It seems she was a test subject in some kind of secret Enclave experiment, and she has superpowers probably, and she hates pegasi, and yada yada yada, I'm already falling asleep. At any rate, it looks like we've got another goofy side-mission lined up before the main event.

Speaking of goofy side missions, it seems that before they go running off to single-handedly assault a heavily armed military base in the sky, using only their arsenal of small arms and someone named fucking Fluffykins for crying out loud, LP wants to escort all of the nameless NPCs she rescued to Junction R7. You may or may not remember that Junction R7 is the super-rad base that LP took over from Gawd like 40 forevers ago and then never returned to. Once they get the details of that hashed out, Velvet pulls LP aside for a private chat.
Anonymous
c35ed5d
?
No.320368
>>320360
I was joking with the Twilight/Batman thing, I know they fight for more than just the homes they live in. They fight for ideals and that is represented beautifully when the heroes who work together face flawed villains who mistreat their underlings or flawed alliances of villains. Friendship good and evil bad, it feels weird to compare a story written by an "adult" for "adults" and point out what they lack compared to kids shows.

There have been heroes that start with an inherently selfish goal like "retrieve someone who doesn't want to be retrieved so I can get my old life back" but then they grow as a result of new stimuli and life lessons and bonds made with others. They choose new moral missions like "Help this person gets where he truly needs to go no matter what" or "protect this person my old bosses wanted me to retrieve".

LP never goes through the kind of transformative character arc necessary to go from "I'll get Velvet back home and then everything can go back to normal!" to "Velvet and I will change this world for the better no matter what!" and so her character fundamentally doesn't work. Kkat wanted her "perfect" from day one so she's already peak murderhobo despite some grumbling or an odd moment of nerves or vomit here and there. But he didn't understand heart, or the heart of character.

Kkat doesn't understand enough about society and the death or birth of nations and laws to convincingly write about LP's deeds killing a bad society and giving birth to a new one. So we're just told to believe "Littlepip The Lightbringer, Wasteland Savior and Bedfellow of Edgelords" successfully took so many cruel influences away from the few ponies alive in the wasteland that only "kind" influences remain. Forget anything deep this story could say about society and the morality of using force to rebuild society vs letting thriving moral settlements that thrive due to their morality voluntarily form trade agreements and protect each other's interests and hire travelling heroes to solve problems only force can solve. No, this whole story was just a shooting gallery and now that the inherently evil enemies are all dead the remaining "inherently nice" ponies can enjoy life and do their part to fix things without any Raiders or Slavers or Alicorn cunts getting in the way. What a leftist view of the world, to believe that post-apocalytpic nightmares only suck for the inhabitants due to the actions of others, actions that can be undone with the murder of others.

Does the cloud covering maintained by Pegasi farmers prevent other races from farming? Just exterminate Enclave forces until you can take weather control away from them and use it to make your own "good" farms. Do Raiders feed on Trading Caravans? Just exterminate the Raiders as you would a RadScorpion infestation. Murder, murder, the solution is always murder to this blood-soaked pony with blood magic spells, and we're told she's morally superior to all the other killers in this hellhole because she tells herself she only kills "righteously".
As long as there is resource scarcity some will naturally want more. If society has no moral safe avenue for these people to get what they need (like becoming farmers) they will turn to crime. Authoritarian dictators like Red Eye might be able to promise his people full bellies and paved roads and a world without raiders but is it worth it if it has to be forced onto the world at the barrel of a gun held aloft by an Alicorn tyrant who's one third murderhobo, one third cyborg wannabe-dictator, and one third the worst villain Kkat could imagine: A racist food-hoarding Gwneral in charge of the local America stand-in hurting the "poor oppressed peoples" of the Edgequestrian Wasteland that's somehow supposed to also be the Middle East despite also being the ruins of a decadent failed-universalist failed-humanist American state that accepts drug-addicted drug-trafficking zigger rapefugee terrorists?

I wish Kkat found Fee.Org and youtube videos like Out Of Frame and Common Sense Soapbox before writing this, and got over his leftist delusions so he could understand reality for what it is and reflect that better in his moralporn emotionalporn murderporn gorefic for whiny teenagers who think nothing's edgier than Pinkie Pie becoming a crackwhore or a Pegasus with a shotgun saying fuck.
Anonymous
6183881
?
No.320369
Domestication_unit.png
>>320366
Kind of a reference? but this side mission might exist just to reference the fact that the Enclave in Fallout 3 have a few mind-controlled Deathclaws (the monsters that Hellhounds are based upon) in their possession.
Anonymous
34ad5d0
?
No.320418
320441
I've really missed this during the hiatus. Welcome back Glim.
Anonymous
6e09e90
?
No.320425
320441
>>320366
Glad to have you back glim glam.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.320441
320443
>>320356

As I've said, I think if kkat actually understood how deranged his character comes across it could be a potentially interesting story. If he wrote her this way on purpose it would be one thing, but again I don't think he actually realizes how crazy his character comes across or how erratic her actions in the story appear. Thus, her derangement is a bug and not a feature.

Having an unreliable narrator can add an interesting layer of complexity; the reader has to learn to differentiate between the character's point of view and what's actually going on. If you have a narrator who is clearly insane, you can use this technique to completely obfuscate the truth and force the reader to merely guess at what is actually happening. A Clockwork Orange does a good job of this.

Though it's not written in the first person, Absalom Absalom by William Faulkner also uses unreliable narrators in an interesting way. The life story of a character the reader never actually encounters is told multiple times by different characters, all of whom have a different opinion of him. Some have never actually met him. Every character is biased in some way and each has a different level of knowledge of the subject, so no account given can be completely trusted. The reader is never given the omniscient version of the story.

We're not quite at the end of FoE yet, so I suppose it's possible that kkat has some kind of twist prepared. However, nothing he's written so far suggests to me that he is capable of writing at that level. As far as I can tell, Littlepoop is intended to be taken as a genuine hero; I don't think there's any kind of bait and switch being prepared. If I'm wrong, it might change my opinion of the book overall. But again, I'm not holding my breath.

At any rate, calling LP an unreliable narrator just to explain away logical inconsistencies in the plot doesn't fly, in my opinion.

>>320357
Part of what's frustrating about this book is that kkat actually has more to work with than he realizes. I've mentioned several times that he could have made a much more interesting character out of Velvet by exploring her cunty, manipulative side a little better, or at least putting a little more thought into her what drives her, beyond that she likes to sing and kinda-sorta wants to be a doctor when the mood strikes her.

>>320129
>>320418
>>320425
Thanks folks, it's good to be back. Well, not really, but...you know what I mean.
Anonymous
379f8e4
?
No.320443
6250087.gif
2113113.jpeg
>>320441
Complimentary ponefish.
Anonymous
70c641f
?
No.320758
Remember that FIM episode where the ponies warred with Buffalo by throwing pies?

You know what is vaguely pie-shaped? Landmines.

These ponies shouldn't be using guns meant for human hands, they should be tossing landmines. Either throwing them like frisbees to deny areas to the enemy or hurling them face-first at enemies to explode on contact.

Landmines should have gone through centuries of evolution in this alternate pone timeline, not guns. Traditional old fashioned landmines, proximity mines, gas mines, frenzy gas mines that makes berserk enemies turn on each other, memory loss gas mines, magical enchanted ice or shrink blasts or even magic waves that turn you into delicious cows, and more. Imagine a landmine that, when readied and triggered, teleports the person who readied the mine to it so they can gun down and loot whoever triggered the landmine. LP could trigger one and it could summon a dead skeleton picked clean of loot and meat. Super spooky and tragic, he died before his trap could be triggered.

Speaking of which it's stupid that in this story the creation of gunpowder and the birth of the first guns and the creation of the "modern-day" (vaguely retrofuturistic and classic to 1960ish era) guns are so close together. It could be justified with all sorts of things (tremendous gun research budget, future-seeing wizards ripping off weapon designs 20 years into the future then checking the future they just changed by advancing their current tech level to see even more advanced weaponry in the future and repeating this process until nukes are eventually discovered and the future mysteriously becomes unseeable, researchers on Mint-Al CrackMints with boosted intelligence drawing equations on walls with Magic Hats Of Metalbending letting them rapidly craft and iterate upon more than ten new gun designs a day per mad genius assigned to the project) but if Kkat thought it was something unusual that needed a justification instead of expecting us to take ponies inventing human guns for granted, he would have provided his own explanation. An overly long and potentially confusing explanation filled with irrelevant details and namedrops for shit to be forgotten now only for it to potentially get referenced again 200k words later.

also its me my wifi is down.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
1cdabcd
?
No.320760
320765
6224176__safe_artist-colon-andoanimalia_imported+from+derpibooru_starlight+glimmer_pony_unicorn_the+parent+map_dreamworks+face_female_simple+background_smug_sol.png
>>320366

LP follows Velvet outside to see what she wants, but before they can have their chat the hellhound pulls her aside.

>“Leetlepip,” he said with an almost whispering hiss. “Ain’t no small thing, you’re intendeen. Tu bring back the moon und the blanket uf gems.” Blanket of…? Oh, he meant the stars.
I have no commentary here, I just wanted to highlight this as an example of the horrendous dialogue in this story. Every single line spoken by the hellhound has been written this way so far.

Anyway, here's a quick summary of what the hellhound (still no name for this character) has to say:

He is aware that Littlepoop was responsible for the destruction of the hellhound warren that got kerploded when Xenith set off the megaspell underneath Splendid Valley. However, he doesn't hold a grudge against her for this. His reasoning is that the hellhounds and the ponies were at war, so these deaths were merely battle casualties. What he does hold a grudge against her for is her failure to rescue the "Ghost Farm hellhounds."

This part requires a bit of explanation, as it is one of those areas of the story that kkat didn't explain particularly well. However, he has dropped enough bread-crumb hints that we can more or less piece it together.

The Enclave had some kind of project going that involved putting mind-control helmets on hellhounds so they could use them as low-level grunts to do their dirty work on the ground. The evidence of this consists of the radio transmitter the party found atop one of the buildings in that ghost town they visited shortly after they first met Trixie, and the fact that the party has encountered hellhounds wearing mind control helmets at a few points throughout the story. The most recent batch, the ones who broke into Red Eye's basement laboratory, were among these. The implication is that Colonel "Big Mountain" Fudgecake was holding them as a trump card, and summoned them at the last minute to foil Red Eye's schemes. How he was able to do this while completely paralyzed is a question for another day.

The "Ghost Farm" the hellhound mentions is a location that has been referenced once or twice in passing, but hasn't factored into the story in any significant way. If I remember correctly, it is located somewhere in the vicinity of Canterlot, and is supposed to be booby-trapped with a fuckton of landmines. If you don't remember hearing about it you can hardly be blamed.

Anyway, what the hellhound is basically saying is that LP was justified in killing the hellhounds underneath Splendid Valley, since they were arguably her enemy. However, he holds her culpable for the deaths of the hellhounds that died when the Cathedral was destroyed, since they were being mind controlled by the Enclave and couldn't be held responsible for their actions. That LP was directly responsible for the deaths of the Splendid Valley hellhounds, but only killed the Cathedral ones indirectly by electing not to save them, does not seem to factor into his logic.

This seems to be another instance of kkat's wacky moral algebra being put to work. The issue at hand is that LP elected to save a bunch of unconscious unicorns while allowing the violent, mind-controlled hellhounds to die. To me her decision seems logical: she elected to save the unicorns because they were fellow ponies, but didn't consider herself responsible for saving the alien hellhounds (who probably would have attacked her, with or without the helmets, if given the opportunity). However, if you're working from the base assumption that all lives should have equal value to all people, then I suppose I can see how this might create a moral conundrum.

The problem is that when you try to apply these kinds of universal ideals to a splatter-porn survival story like this, you tend to get weird results. As I've often complained, none of these characters have any clear principles of their own. They all seem to just accept some general, vaguely-defined idea that killing is usually wrong, but also that killing certain specific things under certain specific conditions is okay. LP's justifications for killing tends to change on a dime, so it's hard to gage what the author is actually trying to say here.

Anyway, LP spends a few more paragraphs waxing pseudo-philosophical about whatever ethical issue she's supposed to be grappling with, and then she lamely apologize to the hellhound for not being "better" than she is. Her statement is worth quoting, because it actually sums up the vague wishy-washy morals of this story pretty succinctly:

>“Your people have every reason to hate me, but I really am trying to do the right thing, the best I can.” That, I could only assume, was the coldest of comforts. But I had to say it. I had to say something. “I’m sorry that I haven’t been able to do better.”
"I'm trying to do 'the right thing.' I'm sorry for not 'being better.'" How exactly is one supposed to be "good" when they can't even define their own idea of it?

>Another thought occurred to me. “After this, the pegasi will have plenty of reason to hate me too.” I felt sudden empathy for Scootaloo. “To save Equestria, I’ve become the villain of the piece.”
This statement also reveals more than the author intended it to. Look past her words at what she's actually saying. She isn't empathizing with Scootaloo or anyone else, nor does she actually regret whatever horrible thing she's about to do to the pegasi. She feels sorry for herself, because she's about to do something that she sees as being for the good of all, but in her infinite Mary Sue wisdom she also knows that the poor, stupid rubes she's saving won't see it that way. All she regrets here is that the world won't fully comprehend how noble her efforts to save it have been.

We've seen the phrase "villain of the piece" before, but the way she's describing it "pariah" would be more accurate. With LP, it's narcissism all the way down.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
1cdabcd
?
No.320765
320786 320854
2465394.gif
>>320760

Anyway, the hellhound tells Littlepoop that while he still holds her responsible for not saving the other hellhounds, he approves of what she is trying to do. He insinuates that if she can accomplish her mission then as far as he is concerned they are squaresies on the whole hellhound-holocaust thing, and because of this he is willing to send someone along to help her. At this point, he asks where they are planning to "gather" in order to attack the Enclave fortress, so he can instruct his friend to meet them there.

LP does not entirely trust him, but at the same time is tempted by his offer of another disposable soldier to drag off to the gallows on her ill-fated holy war against the forces of whatever. Eventually, she concludes that the hellhound can be trusted because Velvet Remedy fixed his leg, so she decides to meet him halfway. She won't tell him where they are planning to gather, but she tells him to have his friend meet them at "a hardware store near a passenger wagon stop in Fetlock."

Page break. It looks like there are going to be more confusing time-jumps in this section of the story, as this one is headlined "today."

>The first shot was fired less than an hour after dawn. I don’t think anypony will ever know by who.
By whom.

Anyway, I have literally no idea what the fuck is supposed to be going on in this particular microscene, nor do I understand why the author felt it was appropriate to skip forward a whole two days just to drop it in. Since it's short, I'm just going to copypaste the whole thing. Take from this what you will, I guess:

>But that shot lit the fire. Two massive armies charged forward over the badlands outside of Fillydelphia.

>The orifices of the Enclave Thunderhead Glorious Dawn opened and spewed a black-carapaced plague that swarmed down from the sky. Hundreds of battle-armored unicorns and earth ponies, a great many of them survivors of The Pitt, galloped to meet them, firing assault weapons and high-powered rifles with enchanted bullets.

>Griffins soared into the sky from the Fillydelphia Wall, anti-machine rifles firing at each target of opportunity. More than a dozen Raptors swooped in, their energy weapons turning Pinkie Pie Balloons into flying infernos. The first four crossed over the wall when Stern unleashed her biggest surprise.

>Though badly wounded, Red Eye’s cyberdragon had survived the fight in Everfree Forest, and for reasons only it could know, it still fought for Equestria. And it was pissed. The first of the Raptors was torn apart in a whirlwind of violence.

>The sound of heavy, cruel thunder drummed the earth as the Glorious Dawn descended into the fray.

Page break. The time-frame is back to being "two days ago," once again raising the question of why the fuck the author randomly decided to skip ahead two days just to dump in a detached scene without context.

Anyway, this scene pretty much picks up where the actual story left off. Having finished talking to the hellhound, LP now turns her attention to Velvet. Velvet tells her that somehow, Calamity has figured out that LP killed his brother. She wants to know if it's true. LP decides to be honest and confesses to the deed.

>I interrupted her silence. “And before you try telling me I should have given him a chance: you didn’t see him down there. And you didn’t see Friendship City.” My voice was slowly rising. “He’d had chances. You have to want to change, or at least show a shred of remorse or decency or something…”
What exactly did he do 'down there' that she found so objectionable? I don't remember him doing much of anything; he argued with Red Eye for awhile and then Red Eye disabled his armor. Again, if this character had been introduced earlier on in the story as a major antagonist, and we'd been given a chance to witness his deeds and form an opinion about him the way we did with Red Eye and Trixie, his execution might have made more sense. As it stands, I still have a hard time understanding why LP felt the need to do what she did, apart from the obvious fact that she is a self-righteous, narcissistic psychopath.

Also, I'm not entirely clear what she means by this:

>And you didn’t see Friendship City.
What happened in Friendship City, and how is it relevant? I remember the Enclave attacked it at one point, so presumably Calamity's brother had something to do with ordering that, but so what? What about that specific incident was so atrocious that it justified executing this guy point-blank?

She goes on:

>Deflating, I said simply, “If I had let Calamity’s brother go, he would most likely have sought revenge on all of the wasteland.
This can neither be proven nor disproven.

>He had no regard for the lives of others
Neither does LP or anyone else in this story.

>and Red Eye gave him every excuse he needed to turn his Operation: Cauterize into something more like Quarantine and Incinerate.”
I don't really understand what she's saying here. Is this a condemnation of Red Eye, the Colonel, or both?

Anyway, LP's thoughts go off on another of her random tangents, and she babbles on for a few paragraphs about stuff and whatever. As it turns out, Velvet isn't even actively condemning her for killing the Colonel, she's just concerned about her. The rest appears to be LP's own conscience nagging her.

After this, they yak about Velvet's decision to help the hellhound and fix its leg. I'm actually still not clear on where she found a cybernetic leg, or how she managed to attach it to the hellhound. Either I missed something big, or it's one of those situations where kkat just expects the reader to piece something together from random pieces of autism he's scattered around the text. Either way, I'm not really interested enough to investigate.

Anyway, the two of them have a long, pointless conversation in which they both give themselves a self-righteous pat on the back for helping ponies and/or creatures that probably wouldn't do the same for them, and then the scene ends.
Anonymous
3ac3469
?
No.320770
320792 320810 322653
hey guys, I'm pretty sure I found that fanfiction about scootaloo on earth that pushes how great socialism is.
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/91215/our-girl-scootaloo-1-of-3

Though I won't be able to verify until I get home.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.320786
320814
2704667.gif
>>320765

Page break. Time jumps forward to "today" again. For some reason Gawd, her daughter Reggie, and several of the other Talons are helping to clear clouds. Whatever pegasus-devised mechanism created the cloud cover in the first place keeps trying to fill in the gaps, making their effort rather sisyphean. They also appear to be doing this while the battle described in the previous "today" scene is raging below, adding to the-already high WTF levels.

Suddenly, they are attacked by a patrol of Enclave soldiers. They fight for awhile, stuff happens, a throwaway character named Butcher is killed, and Reggie gets hit and falls through the clouds. Nothing else happens.

Page break. It is once again "two days ago." Having apparently finished their conversation, LP and Velvet turn to go back to Zecora's hut. Then, suddenly, a wild alicorn appears.

The alicorns, which apparently still exist because reasons, want to procreate, because reasons. The problem seems to be that there are no male alicorns. They have therefore chosen this precise moment to fly out to this random hut in the woods to ask Velvet Remedy about it, because...you guessed it...reasons.

Anyway, it seems that the alicorns, in their goofy way, have somehow gotten it into their head that Velvet is "the one who helps." They pull out some mangled cybernetic junk and a ruined robot eye, which turns out to be all of Red Eye that survived after he fell into the vat. If anyone cares, the story is that apparently he survived falling into the vat, managed to climb out of it and escape into the tunnels, only to end up being eaten by his own pet dragon.

I don't entirely follow this next bit, but once again, I'm getting pretty tired of trying to follow kkat's autistic reasoning process and I just don't have the energy to analyze it. But I'll try. The long and short of it seems to be that Red Eye had some kind of huge computer array in Fillydelphia, that somehow received memories transmitted by his sprite bots, and the alicorns want Velvet to somehow use this to...actually, fuck it; I have literally no goddamned idea what they expect her to do. This story is approaching levels of autism that shouldn't even be possible.

In any case, Velvet is too grossed out by Red Eye's bloody half-chewed cybernetics sacrebleu! le edge! to agree to this. However, for reasons that only she could understand, she promises the alicorns that she will try to think of a way to help them. The alicorns seem to be okay with this arrangement. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Once again, it has become "today." I'm beginning to smell a pattern here; perhaps kkat googled "foreshadowing" at some point, and decided to give it the ol' college try.

Anyway, the same battle appears to be raging on. This time, we see it from the perspective of the Steel Rangers, who are presently trying to defend their headquarters from some attacking Enclave ponies. The situation appears hopeless, then suddenly one of the Applejack's Rangers the distinction between these two still hasn't been explained all that clearly randomly shows up and starts shooting at the Enclave. The Steel Rangers continue fighting. Nothing else happens.

Page break. "Two days ago." We are told that it is now dawn, because apparently it was night before. The alicorns leave, and LP is now approached by Life Bloom. Through some convoluted chain of autistic logic similar to LP's leaps of Mary Sue intuition, Life Bloom seems to have figured out that LP has access to some kind of "food-production megaspell." Though he does not know about the Gardens of Equestria, he seems to have figured out that something along these lines exists, and that it's part of LP's plan somehow.

He asks to see the spell, and LP informs him that it's not hers to show. He reluctantly accepts this, and then reveals something else that he seems to have somehow intuited (thought this one isn't that hard to guess at) - that LP's plan also involves some final act of self-sacrifice that will result in her death. LP confirms this.

>“Part of me wants to hug you and proclaim you my hero for what you are about to do,” Life Bloom granted. “But part of me wants to drop you, and keep you paralyzed until I can hoof-deliver you to Homage so she can buck some sense into you.”
I can actually sympathize with him a bit here, as I am also a bit conflicted in my feelings towards Littlepoop. Part of me wants to stuff her into a trash can, kick it down several flights of stairs, drag her out of the trash can and back up the stairs by her tail, stuff her into a second trash can filled with rusty nails, weld it shut with no air holes, and then kick that[ down the stairs.

But, another part of me wants to eat a giant Mexican lunch, shit the entire thing down her throat, sew her lips and anus shut, stuff her entire body into Life Bloom's colon, sew his lips and anus shut, toss them both into an oven, slow-roast the shit-and-pony turducken in a patented blend of herbs and spices for several hours, and then drop it off at kkat's house so his mom won't have to cook him a Thanksgiving dinner. Decisions, decisions.

Anyway, the long and short of this is that LP plans to either die inside the SPP, or else fuse with it somehow and become some sort of living weather-machine; I'm not really clear on which (or if it's actually some ridiculous third kkat thing that I'm not autistic enough to think of). Either way, once she activates it, she doesn't plan on a return journey.

Bloomin' Rectum berates her for abandoning Homage, pointing out that she's already lost one dykefriend and that it will destroy her to go through that again. She responds with her usual "if I don't save the wee turtles who will" pablum. She also claims that Homage will completely lose her "faith in heroes" if LP doesn't save the wasteland somehow, because LP's ego is literally that big.
Anonymous
726db96
?
No.320792
320810
>>320770
Got home and apparently I read all but the last chapter of this fanfiction. Didn't read any of the sequels.
Scootaloo was adopted by a couple of faggots that were "married" apparently.
Was skimming the second-to-last chapter, "scootaloo goes to church" and its all about how any kind of "faith" in anything is acceptable, unless you are an actual christian with actual legit values in life.

I seem to recall socialism was interlaced through the whole thing, and pushed pretty hard in at least a few places.
Anyway, somebody was asking about it. I'm about 95% sure this is the one I was thinking of. I am sorry, for whoever ventures into reading it in any capacity. I feel bad for myself for just skimming this one chapter about "church".
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
1cdabcd
?
No.320810
>>320770
>>320792

This actually looks like it might be kind of funny. I'm going to add it to the maybe pile.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
1cdabcd
?
No.320814
320826
download (29).jpeg
>>320786

The rest of this microscene is just Life Bloom simpering and apologizing to Littlepoop for not being as heroic as she is. He accedes that the Twilight Society needs to live up to its name, and do more for the good of Equestria, and blah blah blah eat the pudding.

LP's reaction is worth calling attention to:

>I merely nodded, turning my tail on him and trotting off. As much as my heart felt like it had been put through a blender, this was good. I needed Life Bloom thinking this way. I had a plan. And without Homage, it would be up to him alone to convince the Twilight Society to do their part.
Littlepoop is probably a legit sociopath. She pretty much does whatever she wants whenever she wants, uses whoever she wants however she wants, and justifies all of it through this misguided idea that she's somehow "fixing" or "saving" the wasteland. She never questions her natural right to do this, and any damage she causes is just a trifle before a great mission. It isn't just strangers or adversaries she takes advantage of either; she has shown repeatedly that she has no problem taking advantage of her allies, her friends and even Homage in order to get what she wants.

Her ultimate goal, as I've repeatedly stated, has never really been clear. Whether or not the wasteland will end up any better off as a result of her actions remains to be seen, but either way this entire project of hers is nothing but insane self-aggrandizement; everything she says about doing it for others or for some warped notion of common good is just her delusion.

One thing I will note here is that I'm beginning to see the intended parallels between LP and Red Eye a little more clearly now. It was still clumsily handled, but I'll admit that the author probably deserves more credit than I've given him for developing these two characters as mirrors of each other. The main issue is that (I suspect) Red Eye was intended to be a dark mirror of LP; the goal with his character was to show how thin of a razor's edge LP is really walking, and how it would only take a slight nudge to make her just as evil as he is. That isn't exactly how it worked out.

If anything, the problem is that there isn't enough of a distinction between the two characters. Red Eye isn't LP's dark mirror, he's just a slightly more obviously evil version of her. If anything, Red Eye is the more sympathetic of the two; at the very least he owns his sociopathy and doesn't try to deceive himself about what he's doing or why he's doing it. LP hides every insane, self-serving thing she does behind a veneer of noble selflessness, and what's more, she does it without even being conscious of it. She's such a talented sociopath she even manages to charm herself.

Anyway, let's move on.

Page break. It is once again "today."

We are now inside Tenpony Tower, in one of the hidden ritual chambers that Homage showed to LP. We are told that the last time this particular chamber was used, it was to cast some kind of sun-harnessing megaspell that completely destroyed several zebra-occupied islands.

At present, the chamber is being used by a group of robed ponies who are almost certainly members of the Twilight Society. It's not clear what they are up to exactly, but from the last few "today" scenes, we're beginning to get the first faint glimmer of the larger picture. Here is what is most likely happening:

Earlier, we saw Gawd's mercenaries punching holes in the Enclave's cloud cover. This would be a futile effort in and of itself, but the object here is probably to allow just enough sunlight through to power the spell that the Twilight Society is trying to cast. It's not quite clear what's happening down below, beyond that there is a huge battle going on, but all of this seems to be part of one of LP's intricate, wacky schemes. Unfortunately, the only way to find out exactly what's going on will be to keep reading.

Page break. "Two days ago."

>I concentrated as best I could. This time, it was my turn to fly Calamity over the treetops of the Everfree Forest. We were going to locate the Tortoise, and I was going to levitate it back with us to Zecora’s Hut, the only safe place to really work on it.
This doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The only reason to bring Calamity along on an errand like this would be to have him fly the Tortoise back to the hut once it was located. However, it was established earlier that Calamity has a broken wing and can't fly, which is presumably why LP is levitating him. Since she's going to transport the ship back by levitating it, Calamity's presence here shouldn't be necessary; if anything, it's just going to give her one extra thing to levitate on the way back.

Anyway, as they are walking, they are suddenly attacked:

>Even so, I was absolutely not ready for what swooped out of the sky in front of us. I found myself staring into the eyes of a reaper pony!
What is a reaper pony? We haven't encountered one of these. Although LP immediately explains it in the next paragraph, this passage is worth calling attention to, because LP hasn't encountered one before either. Thus, logically, she ought not to know what it is any more than we do, and shouldn't be able to identify it by name. This goes back to one of my earliest complaints: it's never been clearly established just how much knowledge LP is supposed to have about the world she lives in.

Anyway, here's what a reaper pony is:

>It had the body of a dead pegasus -- gaunt, coatless, its body a pale and sickly white -- but the eyes of a dragon -- fierce, glowing-yellow irises with cat-like pupils, full of power and fierce life. From behind its shoulders sprouted large, leathery, bat-like wings. And nightmarish armor growing out of its flesh.
Honestly I don't see much difference between this and a ghoul, other than the bat wings and the eyes. I'm going to take a wild shot in the dark and assume that 'reaper' is another blatantly plagiarized Fallout thing.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
1cdabcd
?
No.320826
320829 320839
images (2).jpeg
>>320814

>My heart seized. The reaper ponies were real! I mean, really real! Oh Goddesses, I wasn’t ready to die! Not now!
This is also confusing. Is a reaper pony supposed to be something significant in the world's mythology that we should recognize? Again, kkat tends to be pretty murky about details like this.

My old friend Ctrl-F reveals that the earliest mention of a "reaper" is in Chapter 19, in one of the end-of-chapter footnotes:

>New Perk: Reaper Pony’s Gallop – If you kill a target while using S.A.T.S., 25% of your AP are restored after dropping the spell. This will usually refresh your targeting spell enough to use it again immediately for at least one more attack.
This unintelligible vidyagame autism seems to confirm my theory that "reaper" is something distinct that Fallout players would recognize.

The word is also peppered throughout quite a few of the earlier chapters:

>By Luna, we look like grim reaper ponies.
Velvet Remedy, in Ch. 23

>I grimaced. Not that I minded looking like a reaper pony to raiders (I damn well ought to!), but because Velvet’s comments brought back memories of the twisted view of us that SteelHooves had once professed to Calamity.
LP, same chapter, reacting to Velvet's assessment of their appearance.

>The reaper pony had come to take him home.
LP, in Ch. 24, describing her "host" in one of the memory-orb interludes.

There are a few more examples I could quote, but it's just more of the same. Point is, prior to this chapter, the word "reaper" has always appeared in a generic context: a simple avatar of death. Most people reading the above passages would just take "reaper" as a figure of speech; basically just a colorful and poetic reference to the concept of death itself. Here, however, it seems that he's referring to a specific type of creature, called a "reaper pony."

This is one of kkat's bad habits. Several words in this setting, most notably raiders, slavers, ghouls, zombies, and now apparently reapers, refer to creatures or character classes that are specific to this setting. However, these are also common words that have an established meaning in common parlance. Kkat uses them casually, without giving the reader any hint that he is referring to anything specific to his world; thus, the reader is going to naturally assume the common definition of the word. Usually, when he does this, it means he's talking about some direct reference to Fallout that he just assumes the reader will pick up on.

This is a bad writing habit and you shouldn't do it. Even if it's a safe bet that most of your audience has played the video game you're referencing, you still want to make sure your text could be understood by someone uninitiated. You don't have to autistically explain every detail of what a "ghoul" is, you just need to make it clear to the reader that "ghoul" in your story is the proper word for a specific type of creature, and not simply a general term for something nasty, interchangeable with "monster," "goblin," "spook," and so forth. For example, Tolkien in The Hobbit uses "goblin" to describe a unique type of creature, distinct from trolls, ogres, and other words that might be used interchangeably with "goblin" in ordinary speech he later retcons "goblins" into "orcs," but the basic concept still applies. From the very first time it appears, he uses the word in a way that makes it clear that it refers to something world-specific, and that the word applies only to these specific creatures.

Anyway, the scene becomes only slightly less confusing as it progresses. The question of what a "reaper pony" is turns out to be irrelevant anyway, as it appears Littlepoop was mistaken; what she thought was a reaper is actually a Canterlot ghoul (I guess), and for some reason it knows who LP and Calamity are. It refers to Calamity as "Lionheart," and Calamity rather cryptically refers to it as "the demon."

It gets pretty bizarre from here. I get the impression this scene is meant to be light and comical, but either the humor is too autistic for me to get, or else kkat is directly spoofing a Fallout moment I'm not familiar with. I'll do my best to summarize what happens.

This weird, undead ghoul-like creature, that may or may not be something called a 'reaper,' speaks in a very loud voice. The reason for this appears to be the armor it's wearing: the creature says that it was enchanted by Luna so that the pony wearing it will always speak in the Royal Canterlot voice. This seems like a bit of an impractical and silly enchantment, but we'll put a pin in that for now. It keeps referring to itself as "we," and Calamity initially makes the mistake of assuming it means the royal "we."

However, it soon becomes apparent that there is a second member of its party:

>In response, a tiny white field mouse with cute little pink eyes scurried up the Canterlot ghoul’s hideous neck-armor and perched on his head, squeaking. The little fellow’s whisker’s wiggled cutely...
>…and for some reason I couldn’t fathom, the tiny mouse struck an even deeper note of terror in me than the apparent reaper pony had.

Using her Mary Sue divination powers, Littlepoop immediately deduces that 'Lionheart' must be this mouse's name. The character was mentioned briefly in one of her dykefriend's long-forgotten broadcasts:

>I have a tale here of two such heroes taking down one of those warships just south of Stalliongrad. Left a calling card: Lion & Mouse. Well, tell you what, Lion and Mouse. Drop by Tenpony Tower sometime.

So, if I'm following all of this correctly, these two are some kind of dynamic duo; presumably the ghoul-reaper-thing is the Lion, and the mouse is the Mouse. Though it is not at all clear how they did it, it seems that these two managed to down one one of the Enclave's giant airships on their own. Alrighty then.

I wish I could say this is the most autistic thing that has yet happened in this story, but I think we all know that's pretty far from the truth.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
1cdabcd
?
No.320829
320831 320859 320903
images (3).jpeg
>>320826

Anyway, the rest of this scene is just LP going off on another of her spergy internal monologues, in which she connects various random bread crumbs dropped throughout various random points in the text, and in so doing divines the origin of these two very strange characters who suddenly appeared out of literally fucking nowhere. Here is a brief summary:

Lion and Mouse are two vigilantes, who appear to have just randomly decided one day that it was their mission to wander around the wasteland blowing random shit up. Sounds a little familiar. Anyway, their attacks on the Enclave attracted the attention of DJ Pon3/Homage, who invited them down to her studio for an interview. They showed up, and immediately forged a bond with her over a mutual love of random, pointless acts of destruction thinly disguised as heroism.

Homage appears to have enlisted their help in her own quest to commit random acts of pointless destruction (I've honestly forgotten what she's supposed to be doing exactly), and after tearing around the wasteland blowing up Enclave ships and whatnot for awhile, she appears to have sent them LP's way to aid in her mission of random, pointless destruction. As proof that they were indeed sent by Homage, they present her with a gift: a memory orb and a note that simply reads "#8." Presumably, this is one of the memories that LP recorded and then had erased. I'm not 100% sure about this, but I think #8 is supposed to be the dirty one.

>The mouse snorted, just a little, blasting the air with yard-long streams of terrifyingly solid pink.
My best guess here is that for some autismo reason that only kkat could comprehend, this mouse is able to exhale pink cloud every time it blows its nose. I think the basic idea is that they both somehow survived the Canterlot attack, and were mutated by it or whatever. I don't even know what the fuck anymore.

Page break. "Today."

We are now treated to a glimpse inside one of the Enclave battleships. The regrettably-named Ensign Fancy Lad is overseeing the bombing of what appears to be whatever's left of Red Eye's slaving operation. Then, suddenly, one of those haunted radios appears to go off, infecting the headsets of all the crew members. An elevator door opens, releasing pink cloud into the cockpit or bridge or whatever the fuck this thing has kkat doesn't describe the interior of these ships any better than he describes anything else, and standing in the midst of it are two characters who bear a striking resemblance to the pair we encountered in the previous scene. Nothing else happens.

Page break. "Two days ago."

>“Whut?” he asked, at least feigning ignorance. “Killeen joke turned uh male hellhound entu uh female pony.”
Well, it looks like we finally learned kkat's origin story.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, they are all back at Zecora's hut again. Whether or not LP and Calamity accomplished their original mission of recovering the Tortoise is presently unknown.

For whatever bizarre reason, hearing the albino cyborg hellhound talk about magically-induced sex change operations gives Velvet Remedy an idea. In a completely out-of-character moment, she channels Rarity (who has been dead for 200 years) and cries "I-dee-ah!" in a shrill singsong voice. Then, she runs up to LP and randomly asks if they can return to Stable 29. I've completely forgotten which of the stables is which, but I think 29 is the one the Steel Rangers took over.

LP accedes to her request without even bothering to ask why she wants to go there, because apparently her own zany plan calls for going there anyway. Lionheart (this name seems to be rather ambiguously applied to both the reaper/ghoul pony and its mouse friend) enters the room and greets everyone, and for some reason this freaks out the hellhound. The text doesn't offer any hints as to why, but I suspect it has something to do with the volume of its voice.

At this point, Calamity asks LP if she would like to explain at least some of her ridiculous plan now, and LP decides that she might as well. Here is a brief summary:

To pull off whatever insane thing she intends to have them attempt, the party will need the help of seven of their allies. LP has already taken the liberty of using Spike's sprite-bot network to summon all of them. The only name given is Life Bloom, who is already with them. However, we can logically deduce that this "Lionheart" character was sent by Homage since (for some reason I've forgotten) she won't be able to join them herself. I'm also going to take a wild guess and assume that Gawd is one of the mysterious seven, so that leaves four names still unaccounted for. I can't tell if kkat is intentionally keeping us in the dark here, or if this is another of his bread-crumb puzzles that he assume's we'll just figure out; either way, I don't care enough to spend any more time on it. We'll find out in due course, I guess.

Oh, also, Xenith just woke up.

Page break. "Today."

This very short microscene seems to be hinting that Pyrelight has once again bathed in cum radiation and gotten huge. Presumably, this will be important later. Nothing else happens.

Page break. "Two days ago."

For some silly reason, the first thing Xenith does after waking up out of her coma is yell at Zecora's old pet rock. You may or may not recall that there was a small rock stored in an old trunk in this hut somewhere, along with some recordings and some other assorted crap. Apparently, this rock was supposed to be part of the meteor that crashed into Equestria thousands of years ago, and somehow killed all the zebras or pissed them off or scared them or something, and I think it also started the war somehow. I literally don't even fucking know anymore. Anyway, Xenith is mad at this fucking rock for some dumb reason, and she stomps it into pieces. After this, she announces that she is going to whip up some healing potions. Nothing else happens.
Anonymous
f10b427
?
No.320831
fancy lads.png
>>320829
Ensign Fancy Lad seems to be named after "Fancy Lads Snack Cakes", a consumable item that can be found in Fallout 3 and its sequels.
Anonymous
6183881
?
No.320839
>>320826
No actually, Grim Reaper's Sprint is a notoriously broken perk in Fallout 3. The idea is it is meant to chain your kills together when using the auto-targeting mode, completely refilling your targeting points upon a kill, letting you stoop time and kill entire groups easily. The idea Kkat was going here wasn't referring to any kind of mythology or the perk, only wishing to have Littlepip freak out about seeing something that resembled the traditional Grim Reaper coming for her. Nothing more. This ghoul just happens to be a unique character.
Anonymous
e726b05
?
No.320854
>>320765
>>and Red Eye gave him every excuse he needed to turn his Operation: Cauterize into something more like Quarantine and Incinerate.”
>I don't really understand what she's saying here. Is this a condemnation of Red Eye, the Colonel, or both?
Operation Cauterize has the Enclave descend upon the wasteland and obliterate everything for funsies.
*vomits because I said funsies*
LP is mad at the Enclave guy she killed for not turning "Operation kill absolutely fucking everyone in the wasteland and destroy everything like cartoon supervillains for no real reason" into "Operation quarantine the Bad Areas arbitrarily deemed to be Bad by LP's moral code like Raider Dens and Slaver Towns and locations full of mindless Hostile NPCs like Feral Ghouls and Radscorpions and then slaughter them with overwhelming violence while leaving designated non-hostile "good" NPCs and Nice(tm) settlements with Innocents(tm) and Civilians(tm) alone".
The irony that General Cuntornado arbitrarily deems the entire Wasteland to be bad and in need of slaughter by his arbitrary moral standards which are shared by much of the Enclave is lost upon her.

also my wifi is FUCKED by setting up my own wifi hotspot machine I accidentally stole the house's wifi and disabled their phone line by enabling my own wifi. Not that my wifi works anyway. Those bitches on the phone lied to me. "It'll be done by midnight" ny fucking arse I've practically waited a whole month for this and the situation's only gotten worse. The bitches on the phone said this wouldn't happen. Renting a house sucks. All this waiting for nothing. Now we both have to start over and I have to get a guy over to give my room a separate line if I want wifi in my room. Until then I must ration my mobile data carefully.
Anonymous
d4f83eb
?
No.320859
>>320829
>The regrettably-named Ensign Fancy Lad
This reference to Fallout's "Fancy Lad Snack Cakes" is really out of place
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
1cdabcd
?
No.320903
320913 320923
download (31).jpeg
>>320829

Page break, "Today."

Stern, the late Red Eye's military commander or slave overseer or something, has for some reason just killed her former boss' cyberdragon, which for some reason her side was fighting. Then, suddenly, a wild zebra appears.

The zebra, of course, turns out to be Xenith. Stern immediately recognizes her:

>Stern stepped back, considering the zebra. “Wait. I know you,” she said after just a moment, her eyes lighting with recognition. “You’re that fighter from The Pitt. The one Red Eye let go.”
Thanks to the helpful comments provided by my readers, I know that "The Pitt" is the name of the Fallout DLC that kkat ripped off in order to wedge his silly Thunderdome arc into the story. If I didn't know that, I would be wondering why the fuck he is spelling the word "pit" with two 't's, and why, if he wanted it styled this way, he didn't start using this spelling until a couple of chapters ago.

Anyway, it's not really clear why Xenith is here or where she came from, but I assume we are not supposed to have the full picture yet. At any rate, Stern tells her that she is too busy to deal with her right now, and flies away. Xenith uses the bloodwing talon necklace she made to magically grow a pair of wings and chase after her. Nothing else happens.

Page break, "Two days ago."

>The day seemed to pass in a montage; I slipped in and out of sleep several times, mostly in transit aboard the Tortoise.
Oh, rad; looks like they did manage to retrieve that thing. Nice of kkat to keep us filled in on the important details.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFrMLRQIT_k

Also, we learn that one of the potions that Xenith whipped up at the end of the last "two days ago" segment was to heal Calamity's wing, so it looks like he can fly again now. Another debilitating injury sustained by a character has been magically cured with potions the moment it became inconvenient for the author. Fancy that.

Anyway, in the interim space between scenes, they traveled to Tenpony Tower for some reason or other, and from there to Junction R7, to drop off all of the nameless NPCs that the author no longer needs because Mary Sue has already rescued them. Fancy that.

>It could have been worse. I had been concerned about taking a ride with “mouse”. She may no longer be a gigantic, terrible, teeth-gnashing, sharp scaled, horned, pink-cloud-snoring, could-eat-a-pony-in-one-bite dragon, but she was still one of the most dangerous creatures in the Equestrian Wasteland.
I think I may have missed something vital about this "Mouse" character. I checked the wiki, and here is what it has to say:

>Mouse was formerly a Dragon that lived beneath Canterlot. (hinted to be the mother of the dragons born in Canterlot prior to the Last Day: including Spike) Prior to her transformation, she had been fused with her hoard by Pink Cloud, and infused with enough of it that she began breathing it instead of fire or smoke.
>As a curative measure, a crazed Alicorn devised a spell to turn the dragon into something that would pose less of a threat. This spell was tied to a fireworks display in Princess Luna's chambers, and triggered by Littlepip.
>It is unknown how Mouse and Lionheart first encountered each other and became partners.
I remember something about a dragon in the Canterlot arc, and I remember being rather confused by the whole thing.

So it looks like there was a dragon living under Canterlot, and then something-something-pink-cloud happened, and it somehow fused with its treasure pile and became even more of a monster. If my memory serves, that dragon was responsible for exhaling most of the pink cloud that was floating around Canterlot, and LP decided that they should kill it because it was an environmental hazard or something.

Anyway, Calamity or SteelHooves or someone went off at one point to go kill it; I remember commenting how passing strange I found it that kkat would put an event like killing a dragon into his story, yet make it into something minor that happens off-camera. It looks like the dragon-killing spell that was used was somehow connected to some fireworks that were set off from Luna's bedroom. I don't remember all the details and I really don't want to go back and re-read that section of the book; the main thing I remember is that I found it really bizarre and confusing.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, this mouse character is supposed to actually be the dragon that was under Canterlot, so presumably that fireworks spell they set off transformed it somehow. Since the whole "dragon under Canterlot" business always felt a little tacked on, I suspect it was written in solely because kkat wanted to introduce this character later. Why on earth he, or any writer, would have ever thought that a mouse that fires poison gas out of its nose would make a good addition to this, or any other, story is a very good question; however, it's also the kind of question that I really need to learn to stop asking, if I want to make it out of this novel with my sanity intact.

The autism is pretty thick in the next few paragraphs, so I'm going to try to blow through these quickly. LP babbles incoherently to herself about how the dragon was transformed into the mouse, and then Lionheart, for some reason, shows her a small glass marble that I guess the mouse...lives in? I think? I honestly can't make heads or tails of this autism. Moving on.

They land at Fetlock, which I think is in Manehattan somewhere. The place is completely deserted; no friendlies, no hostiles. Velvet opens the manhole cover that (I think) leads to Stable 29, and then LP suddenly notices that the place is not as empty as she thought. She overhears what sounds like a drug deal taking place. Someone calling himself "the Doctor" is selling Dash to what appears to be a hellhound.

Anyway, it turns out that this hellhound is an old, senile, partially deaf one named Barkin' Saw. I think we met him somewhere earlier.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
1cdabcd
?
No.320913
320924 321287
images (4).jpeg
>>320903

Anyway, it sounds like we've met this Doctor character before, but I can't place where or when. Probably, it would have been whatever chapter their last trip to Fetlock took place in. We are told that Velvet Remedy "invested" in his business, whatever is meant by that, and now he has a bunch of medical supplies to sell them. Also, I can't tell if this is going to matter or not, but the old hellhound has a griffon and a brahmin traveling along with him. I had to look it up, but a "brahmin" appears to be a two-headed cow; there was one mentioned earlier in the story somewhere.

Page break, "Today."

We rejoin Gawd at the last place we saw her, in the cloud cover above Manehattan. She is presently grieving for her daughter Reggie, who was shot down by the Enclave and is presumed dead. Some Enclave soldiers have Gawd and her friend Blackwing (one of the other griffons; I don't remember which one exactly) cornered, and they are about to execute them. Oh no, the situation certainly looks dire.

Then...wait for it...it suddenly turns out that Reggie is not dead. Hooray. She bursts up through the clouds, guns a'blazin', and takes out some of the Enclave faggots. Pow pow pow. Gawd and Blackwing start shooting. Bang bang bang. All the Enclave soldiers are dead now. The day is saved. Hooray.

Nothing else happens, beyond that Blackwing gets half of her goddamn wing blown off during the fight. But it's okay; Reggie brought healing potions.

Page break, "Two days ago."

Now they're down in Stable 29, talking to Elder Crossroads (one of the Steel Rangers; I don't remember which one exactly). At first it isn't clear what they are talking about, but eventually we learn that Velvet is trying to enlist their help on behalf of the alicorns we met earlier. It was never quite clear just what the alicorns wanted Velvet to do for them in the first place, and it's even less clear why Velvet thinks the Steel Rangers can do anything for them, but for now we're just going to roll with this and see where it goes.

>“We need to do better,” I commented as I stepped fully into the room, my words echoing those of Life Bloom.
What is this, her catch phrase or something now?

>My heart shared his sentiments. He saw how much the efforts of the Twilight Society had fallen short, how paltry they seemed. I was seeing my own in a similar light, particularly where the hellhounds were involved. Seeing Velvet and Crossroads, I sensed we weren’t the only two due for this awakening.
I don't have any notes here, I just wanted to highlight yet another example of how kkat's prose is practically a war crime.

Anyway, it sounds like what Velvet is after here is access to some research notes that one of the Rangers' scientists was working on. It's not clear how she would know anything about the Rangers' research projects, but at this point I've learned not to even inquire about things like that. At any rate, it seems the scientist they are looking for is back at Tenpony Tower, where they just were. Oh, drat. The Grand Wizard of the Rangers (or whatever her title is) tells her that they would be happy to turn over his research notes, but she will need to get the passwords from him.

With that business out of the way for now, Elder Hot Crossed Buns asks Littlepoop if there is anything she needs as long as she's here. LP replies that she needs all available Rangers to be placed under her command immediately. The Elder says okay, and that's the end of the scene.

Page break, "Today."

Xenith and Stern are fighting for some reason. Stern appears to be winning, on account of how it's an airborne battle and she is the superior flyer. Suddenly Xenith's daughter, whose name escapes me for the moment, appears out of nowhere and turns the tide. The day is saved. Hooray.

Page break, "Two days ago."

>Sunset spread out across the Equestrian Wasteland like a heavy blanket, the ruddy colors making the cloud curtain glow like a warning light. It looked like the clouds were bleeding.
Apart from being just a smad too heavy on the similes, this actually isn't a bad visual. Half a point here.

>Elder Cross had given us a full dozen Applejack’s Rangers and offered us access to their armory. I personally declined the latter; this wasn’t a battle that we could win with bullets.
If I'm understanding it correctly, your plan is to attack a heavily-armed military fortress head on. If you're going to win a battle like that, odds are there are going to be some bullets involved. My advice would be to not look a gift horse in the mouth, so to speak.

Anyway that Paladin we met before, Strawberry Lemonade, is among the hapless bunch of retards that the good Elder turned over to LP for use as cannon fodder. She fills them in on some of what has been going on in Ranger-land since they last saw her. Apparently, the Steel Rangers and the Applejack Rangers are still fighting over whatever the fuck they were fighting about. When the Enclave arrived, the Rangers went and hid because they're a bunch of fags I guess, so now the Applejack Rangers are helping everyone else fight off the Enclave, because that's still a thing that people are doing I guess.

Nothing else happens, really.

Page break, "Today."

There is a big rainbow explosion, and the cloud cover above Fillydelphia breaks open. Conveniently, this also takes out most of the Enclave's remaining air fleet. This business is implied to have been the work of Lionheart. Nothing else happens.

Page break, "Two days ago."

Looks like they are back at Spike's cave now. Spike is pissed off that LP brought a bunch of Steel Rangers with her, because I guess he hates Rangers for some reason or other. I think I vaguely remember that being a thing earlier. LP explains that these are Applejack Rangers, and that they're different from Steel Rangers somehow. Spike grudgingly agrees to let them inside, on the condition that they not touch anything.
Anonymous
6183881
?
No.320923
>>320903
Huh. That's kind of odd. The reason it was called The Pitt in Fallout 3 was because it was the ruins of Pittsburgh, and in a kind of joking post-apocalyptic fashion, the city name was based off the faded and damaged sign. The arena itself didn't really have a name, and was literally just a cage in the floor of a steel mill. Is Kkat calling Fillydelphia the Pitt for some reason? Why? How? How would the readers make this connection if they hadn't played the game? Was the arena itself ever referred to as The Pitt in the story? I forget.
Anonymous
6183881
?
No.320924
320990
>>320913
Jesus christ. What do you think of all these scene breaks and swapping back and forth between timeframes? I get this is after a few paragraphs each, but isn't this confusing and grating as fuck?
Anonymous
5bcd1e4
?
No.320990
321097
sddefault (3).jpg
>>320924
It's stupid. Surely a good author would only alternate between two timelines like this when there's some artistic reason to do so.
Like if we switched between watching a perfect heist executed by master thieves, and watching the planning stages where the mastermind talks about the challenges each member of the heist crew will face and how to overcome them the easy way.
Then some challenges could make the easy way impossible and force characters to improvise and do things the hard way.

Or we could bounce between watching the present day and memories in the past relevant to it. LP could break her leg and have a flashback to when she rode her trike for the first time as a foal, and broke it and broke her leg and was all alone, and had to pick herself up and limp her way to the hospital floor for a health potion. Ponies called her very brave and tough for her age and wondered why her alcoholic bitch mom wasn't around to help. Then in the present she wins the fight by being very brave and tough despite being outgunned and outmatched.

We could watch Calamity struggle in a firefight and get a flashback to when his old boot camp trainer said "You're shit and you should give up because you're physically inferior to the others, underdog" then Calamity proves him wrong by winning the firefight. Then again Calamity isn't an underdog, he's related to enclave higher-ups and won shooting/flying contests because Kkat didn't want any of these overpowered characters to be underdogs.

Flashbacks enhanced the Rock Lee VS Gaara fight in Naruto so much, people still call it one of the greatest anime fights ever.

But this bullshit... it seems Kkat is only using these flash-forwards because he's impatient, he's afraid his readers are getting impatient, or he didn't trust in his ability to coherently write a string of scenes without frequent timeskips and memory orbs and other forms of bullshit giving the author a chance to leap from one scene he's already written out of order to another and sum up what happened in the meantime if he didn't feel like writing about it. He couldn't write coherently about what LP does on the Day Of Maximum Bullshit so he bounced all over the place between different timelines and characters hoping to imply more action than he was willing or able to write.

pic related because I feel like I'm not going to blue burst or gold burst but instead red burst a fucking blood vessel.
Anonymous
6183881
?
No.321001
321097
So Glim, after reading the story thus far, do you think the intro rambling about PipBucks was a necessary inclusion for the story?
Anonymous
9a8507c
?
No.321097
321102
>>320990
Utilizing flashbacks for a heist movie would also be a great way to keep exposition in the flashback scenes and action in the present day. My ID keeps changing, should I start using a name in this thread?
>>321001
I know I'm not Glim but I don't think it was necessary.
LP usually wins fights by shooting her enemies or using telekinesis on something sufficiently dangerous, but she didn't need her PipBuck's AutoAim SATS to justify her instant mastery of aiming when she's already an instant master of aiming and telekinesis without any justifications for those.
The Pipbuck's inventory and stats, I don't think they've ever come up.
She never needs the PipBuck's map because exploration is usually as simple as "A NPC told her to head straight in that direction until she sees a massive settlement she couldn't possibly miss". Not like she's ever using pre-war maps of mountain ranges or modern sonar-generated maps of labyrinthine cave networks/destroyed city streets to figure out which routes lead to dead end and which lead to her desired destination.
She lockpicks using lockpicking tools but she can telekinetically open safes from the inside anyway making lockpicks and the lockpicking skill irrelevant. She usually does her hacking using her PipBuck wirelessly or by plugging her pipbuck into whatever she's hacking but she could easily carry a designated Hacking Tool instead of the pipbuck.
The Pipbuck can glow like a torch, but she could just use ordinary torches or her horn's light whenever she needs a lamp.
I guess there's the enemy-radar feature that marks the direction of enemies as red marks and neutral NPCs/Creatures as yellow ones, but when's the last time that was useful or even mentioned? Wasn't there a scene where a NPC tried to intimidate LP by spinning up his miniguns, but LP could tell she's not in danger because the yellow mark on her enemy radar compass thing hadn't turned red?
Whenever the Pipbuck has a new feature introduced, readers can just remember what it does. Breaking the fourth wall at the story's start to tell the audience what the Pipbuck can and cannot do just seems pointless. Especially since the story could have contained an early scene where somepony enters LP's PipBuck Repair Room and says "I want to replace my old PipBuck 2000 with something new. Is the PipBuck 3000 worth the price?" and then LP could say "Yeah, that's what I wear and I love it. It keeps track of your health and vital signs and limb status and inventory and it can help you aim guns and swing melee weapons and cast spells better. It can hack terminals and robots and read holotapes and play games. It can even glow like a flashlight! It's three hundred ponydollars. But for you, my best friend, three hundred ponydollars."
Anonymous
4edcc26
?
No.321102
321116 321142
1909343.gif
>>321097
> My ID keeps changing, should I start using a name in this thread?
Yes, I can't tell it's you otherwise and identification of the poster is what makes up a good post.
Anonymous
47e689f
?
No.321116
321120
>>321102
>identification of the poster is what makes up a good post
>On a board that's supposed to be Anonymous (sorry non-Americans)
I disagree, but I still get your point.
Anonymous
4edcc26
?
No.321120
>>321116
No, you didn't. I was being sarcastic for exactly that reason. Also, Nigel could probably use a vpn for his posts and I still would catch who it is that's posting.
Anonymous
9a8507c
?
No.321142
321147 321168 321178 321339
g9i6s9lg3oq71.jpg
>>321102
>identification of the poster is what makes up a good post.
My favourite posts are the ones where that one guy screams my name like it's "Dinkleberg!" or "Khan!" in lieu of any argument. I wonder what colour my ID will be this time.
Btw can I get feedback on my FE rewrite?

be littlepip, bored pipbuck repair pony
listening to DJ Pon3 on the Wasteland Radio introducing the basics of the world outside the vault at the start of the story, exposits about how Red Eye's Legion are evil
one colleague is such a faggot LP monologues to herself about everything that makes her a typical Stable-Dweller consoomertard and everything LP doesn't want to be
LP is based, she eats healthily and exercises and shoots guns at the gun range and has a crush on a sexy dreamboat there named Sunny whose handgun takes over 5k words to visually describe
the other two are arguing politics and who should be elected as Overmare of the stable, this seamlessly and naturally exposits everything there is to know about vault life and the past
The two Overmare candidates have wildly different views on whether the Great War was the fault of ponies or zebras, libtard brings up how ponies stole land from Diamond Dogs and Buffalos
while cuckservative neocon brings up how all ziggers were drug-using dipshits that did all the war crimes including how the rapefugees Sandy Hooked Littlehorn and reacted to an act of Fluttershy's mercy (firing the first megaspell, a healing blast, at a battlefield ponies just won and sent the wounded ziggers fleeing from) by turning around and fighting some more
Neocon wishes Equestria nuked Zebrica first and libtard wishes they could all just get along
by getting all this exposition out in chapter 1 there is no need for any memory orbs or terminals about the past EVER
LP thinks they're both faggots because they love outdated status-quo solutions and the only sustainable future is what her crush wants: a decentralized system of based communities and privately-owned nukes and voluntary interactions without government force or Alicorns or all-controlling ministries
faggot karen enters room, demands you fix her pipbuck but has no idea what's broken
LP tests every useful pipbuck function, demonstrating it all for the audience, then deletes 500TB of gay porn from the hard drive for slowing its processor down, LP returns the pipbuck and says "you had a virus, a virus deleted your files"
LP paints a mural on her wall of something based
LP's cunty boss enters the room and calls LP a faggot and makes her stay behind to clean the mural off the wall
LP is the only pony around when Velvet comes in
Velvet is a popstar famous for also being a telekinesis master, she tricks LP into removing her PipBuck then leaves the Stable
fuck.jpg
everyone blames LP because Velvet can't be tracked via PipBuck
except
LP gave Velvet a homemade knitted doll with a GPS tracker because she's a creepy little shit who doesn't respect boundaries and regularly hacks into everyone's emails and lockpicks their lockers to rifle through their belongings and even spies on Sunny in the shower to admire him
Velvet's big brother Sunny, that hunk LP met at the gun range, also wants to help because he wants his sister back
LP leaves the vault with Sunny plus the neocon cuckservative and libtard who are blamed for being her colleagues, and an overly aggressive StableSecurity thug also joins her party but they all die horribly and are killed by raiders
But LP and Sunny are saved by a wandering cynical old badass who teaches LP how to shoot right
the three bond like a family, it's heartwarming
the heroes go on a murder spree fighting countless enemies on the way to Tenpony, doing good along the way
Sunny helps struggling settlements get based, making him a world-renowned hero
they meet a cynical medic woman who tags along
in one place they watch The Calamity slaughter raiders like they'd done him wrong
The Calamity is a deadly Pegasus in Enclave Power Armour, not that anyone on the ground knows what that is. they think he's a mutant
many more fights later...
old man badass dies like a hero facing impossible odds and sacrificing himself so he can get his newfound kids to Tenpony Tower, which is where Velvet went
LP meets Velvet and demands answers
Velvet was contacted by "Twilight Sparkle" in her dreams telling her to visit Tenpony Tower and help the Twilight Society.
The tower's president DJ Pon3 (who isn't named homage, and is instead the daughter of a family that's ran this radio station since before the bombs fell. This tower originally had a secret govt shelter made here by the private military contractor Allbright Intelligent Defense Systems but when Twilight found out about this shelter built for her she had it converted into a survivalist shelter and college for the best and brightest around the world) has no fucking clue what's going on
There is no Twilight Society
Tenpony Tower is overrun by Red Eye, whose wife The Goddess has her alicorns help his slaver army which is called the Red Legion.
The Goddess explains everything
those dreams of Twilight?
it was actually The Goddess baiting her into being capturable
she wants to absorbtion vore Velvet for being really fucking strong and the next Element Of Magic
over the years she's absorbed many poners including reincarnated Elements Of Harmony and Magic is all that's left
Red Eye tricks her and absorbs his wife and 108 of his strongest male unicorns instead, becoming a male alicorn who calls himself Red Overlord
Red Overlord VS LP and Velvet and Sunny, fucking epic fight
jk it's a one-sided slaughter, the situation seems hopeless but the heroes never give up
The Enclave arrive with giant mechs made of storm clouds and flying powersuits faster than jets
epic pony war
The Calamity saves LP, says "Your goodness inspired me to be a hero, we Enclavers were waiting for the perfect time to save everyone but NOW'S THE TIME!!!"
also old man badass survived
With 6 heroes united, they EOH blast Red Eye+the world, un-nuking the world
the end

I cut shite
Anonymous
9a8507c
?
No.321147
>>321142
Idea

what if nukes were never developed and instead meteors fell to devastate the planet? Dust fills the skies and blots out the sun. Grass doesn't grow. Poison Joke doesn't become "the Killing Joke", instead it just stops joking around and starts fatally growing inside poners and ziggers parasitically to kill them. Some poners/ziggers want to keep the war going and some want it to end, and The Enclave is the remnants of the Equestrian Military which banded together under one heroic sexy badass genius general named Wolf Tornado who said "no more foreign wars for the Griffons, we fight for our homeland to protect Equestrians from raiders now".

Or all this Alicorn shit and red eye/enclave stuff could go out the window.

LP could get involved in an awesome conflict where she is saved by a military batallion and joins it, it is led by the sexy badass genius guy Wolf Tornado but life is hard and killing Raiders is hard even with an army. Then the batallion gets dragged into a war with ziggers by a mad general of evil who's pinned over nine medals to his flesh while earning none of them. The heroes should fight a batallion of insane ziggers who loathe and envy ponies but get slaughtered by ponies for being evil. And find a good batallion of zebras who dont want to be evil and want to join the heroes. But they turn out to be evil and betray the heroes because you can't trust an inferior creature as it will always be envious of you unless it's smart enough to recognize why working for you for real as a truly good guy is better for its health and better for everyone. The mad general is half-griffon and has STDs and is serving a secret cabal of jewish griffons and he represents the faulty idea that one should blindly serve their nation no matter how shit it gets or treats innocents, and he wants to force everyone else to serve him because he's a fat faggot with a cuck fetish who loves forcing others to do as he says. Then the general of evil does something so evil the heroes and ziggers team up to take him down. Maybe he tries to rape littlepip. Better yet maybe he takes Littlepip to his rape camp which is like a concentration camp but it's all hot babes and soldiers guarding and sometimes raping them and he imprisons LP there and rapes different mares each day alphabetically until he gets to LP so she can get more afraid as he goes through more mares. Eventually she is freed but for at least five chapters it should really seem like the author's really going to do it. Anyway Wolf Tornado kills the mad general of evil. He needs a name so uh... Darkness Fall is his name. Then with no baddies left they all end up fighting Allstar Allbright the leader of the PMC Allbright Intelligent Defense Systems, he's a mad scientist who's trying to stop society from rebuilding so he can do all the mad experiments of evil he wants. He also has a family including a hot psycho tsundere daughter Sunny's age voiced by Azula, they bang and he purifies the evil from her and that pisses Allbright off. Allbright is also not based and thinks all society is for faggots because he refuses to consider the possibility of a based society AND he's a smug intellectual CUNT who thinks his 240IQ gives him the right to dictate life for millions of others and sacrifice whoever he pleases for pleasure or scientific bullshit even though Sunny has an IQ of 300. Allbright did EVERYTHING wrong and he is to blame for literally everything bad ever. He altered the Poison Joke into becoming what it is, he infected Darkness Fall with a STD that damaged his genes and made him more Griffony over time, the jewish cabal are his shareholders and the bankers, maybe he is even to blame for the meteors too by summoning them via a magic satellite? Anyway there is a massive war and eventually he loses after using a ton of awesome military superweapons including gigantic tanks with over seven main guns and stealth bombers bigger than cities also capable of manufacturing new AI controlled military units to protect itself and adapt to the war as it unfolds around itself. He says the real villain was society all along because it let retards vote retards into power instead of making him king and Sunny says the real villain all along was actually stupidity because stupidity makes people too stupid to tell what is moral and what is evil. The villain, he's shot in the head and LP expects this to magically unfuck everything. But Wolf Tornado says "no, the world doesn't work like that. We have to clean this world up and rebuild" and they do. Giant air filters are built to suck up atmospheric dust and Pegasi help using tornadoes. Timeskip 30 years, a better world has been built but the scars of damage inflicted by villains still linger in some places. The world wasn't just magicked better by a spell so big it's as if nothing bad ever happened. The world is getting back on its feet (hooves, whatever) and a better society that's truly learned lessons from the past remains. Some say war never changes. Some say war changes every time a new dominant weapon or tactic is invented. Some say war changes people, makes them into beasts obsessed with plundering treasure. But the truth is, the real war was inside us all along, between our base desires and our based thoughts, and the real treasure was the friends we made along the way and the better world we can make without bad ideas.
Anonymous
c641037
?
No.321168
321227 321339
>>321142
>my favorite posts are the ones
Is that why you cry like a girl when they happen?
Anonymous
193fb8f
?
No.321178
321227
>>321142
>My favourite posts are the ones where that one guy screams my name like it's "Dinkleberg!" or "Khan!" in lieu of any argument.
It kinda seems like a non-sequiter response to what I said. I guess it could follow but you response to me saying, "You don't need to identify yourself more cause you can already be easily identified," with, "This guy haresses me due to my identity. His posts are my favourites," doesn't seem to flow.
I suppose you concur that you don't need a name for identification then? Or are you saying you want a name as to farm more of your favourite posts?
Anonymous
9a8507c
?
No.321227
321273 321299 321339
based god hitler.jpg
>>321168
You have such a bizarre ability to redefine words and your own memories at will.
Why do you talk to others, if you have no interest in reality?
Why do you seek my approval and validation by trying to drag me into tiresome and pointless shouting matches with a histrionic jew like you?
I'm the most important person in your life, and that's pretty sad.
I can always tell when it's you with a new ID, coming in out of nowhere to make the exact same baseless personal attacks against me with the exact same redditor tone and the exact same lack of any mature argumentation one could engage in proper debate. Nobody coming into this particular thread for the first time would prioritize talking exactly like you and reminding everyone what you baselessly believe over talking about Fallout Equestria or the image at the top of this thread. Nobody else would carry your childish grudge against me for this long. Nobody cares about your feelings except you, so if someone bursts in with (1) post by this ID bellyaching about your feelings, I know it's you or someone as immature and fundamentally worthless as you.
You are a jewish NPC obsessed with your escapism and your reputation, and the fact that I see right through you eats you alive. You've never had anything intelligent to say about politics or ponies, and while you might insist Christianity is jewish and everything else you hate is jewish now and then, you'll resort to your old jewish redditor tricks whenever you want something or feel threatened.
Does it bother you when I post signs of progress upon myself or my personal projects? Is that why you keep telling yourself I cannot change, when you're the one who can't change anything about yourself?
Why not sit in a dark corner of an empty room and redefine your memories alone, until you feel like an important and successful person whose opinion matters?
>>321178
It was sarcasm, I find those "Hey, you, you're Nigel! Fuck you!" posts tiresome.
They are always irrelevant to the topic at hand, always bad-faith attempts to waste my time with antifa-inspired slander and turn productive entertaining interesting threads into a shouting match the jew will blame on me if enough people complain about the shouting while forgetting who started it.
If the blatant and obvious lies like "Last thread you were in, you cried and embarassed yourself and I won the argument!" go unchallenged, newfags with no idea who to believe might assume the bold overconfidence and "Chutzpah" of this lying jew must mean that his unchallenged claims must be right. In truth, if these claims go unchallenged by me, it means I didn't feel like dignifying them with a response, which means he'll keep on being a source of noise until he gets his precious dose of attention from someone.
The jew will fuck off only if someone other than me catches on and tells him to fuck off. They have to make it clear that they won't be a part of the jew's games, and make it clear the jew will have no luck trying to fool anyone. People too smart for jewish tricks are great at catching on when the jew starts his usual routine.
When he feels like someone else is taking his side, even if it's only a compromise between the truth and his lies that has someone blame us both for antics the jew targeting and harassing me started, he practically orgasms. It's like sex for him. It feels like a victory for him and his lies, and he relies on his lies to keep his self-esteem up. But when others catch on, he recoils back as if struck. That spiteful coward with patently jewish tactics feels like his reputation is in danger, and he feels like his attempt to start a dogpile on me to derail the thread has failed, so he fucks off. Sometimes I wonder if he should have some cutesy name assigned to him, but it doesn't seem worth it. I don't need to shout any names whenever his crappy legendary bullshit begins once again, everyone knows exactly who's trying to start the same petty years-old beef yet again. He's got a chip on his shoulder and he can never get over it. But when he feels like he's lost, he fucks off, and that's a good thing.
He might return in a few days or a few weeks to start his jewish noise tactics again once he thinks everyone's forgotten about his embarassing failures and disgraceful behaviour in the past, because he never learns, never grows, and has never made a single argument in good faith in his life. He will tell any lie, even if it's blatantly false, even if it hypocritically contradicts what he's already said. Everything's just another step in his endless struggle against the demonic "Nigel" living rent-free inside his head. Whenever he feels like he has to engage in criticizing the story in this thread, so he can keep up appearances and not make it too obvious that I'm the only reason he's here, all he can do is describe it negatively or repeat what smarter people have said.
If you'd like, you could scroll up and compare how many on-topic posts I've made in this thread to the only posts that guy feels like making, off-topic personal attacks as me. The number might be funny.
I do hope this isn't the part where someone makes the "You are imperfect and therefore you are not qualified to judge the merit of anyone else ever" personal attack. Everyone's flawed, no human is without sin, that faggot is without merit.

What if, in the Fallout Equestria rewrite, there were no ziggers and instead Civil War overtook Equestria somehow? The story would need the Alicorns and Mane Six out of the way so they don't fix everything in under thirty minutes
From there, assorted factions could war over the future of Equestria with or without Fallout iconography filling the story
There could be a Nature faction that wants everypony to live in cottages
an Industrialist faction that wants more factories
a magic faction
an anti-magic faction
and a fifth and sixth diametrically opposed faction
Then a heroic poner could leave her Stable and join one faction and beat the others. Or make lasting peace.
Anonymous
dd6de26
?
No.321273
321325
Starlight Glimmer Cutie Mark Vault .jpg
>>321227
>It was sarcasm, I find those "Hey, you, you're Nigel! Fuck you!" posts tiresome.
So I assume you concur with the idea that you don't need a name then?
Anyway, the rest of your post has nothing to do with what I asked about but I guess, the more you know.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
1cdabcd
?
No.321287
321297 321325
images.png
>>320913

The gathering at Spike's cave is basically a who's-who of all the literally-who's that have appeared in the story up to this point. Pretty much every minor character that we've long since forgotten about is here for some reason: Silver Bell, Gawdyna, Blackwing, Morning Frost, Sunglint, Xephyr, some anonymous unnamed character referred to as the "amber-maned Wasteland Crusader;" the list goes on and on. Apart from the first three, who have made regular cameos at various points throughout the story, I honestly have no memory of who most of these ponies even are.

Anyway, the main focus of this scene is a conversation that takes place between Gawd and Littlepoop. Since (I think) this is the first time the two of them have been in the same scene together since Gawd's son Kage died, the author apparently feels that now is the time to get that particular elephant out of the room. We can dispense with it quickly and move on.

Gawd's attitude is about what you would expect: she is torn between feelings of regret and sadness over the loss of her child, anger at the parties responsible for his death, and an understanding that he was a mercenary and that this was the life he chose. Reggie tries to convince her to cheer up and be proud of Kage, which is apparently the way she herself has chosen to handle it, because the cause he died for was a good one and blah blah blah. Littlepoop, for her part, has nothing but half-assed platitudes to offer:

>“He died like a Talon,” I offered, my words feeling lame as they slipped off my tongue. “Brave and steadfast to the very end.”
He died like a bitch, as I recall. He was basically a faceless red-shirt who was dragged along by Littlepoop on one of her minor side errands, and died a predictably incidental death, killed by some crossfire during one of the scuffles. His only role in the story was to get killed, and he didn't do it in a particularly memorable way.

Anyway, the author tries to set this up as a conflict between Gawd and Littlepoop, which is really what it ought to have been. Unfortunately, it fizzles out almost immediately due to the author's outright refusal to allow any character in this story to find serious fault with his Mary Sue protagonist. Gawd makes a show of getting angry, but is quickly talked down by her daughter. Reggie reminds her that they were fighting the Enclave long before LP got involved (something about the Enclave invading the Griffon homeland; I don't remember if this was mentioned anywhere but it sounds familiar). Of course, she immediately moves on to talking up the accomplishments of LP and her friends, and concludes by telling her mother that she should be proud of Kage: he had the high honor of standing in the august presence of the great Mary Sue herself for all of five minutes, and was even allowed to get a couple of shots off before he was sent to join the choir invisible. Truly the highest honor an NPC in Edgequestria could ever hope to achieve.

Naturally, Gawd slurps up every last word of this nonsense as if it were the glistening cum of Jesus Christ almighty, and the room erupts in a thunderous standing ovation. The scene ends on a lame joke about how the old hellhound is hard of hearing.

Page break, "today."

This next "today" scene appears to be narrated by Littlepoop herself. This actually seems like a good time to mention something that's been bothering me: it's unclear whether or not these flash-forward interludes we've been reading are supposed to be taken as part of Littlepoop's actual narration, or if this is some artistic license being taken by kkat to fill us in on essential details that LP herself would not be privy to. In either case, it's very clumsily done, and imo is just further evidence that first-person narration was a bad choice for a story this large and complex.

Anyway, Spike flies up and BTFOs yet another of the Enclave's airships; that's about all that happens in this scene.

Page break, "yesterday."

The next morning, everyone is sitting around Spike's cave eating breakfast and bullshitting with each other. Nothing of any serious importance is discussed; basically, the Talons found some kind of secret stash of old zebra weapons, and they're bragging about it. However, there is also this:

>Xenith identified the strange weapon immediately. “A crossbow,” she intoned. “An assassin’s weapon. Silent and deadly.”
>“Like a fart?” Reggie snarked. Then suddenly her eyes lit up. She turned towards her mother.
>Gawdyna pinched the bridge of her beak with her talons, her eye scrounged shut. “No.”
>“No what?” Reggie protested. “I haven’t…”
>“No,” Gawd re-iterated. “I ain’t lettin’ you have a crossbow so you can name it The Fart.”
>Reggie whined, “But mom!”
>I felt myself blush as I was suddenly reminded that the gun slinging griffin hero was indeed just an adolescent. I refocused on eating my flowers. Good flowers. Yes. Pretty and tasty.
This happened, and we all let it happen.

Anyway, it just goes on like this for awhile. Eventually it descends from fart humor into cringey jokes about LP's sexual orientation, in this case dealing with the rather obvious euphemism of "eating flowers." Like most of kkat's jokes, it goes on for several paragraphs longer than it needs to, and isn't particularly funny.

The rest of this scene is just irrelevant side-babble from various characters that could easily have been deleted from the text at no cost; I won't bother detailing any of it. About the only important takeaway is that Gawd plans on taking over Fillydelphia once the Enclave is dealt with and the remainder of Red Eye's operation is broken up. Apparently this is her "asking price" for assisting in whatever LP's latest stunt is.

It looks like her overall goal is to rebuild some semblance of civilization, which apparently no one in Edgequestria ever thought of doing before LP came along. I guess they were too busy decorating their houses with entrails and making foals fight to the death.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
036fead
?
No.321297
321301 321326
images (6).jpeg
>>321287

Anyway, Jesus H. Christ; this scene is still going, and these characters are still talking, and the conversation still isn't going anywhere. This entire scene is autistic and random even by kkat's standards; all sorts of disconnected factoids about the world are introduced and then abandoned. We learn that apparently the buffalo from S2-episode-whatever (which have not been mentioned in the story at all up to this point) still exist somewhere, and that Xephyr's zebra tribe has rebranded itself as "The Angels" due to their town's connection to "Doombunny." You may or may not recall that the town the zebras lived in was once the home of Angel Bunny's meth lab. Also, Velvet Remedy wants to help with Gawd's rebuilding of Equestria, and help build hospitals and schools and shit; I guess she plans on using the alicorns somehow. Still not clear on what the fuck is going on with all that exactly.

After pages upon pages of random schizophrenic babbling, this scene finally ends on a random and schizophrenic note. Velvet agrees, for some reason, to name the school she plans to found in Fillydelphia "The Followers of the Apocalypse." I have literally no fucking idea what this means or what the name is meant to signify, but apparently it has something to do with Kage.

Page break, "today."

This one also appears to be narrated by Littlepoop. They have arrived at what I can only assume is the cloud fortress they were planning to attack. If this is where these "today/tomorrow" segments were supposed to ultimately end up, I don't know why the fuck kkat chose to use this gimmicky and overly complicated time-skipping structure; events would have been far easier to follow if he had just kept the scenes in their normal chronology.

Anyway, LP and the gang have apparently busted into the fortress using Spike to fly them there. I think I'm gradually beginning to figure out what LP's plan was supposed to be: she basically summoned all of the various NPCs she's befriended throughout the story and had them all attack various parts of the Enclave at once, so that they would be dealing with multiple simultaneous threats and couldn't direct their firepower at the small group trying to infiltrate the cloud fortress. Not a bad idea in and of itself, but I still don't see why kkat had to break the story into these obnoxious alternating today/yesterday/tomorrow/a week from next Tuesday segments. Protip: unless there is some specific reason why you need readers to witness asynchronous events concurrently, save them a headache and just put your goddamn scenes in the proper chronological order.

Anyway, there's nothing of note here other than what I can only assume is meant to be a romantic, heart-rending parting moment between Velvet and Calamity. Like most of kkat's attempts at this sort of thing, it comes flying from completely out of left field, collides head-first with the wall, and lands flat on its ass.

A big part of the problem is that we only have the vaguest idea what's going on in this scene, so we're not quite sure how to react to this. Is this Velvet and Calamity just saying "goodbye until I see you again?" Or is a final goodbye; a "one or both of us probably won't survive this ridiculous mission we're on, so farewell my love" kind of moment? Since this is just a glimpse of some disconnected scene from the future, we can't really be certain what's going on. Again, the particular way kkat chose to structure this chapter does far more harm than good.

Page break, "yesterday."

We rejoin LP at some undefined point in the future which is also the past, relative to the present, which is also the future. They appear to still be in Spike's cave, holding some sort of pre-mission briefing. Homage is participating remotely via sprite-bot. Naturally, hearing the tinny voice of her dykefriend sets LP's nether regions a'quivering, and we are subjected to yet another of kkat's clumsy, cringey attempts at expressing intimacy between his characters. LP flings herself around Spike's ankles and thanks him in an exaggerated gesture of gratitude, which is of course witnessed by everyone present, and of course this causes her great embarrassment when she realizes it. Cue the laugh track.

Anyway, it sounds like we're finally going to get the full rundown on whatever insane thing LP intends to do, as well as the insane convoluted logic that allows her to justify it to herself. So, let's have a look-see:

>“The Enclave will annihilate every living soul in Fillydelphia and bury the industrial progress made there under melted rubble if they aren’t stopped,” I reminded them. “If Red Eye’s forces win, the surviving pegasi will end up enslaved or with their heads on pikes.”
This is probably more or less true, though there are still quite a few things that aren't clear. I'm not sure why the Enclave is still intent on attacking Red Eye's slave compound, for one thing. My understanding is that the whole beef between Red Eye and the Enclave was that Red Eye was trying to gain control of the SPP, which the Enclave needs for food production. Since Red Eye is dead this shouldn't be an issue anymore, so there's really no reason for the Enclave to continue their invasion.

Really, I never quite understood what the objective of "Operation Cauterize" was supposed to be in the first place. It sounds like it was mostly about Red Eye, so I still don't get why they wanted to bomb the ruins of Canterlot and occupy the wasteland and all the rest of the silly shit they've done. Also, it's unclear why Red Eye's settlement in Fillydelphia would still exist. It makes sense that LP killing General Poopypants McGee wouldn't stop the Enclave any more than assassinating Dick Cheney would have stopped the Iraq war, but Red Eye was just a lone kook leading a cult. Why would his underlings still be fighting for him after his death? There is still so much about this story that doesn't make sense.
Anonymous
369b066
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No.321299
321325 321339
>>321227
>I'm the most important person in your life, and that's pretty sad.
Kittystyles used to sing the same tune. It was a sad and vain attempt to assuage his wounded pride, and it will age just as well from your mouth.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
1cdabcd
?
No.321301
321368 321372
images (5).jpeg
>>321297

>“And Stern’s Talons aren’t likely to stop with just one successful victory,” Gawd added. “With Red Eye gone, she’ll be looking to take over his whole operation. Defeating the Enclave’s biggest force? She’ll take the war back to the clouds once she smells weakness.”
This kind of offers an explanation for why Red Eye's operation is still holding together, but we don't really know enough about Stern as a character to ascertain whether this is true or not. Also, I didn't know that Stern had anything to do with the Talons.

Again, I think one of the biggest cascading problems in this story is its use of first-person narration from a single perspective. With a third-person omniscient narrator we could get a glimpse of this world from many different sides, and have a better understanding of why all of these characters and organizations take the actions that they take. As it stands, we only see the world through LP's eyes, and since she has had very little direct interaction with Stern we don't really know that much about her. Ditto for Gawd; she seems to know a little more about Stern, and her perspective could be useful here, but LP hasn't even had a scene with her since forever ago.

Part of the reason I find the details so hard to keep track of is that there is a lot of information in this story, and literally all of it gets funneled through this single character's viewpoint. The whole story focuses on LP's adventure, and everything else is presented as incidental; however, some of the incidental stuff is also plot critical, but it's impossible to tell when you're reading it which details you should note and which details you can forget. Unless he were invested enough in this world and its characters to remember all of it, no ordinary human could possibly keep track of all the wacky bullshit that's happened in this story and still retain his sanity.

>“Do we have any idea when the Enclave are going to attack?” one of the Applejack’s Rangers asked.
>“Yes,” I told him. “Tomorrow morning.” The news was greeted by several voices of dismay.
How does she know this? Also, where are they going to attack? And why are they going to attack that particular target? From what we've seen in the future so far, it appears the answers to these two questions are "Fillydelphia" and "because reasons," but I don't see how that could be deduced from the information available to LP and the others right now.

Anyway, she spends the next several paragraphs explaining what we already know: she intends to invade the Enclave base at Neighvarro and take control of the Single Pegasus Project. This, of course, is met with regulation gasps of astonishment. How could such a suicidally suicidal undertaking possibly be undertook?

>“Most of the troops won’t be at Neighvarro,” I claimed. “We have two advantages going in. First is the element of surprise. The Enclave isn’t expecting forces from below to actually attack them on their home… turf?” Had to be a pegasi-appropriate word for that. I pushed forward. “This will be an unexpected tactic.”
>“Second is the fact that tomorrow morning Neighvarro will be functioning on a skeleton crew,” I revealed. “Every available pegasi from Neighvarro has been used to bolster the military force poised to hit Fillydelphia. Until that battle is over, there will be almost nopony left at the base.”
HOW DOES SHE KNOW THIS?!?

>I looked to Gawd. “This is the information Kage gave his life for. The one opportunity, the one window of weakness that we can exploit to take the over the S.P.P. and kill the Enclave for good.”
I guess this explains it, kind of. I'm guessing this is one of those kkat moments, where some insignificant detail he slyly dropped into this endless ocean of autism several hundred thousand words ago suddenly becomes plot-critical out of nowhere. Tvtropes generously calls these "Chekhov's guns;" I just call them "infuriating."

I remember that the particular mission they were on when Kage died involved infiltrating some kind of building or fortress or something that the Enclave was occupying for some reason or other, and that it ended with LP retrieving some kind of information from a computer there. Presumably the information included the Enclave's battle plans, or the specs of the Neighvarro fortress, or something that gave her some kind of intelligence she can use here.

Anyway, the rest of this is as hokey as a Michael Bay script, and doesn't really merit going over in detail. Basically, LP confirms what we've already guessed from the glimpses of the future kkat has inexplicably chosen to give us: the plan is for LP and her friends to infiltrate the Neighvarro fortress and take control of the SPP, while everyone else helps Fillydelphia fight off the Enclave. Or, maybe they're helping the Enclave fight Fillydelphia. Or, maybe they're just going to run around blowing shit up for no reason beyond that kkat is mentally disturbed. Yeah, probably the third thing.

There are a few minor details from the briefing that are probably worth noting:
>Ditzy Doo is supposed to do a sonic rad-boom in the middle of the fight to clear the clouds over the battle zone
>Life Bloom is supposed to convince the Twilight Society to fire up some kind of battle spell called Celestia One
>Gawd is supposed to clear the sky over Tenpony Tower so the Twilight Society can work their voodoo
>LP still has some kind of secret thing she's also planning to do but won't explain just yet, but it's totally going to cure world hunger or something

All of this we basically knew already, due to the author's baffling decision to break away from the main story at intervals to show us all of it in advance. However, at the very least we now know what the fuck has been going on for the last several scenes.

Oh, also, LP promises to give Gawd that stupid cheese store she inherited in return for punching holes in the clouds or whatever. Not sure whether or not that will be important.
Anonymous
9a8507c
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No.321325
321338 321339 321364
2059364__safe_sweetie+belle_solo_screencap_edit_meme_edited+screencap_text_cropped_image+macro_exploitable+meme_meta_obligatory+pony_op+is+a+duck_op+.jpeg
>>321299
Am I supposed to know or care who that is? Well, at least you've stopped trying to erroneously conflate me and CWC. If this was a Liberal site you'd try to conflate me with Hitler or Alex Jones. Same liberal tactics, same liberal worthlessness. You keep on reminding me what you think of me, without providing any excuse why, but it doesn't matter because I don't care what you think of me. You as an individual lack value and maturity. Your disgraceful behaviour is why I do not care about you or your opinions. You feel entitled to my respect but you've constantly failed to earn it. How can legendary idiots like you look at yourself in the mirror without bursting into laughter? Honestly. Christ. You'd have to have some original opinions on the thread topic for me to take your opinions on it seriously. But you've already demonstrated your "Flexible" relationship with reality so many times, I think it's a good thing that an individual as petty and eternally spiteful and envious as you loathes me. You'd only admire me if I was like you, and I'm glad I'm not you.
>>321273
You're right, there's no reason for me to give myself a name in this thread. What do you think of these final chapters of Fallout Equestria? Do you think they're the "epic grand finale" Kkat's going for? Do you think Lion And Mouse should have featured earlier on in this story, so he wouldn't need to ham-fistedly introduce them during the period any competent author would spend wrapping up old plot threads instead of introducing new ones, or do you think they should have been cut from the tale completely?
>>321287
Have you noticed how this story treats civilization as an all-or-nothing affair?

Either ponies are Civilized and therefore Good: They're honest, trusting, well-equipped, and despite the wasteland setting they're never forced by a lack of supplies to start raiding other "Good" settlements or tribes. They respect goodness and know it when they see it. They hand out sidequests and don't shoot the heroes on sight. Civilization means buildings without gore decorations.

Or they're Uncivilized. Cruel, stupid, dirty, short-sighted egomaniacs who'd only ever want to rebuild society so they can enslave others and torture slaves for fun, make slaves battle in thunderdomes, maybe even sacrifice others in an uncertainly-fated quest to become the Gods of it. They decorate their homes with entrails or rape for their own amusement, they eat ponies, they eat strangers, and they exist to be shot at and never seriously thought about.

Gawd the Griffon wants to "Rebuild society" and be the next king on top for the next revolution's turn of the fucking endless wheel of faggots in charge vying for absolute power over the lower classes made of those less gifted in importance and violent aptitude, but no serious thought is put into what that looks like, or what it entails.
Building shelters? Organizing hunter-gatherer parties to sustainably hunt RadGators and RadScorpions for their meat and raid shopping malls infested with capital-R Raiders?
Setting up and maintaining hanging stations or prisons for ex-slavers of Red Eye and any captured Prisoners Of War?
Roaming and patrolling her territory with her mercenaries to execute anypony who breaks any law she sets out?
What does her tax plan look like?
How does she recruit new members to her organization, do you have to be born a Griffon or at least half-Griffon or is it enough that the boss thinks you're a sufficiently qualified hired gun with sufficiently upright motives and morals?
This story treats civilization so shallowly, obliterating Red Eye's civilization and stamping out his culture of Red Eye-style behaviour like Red Eye worship and slavery and pointless stupid fucking thunderdomes will be as effortless as gunning down a sufficient number of Red Eye supporters before declaring yourself Divine Absolute God-Emperor of the rest, making them effortlessly fall in line and work together without question or complaint or competing agendas to build a fucking democracy with universally-held universalist libtard values where a totalitarian despotic slavery-loving madman used to rule.
We don't need to know Aragorn's tax policy to know his excellently-written fairytale-style mythic and universal story tells us he's a "Good King who rules fairly and justly", but for a story like this that concerns itself with the fate of rapefugee-loving resource-hungry interventionist liberal nations eager to change the nation of druggie ziggers and warring with said backwards brainless ziggers who feel their absurd beliefs about the moon are entitled to respect simply for being beliefs, concerns itself with warring in the ruins and mud of a nation nuked by the failure of Mutually-Assured Destruction in the face of ziggerian religious lunacy(HA! MOON PUN!), even concerns itself with new warring factions eager to build their own vision of a perfect world upon the war-torn remnants of the old, we need to know exactly what this character wants so we can know if she's morally-good and a smart constructive heroic influence on the world or simply an opportunistic mercenary doing what's best for her Griffon tribe in the moment.
But of course, Kkat doesn't bother with any of that.
He doesn't bother fleshing out Gawd as a character, or fleshing out her organization. I wouldn't expect anything as deep as FNV's critical look at the Brotherhood Of Steel but even Fallout fucking Four's Minutemen were looked at in a deeper and more realistic light than this. This shit's archetypical fairytale caricature masquerading as mature deep edgy fiction for smart adults. Gawd doesn't need motives or deep character analysis or a coherent ideology or even coherent morality in Kkatland. Gawd is simply the "Badass leader" of a "Good mercenary organization" that wants to rule, and it will, once sufficient violence has been carried out for political gain, and her rule will simply be "fair and just" even in a democratic nation because Kkat says so.
Anonymous
9a8507c
?
No.321326
>>321297
>The Followers of the Apocalypse
Just more stolen Fallout iconography. https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Followers_of_the_Apocalypse
Ironic.
The FOTA in Fallout were a secular tribe formed in the Boneyard(settlements made within the destroyed Los Angeles), with the goal of educating humanity about the horrors of the Great War, hoping humanity would never repeat those atrocities again. Then they stopped preaching in favor of doing medical treatment and charity. They're also partially responsible for Caesar and Caesar's Legion in FNV but this story decided to make Zebra Caesars a thing and make them a pre-war thing.

In Fallout Equestria, before the megaspells went boom, Fluttershy was a pony who constantly preached in favor of peace and single-handedly ran an organization called the "Ministry of Peace". From what I recall it mostly made posters of Flutters begging poners to "Do Better" and not do war and be mean and shit, except it somehow also invented Megaspells on its own, even though Applejack's gun-inventing (i think?) ministry needed to work together with Twilight's ministry of Arcane Science to invent... was it energy weapons or Power Armour?
Anyway you'd think a pony like that plus the kind of war Equestria went through plus the naturally-good nature of Equestrians would have resulted in an anti-war movement, maybe an organization like the FOTA forming before the war, or after it.
For fuck's sake, First Aid boxes around the Wasteland still have Fluttershy's Cutie Mark on them.
But letting Fluttershy inspire a generation to detest resource wars/holy wars and want peace and/or inspire the creation of the FOTA or even build it directly...
That would mean not letting Kkat's shitty fucking OCs take all the credit for everything good that ever happened in the Edgequestrian Wasteland, a shithole where ponies decorated homes with gore and made kids and slaves battle in thunderdomes when not raiding or raping each other or living off canned corn for over 200 years.
Twilight made the Alicorns, Velvet made them Good(TM).
Applejack made guns, Edgequestria's heroes used them for Good(TM).
Twilight built the surveillance tower and emergency radio broadcast system at Tenpony, but the tower ended up full of cartoonishly retarded rich poners while Homage used the surveillance system and radio for Good(TM).
The Pitt was a lawless hellhole before Red Eye came along to spread the ways of slavery and thunderdomes for "Goodish", but he's still mean to LP so he's Evil(TM) and LP killed him for Good(TM) and now Gawd is going to build a "Better" country for Good(TM).
Fluttershy invented nuke megaspells, and LP used one for Good(TM) against The Goddess aka Trixie but mutated by Twilight's fuckups.
Everything bad in Edgequestria can be blamed on canon characters, and everything good is something to thank an OC somewhere for.
What a blatant way to suck off your OCs at the expense of FIM, Kkat. No wonder your fandom's a distinct entity separate from FIM willing to throw canon chars under the bus whenever their Fallout Equestria knockoffs - oh sorry "Side stories" - need an excuse for something bad to exist or happen.
I almost miss the trashy fanfic I wrote years ago where canon characters gushed openly about my OC. It was less disrespectful to canon than this, probably. I guess it depends on your point of view. I still can't believe I thought that shit would get audiences to stick with him as he grows and becomes less of a cunt. If I want audiences to think there's something good in him I should show him doing good things, and show him doing more good things as the heroes make him nicer.

Also I should have said this sooner but Kage is a really fucking stupid name for a Griffon. Either it's the Japanese "Kage" as in shadow, which is an edgy retarded name no Japanese person over the age of 10 would use, or it's "Cage" but spelled with "Xtreme Kool Lettrz". Which is retarded for different reasons.
A man named cage, whose mercenary organization fought slavers... That's just lazy.

Also, it's ironic that LP knows and cares so little about Stern due to a lack of screentime, even though Kkat already put Memory Orbs into this story, which could give Gawd the perfect excuse to pull one of those flashback orbs out of nowhere and give it to LP so she could experience Gawd's memories of being fucked over by the memorably evil Stern at some point in her life, right? These lore orbs and even random documents and audio logs are the perfect excuse to make an omniscient narrator out of LP's limited single-person first-person perspective but Kkat just doesn't get it.
Anonymous
369b066
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No.321338
321339
>>321325
Done projecting?
Anonymous
42bdd70
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No.321339
321343
>>321142
>>321168
>>321227
>>321299
>>321325
>>321338
https://youtu.be/ebUCzaNCC5s?t=8

Take it to /sp/
Anonymous
369b066
?
No.321343
Screenshot_20211003-172153_DuckDuckGo.jpg
>>321339
Are you suggesting a new lolcow thread?
Ngl, the idea has merit
Anonymous
1c7856b
?
No.321364
321368
>>321325
>What do you think of these final chapters of Fallout Equestria?
I don't know. Before GG's break, I could jump in and drop out of the story whenever I wanted but now it was bit harder. I assume it's because the plot has developed somewhat or it could just be that I didn't give it enough of a try.
It seems to me that LP is gathering, or that they have gathered, al the acquaintances from her journey and intend to march on The Black Gate with this army. Who's black gate? I don't really know. It's probably Red Eye's.
But if I read more I'll probably get the gist of it.
Anonymous
6183881
?
No.321368
>>321301
>>321364
This finale sequence is meant to sort of be a merger of Fallout 3 and New Vegas's endings, so yet another big reference.

The Fallout 3 bits are how you suit up for an offensive about the enclave establishment, with the intent of wresting control of their core, important magical machine. The New Vegas bit is how you gather all the factions you helped along the way and some important characters to lead the final offensive assault.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
625b1a3
?
No.321372
321374 321384
1509006087314.png
>>321301

Finally, LP gets down to brass tacks. One of the literally-whos, an NPC named Morning Frost, was apparently stationed at Neighvarro once, so she has a map of it on her PipBuck. Not sure why she has a PipBuck, but since I have no idea who this character is, I can't really say whether or not it's appropriate for her to have a technical device usually reserved for the stable ponies. At any rate, Neighvarro is about what you'd expect: a large, heavily guarded floating fortress being patrolled by a large airship (I believe these things are called Thunderclouds or Thunderheads or something like that) and four raptors.

Anyway, there is nothing else to do except work out some technical details. The rest of this conversation is just rambling autism, so for the sake of expedience here is a quick summary of what is discussed:
>Twilight Sparkle had some kind of cloud walking spell, which Spike now has for some reason, that will enable all the pones participating in the Neighvarro raid to walk on clouds
>Xenith is going to make bloodwing talismans for everyone, but will not be participating in the raid as she needs to find Stern and kill her because revenge I guess
>Stern and Xenith have some kind of history that apparently makes this revenge a big deal; I guess Stern murdered Xenith's family or something (this sounds familiar but I don't remember where it was mentioned)
>the Applejack Rangers that LP recruited on her way here, despite being obviously the most valuable fighters in terms of firepower and training, are not going to be participating in either the Neighvarro raid or the attack on Fillydelphia; they have been given the garbage detail of guarding Spike's cave
>the reason Spike's cave needs to be guarded is because Spike won't be in it; they need to use him to get them past the Enclave battleships and into Neighvarro
>a group of literally-whos called the Wasteland Crusaders are also going to stay behind and guard Spike's cave (I have literally no idea who these characters are, but they were mentioned by name so I'm going to assume they're important)
>Spike can break through one of the shields surrounding Neighvarro, but there is a second one that he can't break for some reason, so LP needs to figure out a way past it

The scene ends with some more cringey sex banter between LP and Homage.

Page break, "today."

Velvet Remedy breaks into some broadcast station that is in the cloud fortress I guess. For some reason she is now an ultra bad-ass ninja, and is able to quickly subdue everyone in the room using her anesthetic spell. She goes over to the broadcast station and fires it up, once again overriding Homage's broadcast signal. There are any number of perfectly reasonable technical questions about how and why something like this would work that I'm just not even going to bother asking. The rest of this scene is pretty ridiculous.

Velvet goes on air and announces to everyone in the wasteland still listening to the radio that she is about to start singing. Before she can make good on this threat, however, a bunch of soldiers burst in and interrupt her, proving that there may actually be something resembling a God in this post-apocalyptic hellhole.

>Velvet Remedy looked put out, pouting with her lower lip and fluttering her eyes. “But boys, I don’t need guns or magic. I have something with me that’s much more powerful than those.” Velvet smiled pleasantly. “Kindness.”
Have I mentioned that I really, really hate this character?

Anyway, for reasons I can't even begin to fathom, an alicorn suddenly appears out of nowhere and BTFOs all of the guards.

Page break, "yesterday."

We rejoin LP at some indeterminate point in the future and/or past. She is telling Spike that she wants to show everyone the Gardens of Equestria spell, because reasons I guess.

>I expected resistance. Instead, Spike agreed readily. “I’ve already shown Ditzy Doo,” he confessed. “As one of the spirits of the Element of Harmony, she deserved to know.”
So Ditzy Doo is one of the Elements of Harmony now? When did that happen? What element is she supposed to be? How did Spike figure this out? Literally nothing about this shit makes any goddamned sense.

Anyway, she takes them all into the Butt Sex Room, which has since been repurposed into an Elements of Harmony room, and shows them Spike's big fancy computer. They all ooh and ahh over the Elements and whatever.

>Ditzy Doo sat at the pedestal holding the Element of Laughter, staring reverently at the necklace with the little balloon-shaped gem.
>Calamity was the first to speak. “The spirit o’ Loyalty?” He seemed overwhelmed. “That’s… a lot. Ah’ll try t’ live up t’ that…”
So...Derpy is the Element of Laughter and Calamity is the Element of Loyalty? Is that what I'm supposed to take away from this? Sure; why the hell not?

I'm honestly not sure why Spike had such a difficult time tracking down bearers for these Elements; it seems like LP is just handing them out at random to her various friends. Maybe it's a trick that only works when Mary Sue does it.

>“Kindness?” Velvet Remedy sounded faint. “But… Are you sure?” She leaned closer to me, speaking hesitantly. “In case you haven’t noticed, Pip, I can be a bitch sometimes.”
We have noticed that, Velvet; thank you for pointing it out. Also, it looks like Velvet is supposed to be "Kindness." Welp, that's three of them down. Who will LP pick as the Elements of Generosity, Magic and Honesty? Ms. Crabtree? Chef? The 1991 Denver Broncos?

However, it seems we won't get to find out immediately. Instead of addressing who will carry the remaining three elements, the conversation devolves into some rambling autism about whether or not Fluttershy has actually become a tree. Once this is concluded, LP announces that their job tomorrow will be to find the bearers of the remaining elements. I'm assuming this just means they are supposed to go down to the bus station and find three random ponies who would like to earn five bucks.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
625b1a3
?
No.321374
321384 321394
large (6).png
>>321372

>Meanwhile, I had unpleasant news to break to the others. “After tomorrow, your top priority will have to be finding the two remaining ponies with the virtues needed to use the Elements of Harmony and set off the Gardens of Equestria. By your estimation, Calamity, you’ll have about a year before things get really bad. I hope you can do it by then.”
It's interesting that she says "finding the two remaining ponies." By my count we have three elements still unfilled:

>Velvet Remedy - Kindness
>Ditzy Doo - Laughter
>Calamity - Loyalty
Yep, that's only three out of six that are spoken for.

Given the absurd amount of significance this story places on its "hero," the logical assumption would be that the Magic element will be filled by LP herself. However, it sounds like her plan is to sacrifice herself inside the SPP, leaving the Gardens of Equestria to be set off by her friends in her absence. Also, she has hinted numerous times that she considers Homage to be the actual wasteland hero for some reason. Though it's never been clear what she bases this on (other than the fact that she wuvs her so much), we can probably assume that Homage will be the Magic element instead. So I guess that just leaves Generosity and Honesty? Who the fuck even knows; I've completely given up trying to follow kkat's logic.

>“Wait,” Calamity waved a hoof. “Y’all say that like yer not comin’ with us.”
>My heart felt like it was being squeezed. “I’m not,” I said, feeling tears. “I can’t.” I explained to them, as I had to Life Bloom, that the Single Pegasus Project needed a pony. And that saving Equestria required that pony to stay.
>“Why you?” Velvet complained.
This is actually a pretty good question. Seems to me that the keyword in "Single Pegasus Project" is "Pegasus." I've never entirely understood why LP is supposed to be the one going into the box, just like I've never understood why Homage was selected to be the hero of the wasteland. The only explanation is that, as the author's beloved Mary Sue protagonist, it is naturally LP's job to valiantly sacrifice herself for the good of all; the fact that she's not a Pegasus and thus fails to meet the literally one requirement for participating in the Single Pegasus Project seems to be beside the point.

>I sighed heavily. “Because of all this.” I glanced around at the Gardens of Equestria. “Because, in the end, I’m expendable. And you’re not.”
Because reasons, basically. Seriously; I know I've said this a thousand fucking times now and you're all probably getting tired of hearing it, but this makes absolutely no sense.

Presumably, when LP says she is expendable compared to her friends, she means that all of them are meant to be bearers of the Elements of Harmony, whereas she is not. But how was any of this determined? The logic for selecting the Element bearers has never been clear. Why does Ditzy Doo embody Laughter better than any other pony in the wasteland? Because she "laughs at adversity" or some hokey shit like that? Why is Velvet the embodiment of Kindness? Because she likes Fluttershy and occasionally helps others? Why is Calamity Loyalty? Because he doesn't have enough of a personality to question just why he's been palling around with this psychopath Littlepoop for all this time?

And for the last bloody time, just what exactly are Homage's qualifications to be the Element of Anything? Other than being LP's girlfriend, there is nothing remarkable about her at all. She has spent most of the story doing literally fuck-all except sitting in her comfortable penthouse gibbering about bullshit on the radio. If any character in this story is expendable enough to be tossed into a magic weather machine and forgotten about, it's Homage.

Anyway, the conversation takes a predictable turn from here. LP gets all bleary-eyed and angsty, talking about how useless and unremarkable she's always been, and how she's finally "found her virtue," which, since she doesn't say what it is, I'm going to just assume is "being a self-righteous cunt." Velvet cries, and Calamity is also sad, but accepts LP's decision. He gives her his hat as a parting gift, and Velvet gives her the Fluttershy orb, because if there's one thing LP doesn't have enough of, it's memory orbs.

At this point Spike suddenly realizes something. I can't make hide nor hair of this autism, so I'm just going to dump what he says verbatim:

>“I told you that your group wasn’t the one that was needed because it was obvious to me that you and SteelHooves weren’t ever going to be Bearers,” he explained rapidly. But it takes more than just being loyal or honest to be a Bearer…”
Why exactly was it obvious that LP and SteelHooves were not bearers? This has never been explained, any more than it has been explained why the others actually are qualified to be bearers.

>“…just like it doesn’t require that the Bearers be perfect paragons of their Virtue. There’s more to it than that.” He looked at us all. “I mean, it’s not like the ‘destined few’ just happened to all live in Ponyville. Fluttershy, Applejack, Rarity... I’m sure there were plenty of ponies with the same virtues, but it wasn’t enough to just have the virtues. That wasn’t what made them suitable to be Bearers.
>“It was only when they accepted the call to act, and became friends in the process, that they became worthy in the eyes of the Elements.”
So basically, if I'm reading this correctly, pretty much anyone can be an Element of Harmony, so long as they kinda-sorta embody that element, and have five friends who kinda-sorta fit the other ones. How has it taken 200 years to find six ponies that meet these incredibly general requirements? Like I said; just go down to the bus station and grab six ponies.

Anyway, Spike keeps babbling for awhile, but the long and short of it is that Littlepoop's role is to be the "spark" that brings the elements together. As to what this means, we will have to delve into it in the next post.
Anonymous
9a8507c
?
No.321384
>>321372
Funny how leftists fundamentally see niceness as a type of manipulation that can be used to get their way and make powerful others do things for them.
It even works that way in their fiction.
>>321374
Sheer cowardice is all that keeps Kkat from admitting LP was written to be the element of Magic. She has tremendous magocal power, has friends, and brought all her friends together and supposedly brought out the best in them. She has Twilight's role as "the spark that brought her friends together" and yet Kkat feels actually calling her the element of magic would be the straw that breaks the camel's back and makes everyone cry "Marey Sue".
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
625b1a3
?
No.321394
321395
large (7).png
>>321374

The way it's explained is rather convoluted, but I think I'm basically starting to see where kkat is going with this. In the canon series, during the initial battle with Nightmare Moon, the magic of the Elements of Harmony only kicks into gear when Twilight Sparkle realizes that her friendship with the other five is the spark that makes the magic work. At this point the sixth Element, Magic, reveals itself, and they can BTFO Nightmare Moon.

Here, Spike explains that the nature of the "spark" is different every time. For Twilight, the spark was an epiphany when she realized how the Elements worked. This time, the spark is apparently a pony: good ol' Mary Sue herself. The basic idea is that you bring five of the six Elements together along with the spark, and then the sixth Element reveals itself. It's not entirely clear if the sixth Element is going to be Magic again or some new thing, but I suppose we'll find out in time.

>At that moment, I finally realized what most of you probably figured out right from the prologue: the true meaning of my cutie mark.
Yeah, totally; the prologue was absolutely 1000% crystal clear about that. But, uh, you know, for the sake of people who aren't quite as quick on the draw as you and I, could you maybe explain how all of that endless droning on about the technical specs of PipBucks explains the true meaning of LP's PipBuck cutie mark, and how that has anything the fuck to do with the present situation?

>A feature not to be forgotten: PipBucks keep track of the location of tagged objects or people. If a pony somehow got lost, it could help find them.
>Like I had found the Ministry Mares. Their stories, which cried out to be remembered. And through the statuettes created through Rarity’s sacrifice, the mares themselves.
>Like I had found Velvet Remedy, even without the aid of a tag. And I had found each of my friends… and a whole lot of good, heroic people, many of whom were gathered in the main room of this very cave.
>I had gotten my cutie mark when I had found that little foal and reunited him with his parents, the first worthwhile thing I had ever done in my life.
>My special talent was finding the right people.
This is a stretch. Even by the standards of this story, this is a stretch. A big stretch. Huge, even.

In kkat's defense, I can kind of see how this logic would might make sense to someone with a gamer's mindset. If I remember correctly the "PipBuck" is this story's analog of the "PipBoy," which serves as the user interface for one or more of the Fallout games. The map is probably the feature that is going to be used most often by the player, so they might logically associate a PipBoy with a map or with the concept of locating things in physical space. However, kkat's logic is again based more on the reader's external knowledge of the Fallout games more than on the internal logic of this story.

The prologue that is supposed to make all of this so bloody obvious is mostly just LP droning on for pages upon pages about all of the features this device has, one of which happens to be a map. The device does plenty of other things, and she uses most of these features as often or more often than the map. For instance, without the auto-aiming bullshit this character would have died many times over before she even made it to Appleoosa. She is constantly using it to listen to audio, both the recordings she finds all over the place and her girlfriend's radio show. And, though I've never been 100% certain about this, I think she uses it, or at least some device that attaches to it, in her hacking of terminals.

Taken purely in the context of its use in the story, a PipBuck isn't really symbolic of anything other than itself; it's a multi-function gizmo comparable to maybe a smartphone, that is designed to do any number of things, including but hardly limited to finding people. Granted, cutie mark symbolism tends to be a little vague in the MLP universe for instance, Rarity's mark could easily be interpreted to mean that she is an expert jewel thief, but expecting the reader to instantly connect an image of a PipBuck with the concept of finding people ponies, whatever is, again, quite a stretch.

Now, if the PipBuck's sole feature was its map and locator system, this would make sense. However, that would mean that LP would not be able to rely on it to hack terminals and aim guns and listen to music and do all the other crazy shit that she can do. This, of course, would mean that kkat would need to think up another way for LP to win gunfights, or else have someone besides his beloved Mary Sue be the expert fighter, and it's hard to imagine him going for that. It would also mean that his entire system of revealing the world's intricate backstory would need to be rethought (which would be a good idea, but again it's hard to imagine kkat actually doing this). But I digress.

In any event, none of this changes the fundamental idea that LP's job is (apparently) only to bring the Elements together; she is (apparently) still not an Element herself. So, in her own words, she's still "expendable."

Page break, "today."

Calamity blows up Neighvarro's solar array. As a side note, it's curious that in this supposedly impenetrable fortress they have encountered almost no opposition so far, save the battleship that Spike effortlessly blew up, and the single platoon of inept guards that Velvet's alicorn (apparently) took out by herself.

>Calamity sniffed at the air. “Well, what do ya know. It’s like the end o’ an empire… with radishes.”
I don't get this joke. Was the solar array made out of radishes? Are there radishes nearby? Do burning solar arrays smell like radishes for some reason? We need a little more to go on.

Anyway, it looks like I spoke too soon about the lack of opposition. Spike is still fighting some of the raptors apparently, and I guess Calamity blew up the array in between fighting some pegasi that are chasing him.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
625b1a3
?
No.321395
321411 321466
imageproxy.png
>>321394

Oh, before we go on, I actually have one more quick observation about LP's cutie mark business.

Her explanation of her mark is that her "special talent" is finding people, and that the PipBuck symbolizes this because of its radar function. However, she relies entirely on said radar function to people and/or things, just as she relies on its auto-targeting system to fight her battles for her, and (presumably) relies on some kind of app she installed on it to hack terminals for her, and so forth.

The PipBucks are standard issue in the stables as I understand it, meaning that literally anyone who has one of these could use its features to do literally everything that LP has done in this story; thus, nothing she uses it for really counts as a unique ability. Thus, if you really think about it, her special talent is really just relying on this device to do everything for her. Thus, her cutie mark is actually appropriate for her, just not for the reason she (or kkat) thinks. Noodle that one for awhile.

Anyway, back to the present, by which I mean tomorrow. Calamity gets shot at by some pegasi recruits that he doesn't want to kill, because they're his old brothers from the Enclave and all that. So, he dodges them instead, heading for some kind of side door or something that turns out to be locked. Then, suddenly, the door bursts open and a guard jumps out. Calamity whangs him over the head and ducks through the door, dragging the guard in with him. Presumably his pursuers have been outwitted, as they don't appear to follow.

The room he enters turns out to be full of batteries or something; not sure what the significance is, but this seems to impress Calamity.

Page break, "last night."

Littlepoop, despite her earlier whining about how she is never going to see Homage again and would do anything just to hear her voice again, chooses to spend this last moment she's been granted apologizing to her. Not for the obvious reason you'd expect, ie the fact that she made a decision to die without seeing her again and didn't tell her about it the last time they spoke, but because she failed to meet her own lofty expectations for glorious Mary-Suedom. There are still ponies in the wasteland she hasn't saved, and her efforts to be a hero haven't been nearly heroic enough, and blah blah blah eat the pudding.

Anyway, Homage tells her to stop being so glum, because it turns out she's not actually going to die at all. Her plan is to plug herself into the SPP, which uses the same network of radio towers that Homage relies on for her broadcasts. Thus, she will be able to communicate with Homage any time she wants. Well gee whiz, I guess that all just works out fine and dandy then, doesn't it?

So, once again, it seems that kkat's effort to introduce (real) sacrifice into his story has fallen flat, due to his outright refusal to have his protagonist suffer any (actual) loss. All this time, we've been led to believe that she will be sacrificing herself nobly for the good of all, severing herself from the love of her life and plunging into the cold abyss of death in order to save the wasteland. However, this noble act turns out to be a huge nothingburger as usual; she's not sacrificing herself, at least not in the mortal sense, and she won't even be separated from Homage.

As far as I can tell, this effort isn't going to actually kill LP or even harm her in any way that actually matters. I was until recently under the impression that throwing herself into the SPP would somehow cause her to fuse with it or be consumed by it or something; that her body would die, and she would basically merge with the machine and become a disembodied consciousness like SteelHooves' old retarded grandpa wanted to do. From the way it's being described here, it sounds like all she's really doing is just locking herself inside the cockpit. Did they not put a door handle on the inside or what?

And, naturally, kkat can't help but end the scene with yet another cringey sex joke: Homage offers to start showering outside so LP can watch.

Page break, "today."

With the guards thwarted, Velvet is now free to sing her dumb songs over the radio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

Meanwhile, LP is listening to this garbage while running down the hallway inside the fortress. She has her invisibility thing on again, so she encounters no opposition whatsoever. Mighty convenient, that.

>I reached the cell block with a few minutes of invisibility to spare. A quick sweep of the area told me all I needed to know. The cell doors had no accessible locks. They were operated entirely from the terminal in the guard office. It had a cloud-interface.
>Fortunately, I could do those now.
It seems that she can now suddenly hack cloud terminals for some reason. Mighty convenient, that.

Anyway, she hacks easily-hackable terminal #4,648 and locates the cell of "Fluffykins." You may or may not remember that Fluffykins is the name of the ally that the hellhound promised would help them. Apparently, the prisoner they need to help them bring the cloud fortress down is being held within the cloud fortress itself. Mighty convenient, that.

The info she finds is a disposal order; apparently, the Enclave intends to execute Fluffykins this very afternoon. However, it would seem that LP and her friends broke into the fortress just in the nick of time. Come on, everyone, say it with me:

"MIGHTY CONVENIENT, THAT!"

Anyway, whatever; she goes to the dumb hellhound's stupid cell and opens the door somehow and lets her out, then hands her a note with some instructions from the other faggot-ass hellhound on it.

Page break, "last night."

>Tonight was the last night before a big battle. One that would define the future of Equestria. And many of them might not be coming back. The party had been Silver Bell’s idea, naturally. But none of them were going to spend their last night reading a good book.
Thanks to kkat, I certainly won't be.
Anonymous
9a8507c
?
No.321411
>>321395
This might be a sad thing to post, but...

Not even the concept of the Enclave's Operation Cauterize is truly original.
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Operation:_Cinder
>"Operation: Cinder is to begin at once. Resistance. Rebellion. Defiance. These are concepts that cannot be allowed to persist. You are but one of many tools by which these ideas shall be burned away."
―A posthumous message from Emperor Palpatine, to a select group of Imperial officers
Operation: Cinder was the code name for the orbital bombardment campaign devised by Galactic Emperor Darth "Creamy Sheev" Sidious, who sought to punish the Galactic Empire (His own side) for failing to prevent his death.
Following the Emperor's demise during the third Star Wars movie, his posthumous instructions were relayed to loyal Imperial officers.
They targeted various planets across the galaxy, including Vardos, a world known for its loyalty to the Empire, and the Emperor's homeworld of Naboo. Although Naboo was saved during the Battle of Theed, Vardos was devastated by satellites that ravaged its ecological balance.
Operation: Cinder was the first part in the Emperor's Contingency; the Empire was to be rebuilt in the Unknown Regions while Sidious was secretly revived on Exegol.
The plan was undermined by Grand Admiral Rae Sloane, who killed the Emperor's protégé in a battle.
The widespread destruction caused by Operation: Cinder also resulted in Iden Versio and Del Meeko—Imperial Special Forces commandos of Inferno Squad—defecting to the New Republic Defense Force.
Despite these setbacks, the Contingency succeeded in ensuring the Empire's revival as the First Order, a military junta determined to recapture the Imperial legacy by ending the New Republic Era offscreen just in time for the Disney Star Wars sequels.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
02abd5f
?
No.321466
321500
large (8).png
>>321395

Anyway, it looks like all the NPCs in Spike's cave have decided to throw a gigantic party, because why the hell not? LP is trying to get some shut eye, but Spike comes in and wakes her up and tells her to join in the festivities, so she does. A good time is had by all.

Life Bloom passes LP a "gift" he created at her behest; apparently she intends to give it to Fluffykins when she meets him in the previous scene, which, even though we've already read about it, won't actually happen until tomorrow. Have I mentioned that the way kkat structured time in this chapter is retarded?

Anyway, we still don't know exactly what the gift was, but it will probably become apparent later on. The rest of this is just LP and Calamity gibbering back and forth about the ethics of saving hellhounds and how Calamity's brother was apparently a douche.

Page break, "today."

We rejoin Calamity in the future, ie the present, ie the past, ie I don't even know anymore. He is presently futurely? stealing batteries or something from that storage closet we left him in, when suddenly his dad walks in. Initially his dad thinks he's just some random Enclave recruit, but Calamity announces himself.

What follows is a scene that could potentially have been a pivotal moment in Calamity's character arc, had the author bothered to actually give him one. As it stands, it's mostly a confusing confrontation between Calamity and some sketchy nameless character that is apparently his father, whom we've heard about in passing but have never seen. It's evident that these two characters don't see eye to eye on most subjects, and presumably their tense relationship played a significant role in shaping who Calamity is today. However, it's hard to actually give a fuck, since Calamity is basically a background pony, and his father, much like his brother, has not had a significant enough presence for us to form much of an opinion.

Anyway, they yak for a bit. Calamity's father is even more of a hee-haw redneck stereotype than Calamity himself, but other than yell he doesn't do much. There's no fight here; Calamity just maintains a condescending indifference while his dad yells at him about whatever. I don't really have any reaction to it; it's just a low-energy confrontation between a character we barely know and a character we don't know at all. There's a bit about Calamity's mother at the end, but we know even less about her than we do about the rest of his family, so it's hard to really feel anything there either. Naturally, kkat takes the opportunity to toss in a random show reference that is completely inappropriate for a moment like this:

>“Ya got her mane, y’know,” his father said softly, letting his traitorous son past. “Ah really liked her mane.”
>Calamity spread his wings and flew away, saying nothing.
Whatever. If kkat isn't going to put any effort into writing this shit, I'm not going to put any effort into reviewing it. Moving on.

Page break, "this morning."

The time to depart for battle has come. This moment would have more poignancy if we didn't already know what was going to happen.

I know I've mentioned this repeatedly already, but I really don't understand why kkat chose to write these scenes out of sequence like this. I remember I also complained earlier, when LP was losing random fragments of time and everything kept skipping forward in a surreal way. However, there ultimately turned out to have been a reason for that: LP had actually lost fragments of her memory, so she was simply recounting events the way she remembered them. As much as I hate to give kkat credit for anything at this point, I'll admit it was a more or less clever way of handling that.

Here, though, we have yet to see any reason why events should be structured this way. Kkat has chosen to tell us the story of the battle concurrent with the story of the day before the battle, when they were sitting around planning the battle. Why? Not only is it confusing, it takes away any impact that either storyline might have. The battle scenes have been mostly disjointed and lacking punch due to us having no frame of reference for what's going on. The planning scenes all take place after we've already read the battle scenes, so all it does is fill us in after the fact. It's like writing a story about a trip to Disney World, opening with a scene about riding Splash Mountain, and following it with a scene about standing in line for Splash Mountain.

In the late 90s there as a movie called Memento. I don't remember what it was about exactly, but its primary claim to fame was its gimmick: it started with the ending, and told the story backwards until it finished with the beginning. It wasn't a terrible movie as I recall, but the annoying thing was that it immediately spawned a whole slew of copycat projects; suddenly, telling a story backwards became this trendy thing to do, and everyone was doing it, regardless of whether or not it was appropriate for the story being told. That's basically what this reminds me of.

Generally speaking, unless there's some concrete reason why your story needs to be told in a non-linear way, the most sensible thing to do is to just order your scenes chronologically. It makes things much easier to follow, and enables you to properly build suspense and tension and so forth. Kkat basically sabotages himself here; his battle scenes are incoherent and lack punch, and by the time he rewinds to explain what we just saw (and the characters are about to see), we've already seen it and don't care anymore.

Anyway, they saddle up Spike and head out. They fly past the remains of a Pegasus stable, because those existed apparently, and a Pegasus city. Oddly enough, despite the supposedly heavy security of the Enclave and the 200 year old taboo about traveling through the cloud barrier, nopony seems all that concerned about the gigantic dragon flying around up here.
Anonymous
7592a19
?
No.321476
>>313901
Starlight Sparkle flows better, I agree
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
02abd5f
?
No.321499
322031
1.png
>>313900
>>313901
Just for that, I'm going to use this image for every single one of my posts from now on until the book is finished.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
02abd5f
?
No.321500
321510
2.png
>>321466

Page break, "ten minutes ago."

Good, the two timelines are moving closer and closer together. Hopefully we can be done with this nonsense soon, unless kkat decides to randomly have his "past" storyline bypass the "present" entirely, and the sequences alternate between "today" and "a week from Tuesday."

Anyway, this scene is short. The Twilight Society fires up their Celestia One spell, and uses it to surgically target the "worst, the most dangerous, on both sides." As usual, we get no explanation for how "worseness" or "dangerousness" is determined, and nothing about how this spell works, even at a black-box level. We are simply told that the Twilight Society feels that they "did the right thing."

Page break, "right now."

Seriously, this had better be it for these idiotic time jumps. Anyway, we're almost at the end of the chapter, so let's sally forth.

>My hoof hit the hard red barrier, sparks of energy crackling out from it. The shield felt as solid as a steel wall under my hoof.
>I reared up and slammed my hoof against the shield surrounding the S.P.P. Central Hub once again, and fell on my tail when I rebounded.
>I wasn’t going through!
>But… But I had been so sure! I was three-fifths alicorn. More importantly, I had something nopony who had attempted this had brought: I had a perfect replica of the soul of Rainbow Dash!
Seriously? Was this her actual plan?

She just assumed, because she has that silly statue of Rainbow Dash in her backpack, and also because kkat's taint turned her into some kind of alicorn mutant or something I guess, that she would just be able to effortlessly waltz through this ultra-powerful shield that has baffled the greatest minds in Edgequestria for 200 years? Seriously, the arrogance of this character is just unreal. If I remember correctly, someone once even tried bringing the severed head of Rainbow Dash to this shield, and even that wasn't enough to bypass it. Well, whatevs; at least we get to watch LP eat a nice big slice of humble pie for once.

>If the bones of Luna hadn’t been enough to get through, if the Enclave’s goal to use the severed head of Rainbow Dash had been attempted and failed, then it stood to reason that the shield’s bypass was designed to register something much more important than mere genetics.
>I had to be the one who could get in. I had been promised this. I had it all worked out!
>This was my purpose. My destiny!
Seriously, how delusional can she get? It's like I said before, this character is completely nuts. None of what she says here makes any sense. Why does she believe that this would be her purpose or her destiny? Who promised this to her? If the shield requires a deeper connection to Rainbow Dash than mere genetics, then why would she even imagine that she was qualified to pass it? She has no connection to Dash at all from what I can tell. This whole thing just smacks of some gigantic delusion of grandeur.

LP has convinced herself that it is her holy calling to save the world, and she intends to do just that, no matter what reality has to say about it. Well I'm sorry, bitch, but that's just not how these things work. Only King Arthur can pull the sword out of the stone, so if you tug on the sword and it won't come out, all it means is that you ain't King Arthur. I'm sure your kindergarten teacher always told you that you were special, and this must be a giant blow to your self-esteem, but I'm afraid that's just the way it goes sometimes.

>I began to cry. Right now, so many were fighting, probably dying, because they had faith in my plan. Faith in me.
>How could I have been wrong? Again?
>Sunshine and rainbows, she had promised. I heard the sound of explosions and massive energy discharges from the remaining Raptors. My crying became weeping.
Lol, it was almost worth slogging through 650,000 words of unreadable dreck just to enjoy this moment. Poor little Mary Sue, it must be so crushing for her to learn that she's not the center of the observable universe after believing it for so long.

Seriously though, I do have a couple of notes. First of all, "my crying became weeping" doesn't make a whole lot of sense. What I think the author means here is that she was crying, and now she's crying even harder. However, "crying" and "weeping" are essentially synonymous with each other; I'd probably say something along the lines of "my crying turned into bawling," or something to that effect.

Second, I'm a little curious about this line:

>Sunshine and rainbows, she had promised.
Who exactly is "she"? I'm sure this is just referencing something from earlier that I'm not remembering, but I honestly can't think of anyone that might have promised her that any of this would work. To my recollection, this entire plan was cooked up by LP and LP alone; nobody told her that she could pass this shield, she just assumed that she could.

>Don’t listen to her! the potted plant had insisted. She just wants you to fail.
The potted plant? What the fuck is she on about? She got this idea from a talking plant? I'm lost.

Alright, I enlisted the help of my old friend Ctrl-F, who directed me back to Chapter 37. There is a particularly autistic scene in which LP dives into a memory orb belonging to Pinkie Pie, and ends up having a pseudo-conversation with a coked up Pinkie, because Pinkie is hallucinating talking to LP in the future, and is giving her advice. Or something. This is apparently where she was told that everything would come up "sunshine and rainbows."

The scene is even harder to follow the second time around, but as far as I can tell, there's nothing in here about passing this shield or anything specific. Pinkie merely assures her that if she "faces the fire" then everything will work out for the best in the end.

Well, I guess I can understand LP's disillusionment. I mean, if you can't trust the drugged-out hallucinations of a centuries-dead crack addict, then who the hell can you trust?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
04545c6
?
No.321510
321514 321585
3.png
>>321500

Anyway, as much as I'm enjoying watching LP twist in the wind, I think we all know that this isn't going to last. This should be roughly the point where she racks her brain, finds the crucial piece of the puzzle that eluded both her and everyone else who has attempted to bypass this shield in the last 200 years, and pulls some ridiculous solution out of her ass that saves the day. Let's read on and see what moronic illogical thing she comes up with.

She goes over Pinkie Pie's delusional ravings from the memory orb as if there ought to be some kind of crucial clue in there, and zeroes in on the bit about "facing the fire." Considering kkat's total lack of imagination, I'm just going to assume that the solution will probably involve literal fire.

>“Spike!” I shouted, waving my forearms desperately! “I need you!”
Yep, that definitely seems to be the direction this is headed. Also, ponies don't have forearms.

She calls Spike down, and tells him that she needs him to breathe fire on her. Naturally, he considers this request to be ill-advised, and refuses. LP now has to try to convince him:

>“I lied,” I told him.
>“What?” He looked confused, hurt and deeply worried. In the middle of all this…
>“I lied about Twilight Sparkle,” I confessed, my heart ripping apart.
>I told him the truth. The whole truth, every awful, soul-wrenching detail.
>“All…” Spike stammered finally, his voice just a whisper. “…all this time…”
Remind me, what exactly is "the truth" about Twilight Sparkle again? Is it something actually serious, like she fingered Spike's butthole and then wiped it under his nose while he was asleep one time, and that's why everything smelled like poop that one day? Or is it just another nothingburger truth, like "the truth about Fluttershy" was for Velvet? As in, she invented some bombs and did some horrible stuff 200 years ago in an era when literally every other canon character was inventing bombs and doing horrible stuff, and LP felt like she needed to shield one or more of her friends from discovering this because it might destroy their perception of their favorite pony?

Oh, who the hell even cares? Whatever the "truth" about Twilight Sparkle is, it serves its purpose well enough here. Spike gets pissed off and blows fire on her exactly like she wanted, because like every other character in this shitpile he apparently has an IQ several degrees below room temperature and can't see through even the most transparent manipulation.

>I was blinded by the blast of greenish flame. The pain was beyond unbearable. I screamed, and my lungs filled with fire. I could feel my skin bubbling and searing away.
If it turns out that LP was completely wrong about everything, and gets burned to a crisp and dies right here, without saving the wasteland or accomplishing anything else of note in all of her pointless, empty life of mayhem and destruction, I will literally take back every gay joke I have ever made about kkat and propose this book be nominated for a Hugo award.

Anyway, LP's fate is, of course, left ambiguous for now. Her last thoughts are of some random bullshit that Homage said to her at some distant point in the who-gives-a-fuck past, and the scene ends with her losing consciousness. End of chapter.

Chapter Forty-Five: The Virtue of Littlepoop

Today's fortune cookie:
>“But it was not until the end of this long road that the Stable Dweller learned the true meaning of that greatest of virtues: sacrifice.”
Well, I can't speak for the Stable Dweller, but about the only thing this long road has taught me the virtue of is alcohol.

Anyway, this is it; the final chapter. Just 10,519 more words to go, and we're at the epilogue.

As with all of the preceding chapters, this one opens with another rambling monologue from Littlepoop. This one, of course, deals with the concept of sacrifice. It's nothing but the usual pseudo-philosophical drivel that we've come to expect from kkat and his obnoxious little mouthpiece; however, I will quickly go through the bits that caught my eye.

>Every day is a struggle against the forces that attempt to compromise and erode anything good in your heart. It helps to have a cause, a purpose; but I have seen too many who have put their faith in those alone and been lead grievously astray.
As I've stated I don't know how many times, there is a gulf the size of the Grand Canyon between LP's view of herself and how she actually comes across. If she has ever had anything resembling a cause or a purpose at any point in this endless clusterfuck, I would be hard pressed to explain what it is. She's in no position to be criticizing how anyone else deals with life in the wasteland, or anywhere else for that matter.

>Raiders are those who failed to weather the moral ravages of the Wasteland. Velvet Remedy was wrong: they do have a reason for existing. The Wasteland is the cause to their effect.
As I've also stated I don't know how many times, the "raiders" are one of the silliest, most comically overstated edgelord elements of this story, and their existence makes no sense.

"Evil" is not some miasmic substance floating around in the air, turning anyone who breathes it into a mindless psychopath. There are only actions and the results of actions; the goodness or evilness of any action can only be evaluated subjectively based on results. The writer's job is simply to understand the motivations and personalities of his characters, and determine which actions they would be likely to take. If he does this correctly, the reader can make their own assessments of which characters are good and which ones are evil without needing to be told.

With that in mind, what exactly is the motivation of the raiders? What drives these otherwise normal ponies to suddenly don ridiculous Mad Max cosplay and run around disemboweling strangers for no reason? The "horrors of the wasteland?" That's not good enough. These guys are the horrors of the wasteland, so what was the prime mover there?
Anonymous
e23b118
?
No.321514
>>321510
I'm sure what I suggested earlier about the Raiders could have worked. If they started life as farmers or adventurers or worthless idiots or town-dwelling twats before failing at life and running into a choice between starving and becoming gangs of thieves, these gangs could have fought over territory. Some criminal gangs could devolve into tribes with superstitions and mythologies as hazing initiation rituals to weed out the wimpy grow crueller with time. Some gangs could rely solely on violence as a lifestyle and culture while others run drugs and sell slaves for food money with violence reserved for making examples of anyone who pisses them off. And over time the "typical" practice of sticking enemy bodies/heads on sticks around the borders of your land to show you mean business (and attract big Radroaches to eat) accelerates into making examples of those bodies/heads to scare other gangs into leaving you alone and scare nearby functional settlements into fearfully paying you tributes of food and purified water to leave them alone. Some motherfuckers invent thunderdomes to keep their skills sharp with practice duels when not making a big show out of duelling captured enemies to death/offering them a spot in the gang if they win. Some motherfuckers make a big gore pit with a trap door out of their town's destroyed sewer systems and love shoving enemies into it to die. Eventually assorted Raider tribes become so edgy and evil they've forgotten all the perversely barbaric showmanship in their rituals and evolving cultural traditions over 200 years initially started as a tool to avoid violence and get what they want (food) without risking their lives.

Also, it pisses me off that LP is relying on Spike's teleporting fire right now. That's such an obvious thing to try. How did nobody try this in over 200 years? Plus we saw Spike's fire obliterate an Enclave soldier ages ago. So as an audience unless we've watched the show and know Spike used to be able to teleport things we'd have no idea he can teleport things now until it's used as an asspull to solve this retarded issue.

Question: if LP found the frozen severed head of Rainbow Dash when running through an Enclave base and kept it, then leapt into Red Eye's Alicorn goo with herself and Calamity and an Earth Pony friend (Steelhooves? Maybe Life Bloom if he was an earth pony?) while clutching RD's head and statuette, and the resulting part-RD alicorn was able to access the SPP, would that make for a better story?
For such a tale to work I think the story would have needed to focus harder on these chosen three characters and their character growth over the course of the tale so we can feel something about their resulting fusion. I'm sure a competent author could make the audience cry at how Calamity's final thoughts as an individual would be of his love for Velvet.
But I still think it would be less retarded than relying on how taint conveniently made LP part-alicorn for no reason when taint usually fucks poners up. Sure that plan failed LP but it's retarded that the universe put her in a position to try it in the first place. She had Spike on her side long ago, asking him to teleport somepony into the SPP (maybe calamity?) should have worked back then making all the bullshit that happened after the heroes met "Watcher" aka Spike pointless.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
06d9b2e
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No.321585
321634 321649
fallout_equestria_background_by_atta_crossroads_d5yzzbx-fullview.jpg
>>321510

>I had finally discovered my virtue.
Yes, and unfortunately, since you're still talking and the book isn't over yet, it doesn't seem to involve being burned to a crisp the way I had hoped. Looks like kkat can kiss that Hugo goodbye.

Anyway, she's been saying for some time now that she's discovered her virtue, but I'm still not quite clear on what it's supposed to be. We learned in the previous chapter that her "special talent" is using her PipBuck to find people finding people, but I don't think that "special talent" and "virtue" mean the same thing in this story. My best guess is that her "virtue" will have something to do with selflessness or sacrifice, since that seems to be the kind of character that kkat believes he's writing about.

>I should have realized it when I first looked into the mirror of the soul. But I was too blinded by what I saw -- a blood-coated, dying raider -- to recognize what the mirror was actually showing me: the first time I truly acted in the spirit of sacrifice.
Yep, called it.

Anyway, the long and short of all this is that LP, continuing to trace the downward nautilus path of her own delusions, now genuinely believes that her purposeless murder-spree across the wasteland has been an act of noble self-sacrifice. She has more or less always believed this, but her most recent epiphany seems to have banished the last vestiges of self-doubt she was struggling with. Her narcissism stat is completely maxed out; nothing can stop her now. She has become GigaSue, Destroyer of Worlds.

>I believe in Pinkie Pie, in sunshine and rainbows. But of all the Ministry Mares, I think it has been Rarity, not Pinkie Pie, that I’ve felt the greatest connection to. The mare whose last act was to save her dearest friend. Who tore apart her own soul for those she loved.
I'm highlighting this passage mainly as an example of kkat's autismo, rambling writing style. This guy cannot pick a subject and stay on it to save his life; he just bounces around from thought to thought and word-vomits whatever idiotic thing pops into his head. Here, watch:

>My feelings are not surprising, for sacrifice and generosity are closely tied. But generosity is a much grander virtue with a much wider scope. I am not generous. I have never given anything but myself; and upon reflection, my sacrifice was often selfish -- a vehicle to protect those I love from facing harm even when it was their right to do so. My mistakes in Fillydelphia are perhaps the most brutal example.
Initially, she was talking about "sacrifice" and how this is her virtue. She then brings up Rarity for no good reason at all (her personal connection to any of the M6 is tenuous at best), which leads her off on a tangent about generosity. She then re-focuses on herself (which is really all she ever thinks about or talks about), babbling about how her acts of sacrifice were selfish and therefore she doesn't embody generosity. Did anyone ever ask if she embodied generosity? Did anyone ever ask her to compare herself to Rarity? The answers are "no" and "no." So why is this in the book?

Everyone who has ever attempted to write anything has probably wound up rambling at some point. I may even be rambling right now. However, the important thing is to learn how to focus your thoughts so you can avoid it as much as possible. If you don't catch it while you're writing, try to catch it in revision. Almost this entire opening monologue could have been cut. Anyway, my point is: try not to ramble.

>After my final discourse with Red Eye, I began to realize that I had been like an over-protective mother, stifling the growth of those I loved. Only now, finally, was I learning to let go. And still, it was the hardest and most painful thing for me to do. Sending my friends into battle against the Enclave without me… putting Ditzy Doo, the spirit of laughter and one of the most beautiful souls in the Equestrian Wasteland, on the front lines… it tore my heart out to not merely allow others to sacrifice, but to ask them to.
Or, alternatively, you could follow LP's example and do the exact opposite of not rambling.

Seriously, look at this shit: Red Eye -> being an over-protective mother -> learning to let go -> sending her friends into battle -> Ditzy-goddamned-horse-fucking-Doo -> the spirit of laughter -> heartbreak. This is her thought process. What is the point of telling us all of this? What are you trying to communicate, you loony twat?

>No, I was not truly generous. I was not Rarity, not even Red Eye.
>Nor was I truly Applesnack. But sacrifice lies in that space between generosity and perseverance -- between the desire to give so that others don’t have to and the drive to never give up, no matter the danger, no matter the cost.
"Am I like Rarity? Or am I more like Applesnack? Red Eye, maybe? No, after spending nine and a half paragraphs mumbling to myself about it, I don't think I'm really like any of those characters. So which character am I truly the most like? Ms. Crabtree? Chef? The 1982 Denver Broncos?" Blecch. Friendly reminder that this drivel is unironically one of the most highly-regarded works in the entire fandom.

What I think grinds my gears about this more than anything else is not just that she rambles, but how utterly narcissistic and self-absorbed this character is. She's not really talking about Rarity or Applesnack or her friends or anyone else she mentions here; this whole monologue is just about herself, and her perception of herself, and how much she's learned about herself, and how she's grown, and yada yada yada. It's nothing but vapid self-affirmation masquerading as deep reflection. We might as well be reading some millennial girl's Facebook posts.

Anyway, it just rambles on and on like this, and there's no point in delving much deeper. Here's a quick rundown of the topics she covers from here: corrupted virtue, friendship, Monterrey Jack, generosity again, sacrifice again, facing the fire.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
06d9b2e
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No.321634
321676
a.jpg
>>321585

Anyway, while it's still not clear what's actually happening yet, we are given the (hardly surprising) impression that even though LP "died" at the end of the previous chapter, through some kind of deus ex machina she has both survived and managed to bypass the shield.

>Faith doesn’t require you to be willingly blind or dogmatically stupid. I knew as I faced the fire that it was going to be more painful than anything I’d suffered before, and I was almost certainly going to die. But I also knew there was a chance, if only just a chance, that death might be… survivable. And Pinkie Pie had promised me sunshine and rainbows. Faith does require that you take risks. Sometimes, you have to risk everything.
If I were compiling selections from LP's memoirs to use as evidence to have her committed into psychiatric care, this one would probably be the centerpiece.

Let's back up and take a closer look at this:

When LP was poking around in the ruins of Canterlot, she came across an old memory orb belonging to Pinkie Pie. The memory shows an obviously drug-crazed Ponk having a bizarre hallucinogenic conversation with herself. Now, the fact that she addresses Littlepoop by name in the memory serves as pretty strong evidence that LP is witnessing something magical, intended specifically for her; there is likely a psychic connection between Ponk and Littlepoop, and LP is right to assume that there is an important message for her in here. However, the actual message Ponk gives her is completely vague: "face the fire."

"Face the fire" could mean any number of things in any number of situations. Maybe she's supposed to rescue a friend who finds herself in a dangerous situation. Maybe she is supposed to stand up against bullying or peer pressure. "Facing the fire" could be a metaphor for virtually any kind of difficult challenge.

Now, it's worth remembering that kkat is probably a middle-aged man who has spent the bulk of his adult life sitting in his mother's basement wearing adult-sized footy-pajamas and playing video games, and as such he is probably too autistic to think in metaphors or to use metaphors in his writing. However, even if we were to assume that the phrase "face the fire" means that LP will, at some point in the story, need to literally face a literal fire, there are still an endless number of things that this prophecy could refer to. Maybe there's a burning building that she needs to go into; maybe some final objective will be blocked by a pony armed with a flame thrower; maybe she'll find herself in a hopeless situation where arson is the only escape, and there is a very real possibility that she will die in the conflagration. Hell, maybe all it means is that one day she's going to have to hack through an extremely difficult firewall.

Point is, there is no way of knowing exactly what "face the fire" could mean, because it could mean literally anything. Nothing in Ponk's message suggests a specific situation or set of circumstances in which this message would be directly applicable.

Now, this kind of vague-message-that-turns-out-to-be-foreshadowing is a common enough device in fiction. However, the way it usually works is the character will be given a cryptic message which makes no sense at the time, but as soon as they encounter the situation it applies to, the meaning suddenly becomes clear. Unfortunately, the best example I can think of off the top of my head is the M. Night Shyamalan movie Signs (spoilered in case you haven't seen it and for whatever insane reason you actually want to): Based Mel Gibson is a former priest who lost his faith while watching his wife die. His wife's last words were "tell Michael to swing away," which he interpreted as just brain-tumor-induced gibberish and evidence that there is no God. However, towards the end of the movie, there is an alien attacking him, and his son Michael is standing behind it with a bat. He tells Michael to swing away, which he does, and it BTFOs the aliens and saves the day. Faith in God: restored. Is this a completely moronic story twist? Of course, and M. Night Shyamalan should be tarred and feathered for it. But, at the very least, it makes sense. Character is given a cryptic message, dismisses it as nonsense, suddenly finds himself in a situation where it applies, and uses it to solve an important problem and overcome a personal hurdle.

With Ponk's prophecy, this is not how it works. When she is trying to break the shield, LP has no indicator that she needs to face any fire. The shield is not made of fire, there is no fire present in any other aspect of the problem, and there is nothing indicating that fire would be helpful. Neither literal nor metaphorical fire has any relevance here.

So here is what happens: LP wants to break this shield that no one in 200 years has been able to break. Being the arrogant Sue that she is, she just assumes she will automatically be able to do it, because destiny and stuff. She comes up with a perfectly idiotic plan that pretty much anyone with half a brain could tell her was not going to work: basically, just walk up to it while carrying that stupid Rainbow Dash statue, assuming that fate or destiny or whatever would do the rest, because friendship and magic and whatever. Naturally, this plan fails.

Now, instead of simply realizing that her plan was stupid, or maybe just considering the possibility that she wasn't chosen by destiny to break this shield after all, she decides to suddenly call down her dragon friend and order him to set her on fire, for no reason beyond that 8 chapters ago she watched a memory orb where an obviously deranged Pinkie Pie said some crazy bullshit about facing fire that could have meant literally anything. This isn't brave, nor is it heroic, nor is it a leap of faith or intuition; it's just flat-out random and insane. Only a lunatic would do something like this and think it would have any positive effect, faith or no.
Anonymous
7eea4d7
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No.321649
>>321585
I kind of want to call the "The mirror wasn't showing LP an edgy copy of herself, she was showing herself the first time she sacrificed for another: When she defended whatshisname from Calamity!" a clever twist but it falls apart when you think about it.
Even with Kkat's attempts to mislead the audience with LP's bullshit about hearing negative voices or feeling like bad poners tell her to do bad things or repeating "corrupted kindness" over and over, it still falls flat because LP's been sacrificing herself before this point.
She sacrificed her peaceful home in the Stable to go out and bring Velvet home.
She risked her life fighting the Raiders of Ponyville and exterminating them just because Watcher/Spike asked her to.
She's wearing Raider armour in that scene specifically because she took it from raiders after a load of self-sacrifice and life-risking.
Kkat wanted this big dramatic reveal that recontextualizes earlier information but it just doesn't work unless you come up with some stupid illogical argument for why earlier good deeds didn't count but this one did.
An idiot could but he shouldn't, he should get a job and learn to code instead.
If anything, this act of self-sacrifice should count the least. She sacrificed her comfortable stable life for the Wasteland. After escaping the Raiders she turned around and went right back into hell for Watcher. But when losing and dying to Calamity, she defiantly threw herself into his sights and glared just so she can feel like she's dying a hero defending another, without actually giving up anything heroic or giving anything up to guarantee the win. It was sheer fucking luck that Calamity happened to be nice and recognize her attempt to protect whatshisface for what it was BEFORE blasting her brains across five counties.
Anonymous
7eea4d7
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No.321674
When all of this started I thought it would be cool to make a fixed version of FE but after all this text I've realized you'd make this story less awful by trimming unnecessary bullshit and you'd make it good by replacing the bullshit with better ideas.
But at that point it would be a fundamentally different tale.
not a meandering confused mess but a cohesive quest with a goal and a non-sueish protagonist with an arc and motivations and a realistic level of importance and competence that only goes up when he earns it.
How you fundamentally change it...
By ripping off Fallout and FIM better or ripping off an obscure source your target audience would never know of like an old DS strategy game?
By giving the hero more entertaining powers and battles or removing the focus on violence?
By making the hero someone you can enjoy looking at and reading about, or someone you can't stand and then forcing the hero to grow out of it?
That's up to you. Almost anything can objectively improve the story but choosing what to go with is too subjective to certainly say what would make this objectively "Fallout Equestria the definitive superior fanmade edition".
How beholden should any good Fallout+Ponies crossover writer be to the ideas of FE when Kkat is such a faggot?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.321676
321678 321679 321955
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>>321634

Anyway, kkat seems to have more or less realized how random his idea was here, because he attempts to justify it with wacky kkat logic. Unfortunately, his explanation just makes it worse:

>I said I would burn It, Rarity had insisted to Applejack after the other mare had called her on still having the Black Book. And I tried… I even tried to have Spike burn it. All that did was send it to Princess Celestia.
>The Black Book. A soul jar bound with a living soul. If It could survive the trip, soul intact, then there had been a chance, if just a chance, that so could I.
So basically, because this magic zebra book was able to survive being burned by fire, that must mean that LP can also survive being burned by fire, because...uh...friendship...and, uh, destiny...and...uhhhh...something about sunshine and rainbows...and...uhhhhhhh...wait a minute. What exactly is kkat trying to say here?

Anyway, whatever; hopefully it will all become at least somewhat clear if we keep reading.

Following the deus-ex-machina-bullshit playbook to the letter, LP awakens, completely unburnt and unscathed, in a completely new location. She looks around a little, and finds that she is inside some kind of refrigerated chamber that does indeed appear to be the interior of the Single Pegasus Project. There are some computer terminals, a frozen bottle of soda, and a sign that says "winter vestibule" for some reason. And of course, because it just wouldn't be FoE if it wasn't, the room is full of fucking skeletons.

So, kids, I guess the lesson of this episode is this: whenever you find yourself in a hopeless situation, just do something completely reckless, nonsensical, impulsive and dangerous, and everything will just magically turn out the way you want it to, because fucking reasons. I can only imagine the look on Celestia's face when she finally reads Littlepoop's letter.

Anyway, whatever; she pokes around the dumb room and looks at all the skeletons and junk.

>I winced as my hoof came down on the metal clamp of a clipboard. Looking down at it, I was struck by nostalgic memories of Calamity and SteelHooves joking about Stubbornite.
Who? What? What the actual fuck is...oh, whatever; it's probably just some long-forgotten bullshit detail from 36 chapters ago. Why am I even asking?

>Spike had, to my knowledge, never sent anything to anypony other than Princess Celestia. I had only my faith in Pinkie Pie’s words that, this time, his fire would take me where I needed to be in order to bring sunshine and rainbows back to Equestria. I could not deny that the reason it might do so is because that location, and Celestia’s final resting place, might be one and the same.
Alright, I think I'm finally beginning to get a faint glimmer of what was on LP's mind when she had Spike set her on fire. Canonically, Spike has the ability to send messages to Princess Celestia by breathing dragon fire on them and incinerating them. So, if you carry this idea to its most ridiculous logical extreme, theoretically anything that Spike incinerates with dragon fire would be magically transported to wherever Celestia is. If you ignore the fact that there is no guarantee that this would still work if Celestia is no longer alive to receive the message, and the fact that there is no reason to assume Celestia's corpse would be located in this room of all places, and the fact that there is certainly no reason to assume that a living creature being transported in this manner would actually survive the journey, I guess it kinda-sorta makes sense, in an absolutely-pants-on-head-retarded sort of a way.

Incidentally, didn't Spike use his dragon fire to roast a Steel Ranger alive at an earlier point in the story? I actually seem to remember that event provoking some discussion about this power of his; in fact I think there was even something spoilered that related to the scene we're on now. If LP was able to survive this journey, then logically, shouldn't the Ranger have survived as well? Shouldn't there be a Ranger wandering around in here? Couldn't that Ranger just as easily activate the SPP and dick around with the weather in the same manner that LP plans to? And if this is the case, and Spike understands what his fire can do, wouldn't it stand to reason that he would want to be a little more careful about who and what he sets on fire? I mean, if his fire breath is basically a one-way ticket to the single most important location in all of Edgequestria, would he really be so cavalier about spitting it at anything and everything that pisses him off? Kkat probably thinks he's being clever here, but all he's really doing is opening up a series of gigantic plot holes I could probably make a gaping anus joke but at this point I can't even be bothered.

>The shield around the S.P.P. was designed to let either of the Princesses through. And I had never found Her bones in Canterlot. It seemed to me that if She had died there with Her sister, then Nightseer would have probably been wearing both. Although perhaps not; perhaps, as the alicorn’s name suggested, she had a particular affinity for the Princess of the Night and Moon.
So basically, LP just assumed that because neither she nor Nightseer were able to find Celestia's skeleton in Canterlot, that means it must be here, in the lobby of the SPP? As opposed to, oh I don't know, literally any of the hundreds of thousands of other places it could possibly be?

Here is my personal headcanon: Celestia died on the crapper, became an environmental storytelling skeleton, and LP burns herself alive only to end up transported to a mares' room stall buried under rubble, deep in the bowels of Canterlot.

Anyway, it turns out I got it slightly wrong; the other pony that Spike fireblasted here was an Enclave soldier, not a Steel Ranger. LP finds her corpse frozen nearby. Why LP survived the trip and this pony didn't remains to be seen.
Anonymous
7eea4d7
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No.321678
those spikes are needles he blocked when an enemy tossed them at him.png
sandy vagina no jutsu.jpg
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his gourd of sand is shaped like that to remind people of tanuki nutsacks.jpg
>>321676
Everyone reading this remembers last time Spike spat fire at someone while fully intending to kill them, and it melted that Enclaver without sending him/her(dont remember or care) anywhere, right?
Everyone reading this remembers how the Soul Jars (Objects somebody put a fraction of his soul into) are invulnerable specifically because somebody's soul-chunk is inside them, right?

KKat's insistence that "Because X happened before and you accepted it then you must accept it now" reminds me of when Kkat pulled off several once-impossible feats at once in the thunderdome.
Levitating radioactive liquid, using it as a shield to block bullets, self-levitation and levitating a passenger, opening a lock from the inside via telekinesis to make her lockpicking skills irrelevant*, these were all bullshit moments that made smart viewers scream "If she could always do that, why hasn't she done such absurdly useful things before?"

But those examples were still logical extensions of abilities that already existed and were established. What's preposterous was how far they were being pushed, and that they were all being pushed at the same time.

Using telekinesis on things you can't see? LP already used it to pull pins from grenades she was telekinetically carrying but couldn't see. I suppose it isn't much of a stretch to say she could do it again with something more complicated than a grenade.
Telekinesis can lift things. Can it lift yourself? Sure if you want your OC to fly. Can it lift sand or water molecules? probably if you're skilled. Can it keep radioactive liquid goo together forcefully enough to block bullets like you're Gaara Of The Sand and it's time for your bullshit sand shield fursona/momfu? Fuck it, sure, why not. Might as well give these OP abilities to your sue while you're at it.
Making lockpicking as a concept and the very existence of locks a moot point via instant easy telekinesis? Fuck it, sure, why not, locks were already meaningless for this whore. Who cares if it raises questions like "Who the fuck would bother with locks in a world where a third of the population can psychically unlock anything from the inside without needing to see it".

I don't know if Kkat forgot how the rules of his own story work, or if this is some intentional sleight-of-hand where he's hoping his fans will associate invincible objects with LP and believe she can be invincible if he mentions them closely together and suggests this BS should work, but it doesn't work.

Even if it all did work, it's still a pointless moment of faked death for the sake of shocking and confusing the audience's retards. Like the obligatory fakeout death most shit stories have.

It would be easy for LP to yell "Hey, Spike! Flame-breath me inside that thing!" and hope it worked. Would be fast and easy.
But no, she had to be dramatic.
Had to mislead the audience and pretend LP is just sooooooo brave and self-sacrificing for making this choice even though she's not facing any real danger.
Had to build up false tension in a desperate attempt to build hype.
Had to give her another fucking opportunity to monologue and call herself Sue supreme.
Had to piss Spike off with a single line, making him lose his shit and attempt to murder Lightbringer The Sue right then and fucking there in the middle of a war everypony designated "Good" by the author is fighting for her sake because they all sincerely believed in her ability to fix shit and save the day. Holy shit, did Kkat realize what this stupid moment does to Spike as a character? If it wasn't for bullshit plot armour, Spike would be responsible for roasting alive not just any pony, but a pony this world considers its last best hope, right in the middle of a battle she organized and planned from the start, just because she said she lied about Twilight once or something. If this blatant act of manipulation that effortlessly played Spike like a fiddle didn't work out the way LP hoped, this story would end in a tragedy for this world's inhabitants and comedy for us as the target audience shits themselves in shock and rage because they felt entitled to a ridiculously sappy happy ending where everything just effortlessly works out perfectly on its own now that enough designated good people have sacrificed themselves for special deeds we're told were good, special deeds so special only the sufficiently special and eternally deserving of praise could ever hope to do them, and all the bad people have been sufficiently murdered (The Liberal fantasy, really, minus the anti-white asswitzes and gulags and white slave plantations).
Anonymous
7eea4d7
?
No.321679
>>321676
One more thing!

Remember how Princess Luna's corpse had been defiled in this story, and her skull was worn as a necklace by some edgy darkly-coloured Alicorn OC? I think LP also used that skull to kill the alicorn, I forget, and I forget if she remembered to bury Luna afterwards.

What the FUCK was Littlepip planning to do if Celestia's body had been similarly defiled, split apart, or was located deep underground, perhaps in a magically-sealed stone tomb with a lid so massive and heavy even her telekinesis couldn't break her out of it?

Then she'd just be trapped forever with Celestia's skeleton and nothing to eat.

I swear, if this Sue didn't have plot armour, she would have been gunned down for her supplies after stepping out of the vault faster than Spongebob and Patrick lost the Patty Wagon in the Spongebob Movie.
Anonymous
7eea4d7
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No.321748
Does anyone here think this story would be improved if LP's meeting with Red Eye had him utterly destroy her narcissistic violent pussy libtard mindset and leave her questioning everything?

Even when she escapes, his words would haunt her, control her. Even when she tries not to do as he says, she's still letting him control her.

Only when she figures out a superior ideological alternative to absolute rule under Red Eye or Gawd or any other faggot OC can she actually beat him in an argument on politics.

I think if she had to grow like that, a scene where she beats him in the argument would be an excellent way to show her growth. Not that LP had any growth in the original but anyway back to the grind. Those titties won't animate themselves.
Anonymous
6e83f2a
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No.321911
aw_dor_alignment_chart__long_by_wms366_d38lqqd-fullview.jpg
Surely there should be a scene where some villain is allowed to be right about LP, allowed to point out the hypocrisy she takes for granted, even if only so she can insist she's going to do what she wants anyway.

She never questions Gawd on what kind of society she wants to create, she simply takes for granted that because Gawd seems to be a decent (by her standards) creature, the civilization she creates won't be a shitshow.
She simply takes for granted that she and her friends are Good(TM) and any amount of murder and death they carry out for their own "greater good" simply must be for the good of the wasteland and its inhabitants. She fucking deserves a last-second story twist where it turns out Gawd was a cunt all along who wanted to create a cruel civilization full of everything LP hates like slavery and rape. She's so eager to throw her life away for the wasteland without any fucks given about what the wastelanders might want, she deserves to be told by Homage over the radio, minutes after a permanent paralytic immortality-granting "And I Must Scream"-style entombment within the SPP, that Gawd's a cunt who's taking over the world in the resulting power vacuum with the Enclave and Red Eye's twats gone.

Kkat tried so hard to make Red Eye into this charismatic, powerful, dangerous foe with infinite resources, infinite supplies of soldiers willing to die for him and infinite supplies of prisoners to pull out of his ass, and so on. Kkat did every cheap trick he learned from cheap stories and bad video games (strong guy, unfair resource advantages, generic take-over-the-world motivation, a hint of a cliche theme to set the character apart from every other similar villain out there) he knew of. And yet he isn't allowed to put up any real opposition against Littleshit The Sue or point out anything wrong with her plans. He can't even find fault in her! Or challenge her ideas through dialogue.

Would it really be so hard for Kkat to write Red Eye saying "In this wasteland, it's kill or be killed! There are no Alicorns, no gods, and no masters! Everypony is free to do whatever they want in chaos, and this is chaos. But I can bring order! I can bring stability!"

"By force!" LP should say. "Governmental power should come from the consent of the governed, not from the threat of force! Your nation of ex-raiders turned slavers is actually full of cunts who create inefficiency by abusing slaves, also slavery is bad for many economic reasons I'm going to list for at least six thousand more words-"

"Shut the fuck up, bitch! The Wasteland is a playground for strong ponies like you, it's a shooting gallery where you can gun down anypony at any time and quip about it afterwards. No guilt, no regret. You can't fire a gun into a crowd of Wastelanders without hitting at least one rapist, cannibal, raider, or cannibalistic rapist raider. Ponies can do whatever they want in a world of chaos, and you love gunning down ponies that choose violence and theft because it makes you feel morally superior, even if they only chose theft and violence out of desperation! If a pony's choice is to starve on the spot or steal from another, what right do you have to gun him down for not choosing the slow death?"

"Bullshit!" LP should say. "Everypony has a choice! The cloud covering is preventing large-scale farming but I've seen self-sustaining settlements that could handle many more good and useful members. There are still monsters to hunt for their meat, along with whatever they eat. We can still eat mushrooms and moss and bugs. Ponies don't have to gun each other down for 200 year old tins of beans! Still, I'd show more mercy to a petty thief than a Raider, one who makes a lifestyle and a career and even a tribal culture out of being a spectacularly disgusting serial murderer who makes gore art for fun. Are you telling me you don't think they deserve death?"

"They deserve to be worked to death in my mines, or my factories, or my Thunderdome! They should be used like resources for the greater good of the collective, dear Littlepip! Life is nothing but another resource to spend."

"What good is a collective if it won't let people choose whether they want to be a part of it or not, Red Eye? Nobody should own another's life, not a General, Slaver, or Government. The Wasteland's settlements thrive on a system of voluntary association and barter. Travelling badasses take on sidequests for rewards, it's great. We don't need large-scale armies or governments any more, we're making steps to rebuild the Wasteland into a better society without your cruel machinery!"

"You're just doing this because you're a bored twat who feels morally obligated to peek her nose into the business of others and kill whoever doesn't meet your standards!"

"Maybe," LP shrugged. "Serial rapists, slavers, mass murderers, none of them meet my standards. And if I don't kill them, who will? Maybe I'm just a bored wanderer who forgot why she was wandering in the first place thirty chapters ago. But I have the ability to set things right for others, so why shouldn't I do it?"

"Now you're speaking my language! I have the ability to build a new nation founded on slavery, industry, and glorious ruthless expansionism! We're a lot alike, you and I! We both feel we're doing this for our own greater goods."

"But you're just repeating the sins of the past! Governments caused the fall of Equestria, through cronyism and foolishness and war. Small self-governing settlements too economically dependent on one another to fight, this is the way forward for ponykind and zebrakind. No more warring nations, just homes."

"Foolish mare... When supplies are low, when times are bad, you fools will turn on each other and fight for scraps. Ideals die first when times are tough."

"My ideals will never die! Maybe I'm not some perfect goddess doing this out of the kindness of her heart, maybe I really do love the attention. But I'll fight for my better world anyway."

"As will I, Littlepip. As will I."
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
edff915
?
No.321955
321962 321969
download (33).jpeg
>>321676

>I… didn’t understand.
>Why was she here? And if she was, then why wasn’t the room full of propeller parts and everything else consumed by Spike’s breath?
At this point, it's starting to look like kkat has realized that his little dragon-fire-transportation angle makes things a lot more complicated than he had initially thought. He is now racking his brain, trying to remember all of the things that he has casually made Spike breathe fire on over the course of this story. He has realized at last that if books, scrolls and even ponies can transported hospitably to wherever Celestia's bones happen to be, and if Celestia's bones happen to be in the entrance chamber of the most powerful weapon in Edgequestria for some strange reason, then Spike's fire breath is a less than ideal weapon. Kkat basically has two options:

1) go back to every single place in the book where Spike has breathed fire on something or someone, and remove any instance that might complicate the story; or,
2) remove the fire-transportation angle entirely, and figure out another way for LP to get past the shield.

Unfortunately, kkat seems to have chosen a third option: hastily shart out a bunch of inner-monologue-diarrhea from LP, in which she attempts to wrap her head around how Spike's magic works, but ultimately concludes that she has no idea. Then, just move on with the story while leaving the problem completely unresolved. Kkat has a bad habit of acknowledging problems but refusing to try to solve them.

>I stared at the decomposing body of the mare in confused dismay. I had faced the fire of a dragon based on faith, thin evidence and a cripplingly desperate lack of options. If she was sent here the same way, then something must have made her different, just as something had made me different. But she wasn’t guided by a precognitive voice from the past. She wasn’t the Lightbringer. She wasn’t even a message.
Here, kkat seems to have realized that if LP can be burned by Spike's fire and survive the journey to Celestia, then logically the Enclave mare he burned earlier should have survived as well. However, if she did not survive, then logically LP should not either. This creates a conundrum for him: either both mares survived, which means that the Enclave mare should have been alive and well inside this SPP chamber all this time (which means she could have jumped the gun on LP and fired up the SPP on her own), or else neither mare survived, which means he needs to recruit a new protagonist to finish out the last chapter of the story. Instead of doing either of these things, however, he has once again chosen Option 3: just have the mare be dead for some mysterious reason, have LP wonder about it for a few paragraphs, and then move on without explaining it.

>Did forces such as destiny, purpose and intention play a part in dragon magic? If so, then it was not in the way ponies conceived of such things. Maybe they mattered in a more mysterious and nebulous existential way. I doubt Spike intended to send this mare anywhere… any more than he had planned to send the Black Book.
Here, kkat seems to be flat-out admitting that he didn't really think any of this shit through before he started writing, and that he really doesn't have an answer for why LP is alive and this other mare is not. It seems that the best thing he could come up with is "LP was chosen by fate or destiny or whatever, so she was protected; this other mare was just some random pony that Spike killed so she was not." At least that's what I'm getting out of this.

>I felt a sudden weakness in my knees as I glimpsed the breadth of my lack of understanding. I felt suddenly like I had taken my leap of faith without even grasping the idea of gravity.
Here, LP seems to be flat-out admitting that she doesn't understand how any of this shit works, either.

>The chill of the room began to seep in as I stood over the Enclave mare, deep in thought. I recalled part of a tale Spike had told us: how a hiccup had sent a bundle of scrolls tumbling down on Celestia’s head. It was an accident… but they were scrolls. Their purpose was to bear messages. The Black Book itself desired for its influence to be spread.
Here, kkat is saying...actually, I'm not quite sure what he's saying here. The Zebra Necronomicon made Spike dump some scrolls on Celestia's head, I guess? I really don't know.

>Or maybe this dead mare wasn’t who I believed she was, and I was just spinning nonsensical wheels in my head.
>How does she get in and out? I had asked Lionheart, looking at a pink-warped glass ball which had, centuries before, been designed to hold a small pet.
>Dragon magic.
>I winced, an unpleasant ache in the back of my brain. Dragon magic. One more thing to add to the list of Stuff That Makes My Head Hurt. Right up there between Enclave politics and rock farming.
>But still below pony-pulled train engines.
Here, kkat's autism has completely taken over, and he is once again bouncing randomly between various subjects that have nothing to do with each other.

Anyway, after she finishes gibbering like a mental patient, LP moves past the dead mare towards the door at the end of the room. But oh noes! The lock is made out of clouds. She has a spell that lets her walk on clouds, but it won't let her pick locks that are made out of clouds. So, she decides to look around for a key, which I guess is also made out of clouds.

Meanwhile, a security screen kicks on and an image of Nightmare Moon appears, telling her to stop doing what she is doing. She refuses, and continues to hunt around for the key. Then, it turns out that Nightmare Moon is actually Celestia. At first, LP thinks it is just an elaborate security system. Then, it turns out that it's actually the real Celestia, who I guess has become a computer program? Or maybe she's in some deeper part of the SPP, using the screens to communicate? I honestly don't know; hopefully it will get clearer as we read on.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
edff915
?
No.321962
321997
5042254324_7a4a49cabc_b.jpg
>>321955

As the conversation progresses, we begin to get a clearer picture of what's going on.

It appears that Celestia is still alive; she has been inside the SPP for all this time. She has been observing the wasteland using the equipment in here, the same system that LP was going to use to watch Homage shower. She appears to already know Littlepoop:

>“…But I do remember watching you before,” Celestia interrupted my epiphany, her voice taking on a motherly tone, almost gentle but not without an edge. “You are Littlepip, she of the colorful vulgarities, am I right?”
This is what Celestia considers to be the most memorable thing about Littlepoop? Not the murders, not the ridiculous overuse of teleportation magic, not the chaos and destruction she's sown everywhere she's gone? The naughty language is the thing that sticks out in her mind? Just checking.

>Of the…?! EEEP! Celestia knew me… and for that?! I wanted to hide. But there was simply not enough everything in the universe to bury myself under.
Cue the stock footage of bronies clip-clopping their hoovesies together and cackling like retards.

>“I put Luna to rest,” I told Her quickly, wanting to ease the harmful memory. “I burned Luna’s bones, and slew the monster who desecrated Her.”
>My words felt weak and pathetic in my muzzle, but the expression on Celestia’s face was of such undeserved gratitude that I found myself bowing before Her just to escape it.
Being the Mary Sue that she is, it's only natural that LP would be shown gratitude by the setting's literal god. And how humble she is, too! Truly a worthy heroine.

>“Rise, my little pony,” Celestia chided softly. “I am no one worth your deference.” I glanced up in surprise at Her melancholy words, not moving from my position. “There are too many dead because of me for any pony to show me such reverence. I would bow to you if I could.”
It just keeps getting better and better, don't it?

>My nerves felt covered in ice. My eyes burned. I felt the heat of a tear trickle down my right cheek as I began to cry for my Goddess.
Seriously; 161 Nazi officers were tried and convicted at Nuremberg for "war crimes," yet somehow this faggot is allowed to keep writing prose like this.

Anyway, they yak for awhile about how the war started. Celestia of course blames herself for what happened, and LP of course tries to convince her that it wasn't her fault, and it just sort of goes back and forth like this for awhile. It's all pretty maudlin; Celestia details how she and Luna were trying to save ponies during the gas explosion or whatever the fuck happened in Canterlot, and how Luna "died in her arms" ponies don't have arms btw, and so forth and so on. Cue the sad violin music. The long and short of it is that after her sister died and everything got kerploded, a grief-stricken Celestia fled to the Single Pegasus Project and took refuge inside.

>Celestia seemed mildly thankful for my effort. “...and as a reward, I have been trapped here, in My prison, My purgatory. Listening to the victims of My sins, unable to act. Unable to help.” She seemed to look past me, Her gaze shifting across the bones. “I’ve done what I could to prevent anypony from becoming like me. And to prevent those camped outside from gaining access to this place.”
Just out of curiosity, why hasn't Celestia fired up the SPP and did whatever LP and Red Eye both intended to do; take control of the weather and all that? This is such a glaringly obvious question that not even kkat could miss it, so I'm assuming he's going somewhere with this; still, I thought it was worth calling attention to.

Anyway, they keep on yakking. For some bizarre reason, kkat decides to call the reader's attention to the first broadcast that LP heard on the night she left the stable, the one about the guy whose son ate a poisoned apple and died. Apparently it has been playing non-stop in here since forever ago. The significance seems to be that the guy's son died from poison that Celestia unleashed; the zebras launched some recreational McNukes™ at Canterlot, and Celestia diverted them into Whitetail Woods, where they kerploded and infected everything in the area with radiation or taint or whatever. I guess it's supposed to be tragic; Celestia is forced to listen to a broadcast on endless repeat that showcases the consequences of her sin, or something to that effect.

In relatively short order, we are given an answer for the question I posed above. Apparently, Celestia decided to go the same route that SteelHooves' old retarded grandpa had planned on taking: she uploaded her consciousness into one of the Maneframe I still hate this word computers in order to become immortal. Since she's been alive for 1000 years, I had assumed she was basically immortal to begin with, but we'll put a pin in that for now. In any case, she is now a disembodied consciousness trapped inside the computer system; she can observe everything that goes on in Edgequestria, but she is incapable of action.

"But," I can hear you asking, "If Celestia is inside the computer, and the computer controls the SPP, then shouldn't she still be able to control the weather?" Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but kkat thought of that as well:

>None of that download-your-brain nonsense, Rainbow Dash had explained to Luna. I had them disconnect all that stuff. I want a living pony running Equestria’s weather, not some machine that thinks it’s a pony!
>“Rainbow Dash… Apple Bloom…” I said weakly. “Celestia… they disconnected the mental download system from the controls. That was part of the design.” I had known this, but I had imagined they would have removed that part of the Crusader Maneframe completely, not left it intact but severed.
So basically, it was all Rainbow Dash's fault. For some reason, instead of just trusting this system to a sentient computer that could run indefinitely, she wanted a live pony to be trapped in here until they died, working the controls manually.
Anonymous
6183881
?
No.321969
Meme.png
>>321955
>(which means she could have jumped the gun on LP and fired up the SPP on her own)

This could actually be an interesting angle of conflict, if done and set up better. The Enclave would ABSOLUTELY not want this system to fire off. So what if the mare who was sent back ages ago, a loyalist to the enclave, had sabotaged the system herself in an act of final sacrifice, and Littlepip had to undo said sabotage somehow with her pipbuck repair autism, giving her a purpose and also posing an interesting conflict where she's undoing the "final, noble sacrifice for their cause" of someone else? Dunno. Just gave me a thought.

And Celestia is indeed "alive as a computer program". This is one of the final references of the story, and this time to New Vegas's Mister House. Their consciousness is inside of this computer, somehow, despite presumably dying together with her sister in Canterlot to seal the Pink Cloud inside of the city. However to be fair i'm not sure if anything requiring her to be stuck in the city was stated, so that's a big shrug I guess.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
edff915
?
No.321997
322034 322048
bliss_xp_default_wallpaper.jpg
>>321962

>Spike had once asked me: Have you ever heard the old saying ‘The portal to hell is opened with the incantation of good intentions’? If there was a moral to their story, I guess that would be it.
>It was the story of Equestria’s fall in miniature. DJ Pon3’s words rang in my head. The one great reality of the Wasteland, the truth of the matter: every pony has done something they regret.
These passages are worth highlighting, simply because it seems like kkat has been trying off and on to work this in as a major theme. All of the canon characters seem to have tried to do good, and ended up doing bad instead. It's a rather simplistic message, but it's suited well enough to a setting like MLP, and is probably not terrible in and of itself. The problem is that the events of this story, particularly the pre-apocalypse portion, are so convoluted that it's hard to assess whether or not it actually applies.

"Oh, if only Rainbow Dash hadn't inexplicably severed the AI override controls on her weather machine, because for some reason instead of automating it she wanted to entomb a live pony in there until they presumably starve to death; otherwise Celestia wouldn't have gotten trapped inside with no power to control the weather after she diverted a nuclear explosion into the woods where it inadvertently poisoned some random guy's kid and also destroyed the world or something! Oh, if only the zebras hadn't flipped their shit because Nightmare Moon's armor was made out of meteors or something and then fired a bunch of nukes at some school that Princess Luna had built, where Celestia had placed a bunch of children in order to make some dumb joke to her sister about sending children to the moon; otherwise the ponies wouldn't have fired back and started a gigantic war with lots of blood and guts explosions, pew pew pew!" This isn't exactly the kind of life lesson that can fit into a one-page scroll to Celestia.

Anyway, from here kkat's autism once again takes control, and the conversation veers off sharply into some pretty ridiculous territory. Through a random autistic chain of reasoning, Littlepoop decides to suddenly ask about the Zebra Necronomicon, and it turns out that yes, Celestia had read it at one point and that is how she got the idea to alchemically transmute herself into a living computer program. For reasons that would only make sense to kkat, this makes LP suddenly think about dragon fire, and she asks Celestia if she learned how to use that too, and if that was how she sent messages back to Spike way back when. Celestia confirms this. She also irrelevantly adds that the dragon that used to live under Canterlot, the one that was transformed into Mouse, was the dragon that taught her how to do this.

>No wonder the shield around the S.P.P. Central Hub was so invulnerable. No wonder it had lasted so long. It was being powered by Celestia’s soul.
I thought the shield was something that Rainbow Dash had set up, and that it had existed already before Celestia even got there?

Anyway, with all that silliness out of the way, LP now decides it's time to get down to brass tacks and do the thing she came in here for. She opens the door to the weather control chamber, but before she goes inside, she asks Celestia to show her images of her friends, so she can at least verify that they are okay. Turns out everyone is fine: Ditzy Doo freed all the slaves in Fillydelphia, Xenith was wounded in her fight with Stern but is being tended to by her daughter, Gawd and the other griffons are forming some kind of government council for Nu-Edgequestria that has Life Bloom representing the ponies, Velvet is singing her dumb songs and playing nursie as usual, and Homage has been hiding out in a cave in the middle of nowhere for the last several weeks.

>Then, impossibly, Homage shifted. She looked up. Right up at the camera that was high on a tower so far away that she couldn’t possibly see it.
>Her muzzle opened. And she mouthed the words: “I love you, Littlepip.”
D'aww, how cute. It's so adora-worable that you can almost ignore how utterly preposterous it is.

>“Homage has been using the towers for a long time,” Celestia reminded me. “She knows them.” And somehow, my Homage… the mare who had seen ghosts, found weapons from space and had encounters with strange ponies who lived in blue boxes… could feel that she was being actively watched.
Well gee whiz, I guess that explains it perfectly. There's certainly egg all over my face now.

Anyway, Celestia now informs Littlepoop that, due to the autism about dragon fire that was covered a few paragraphs ago, she is able to send her back to the other side of the shield the same way she came in.

Since Celestia is a disembodied consciousness trapped in a machine, I find it a little curious that her magic would still work just the same as when she was a live alicorn. I'm also a little curious why, if this is indeed the case, she wouldn't still be able to operate the SPP's controls. The most basic form of magic, that can be carried out by even the most magically unskilled unicorn, is the simple manipulation of objects using a magic aura. If Celestia was capable of raising and lowering the sun and moon back when she was a corporeal alicorn, it stands to reason she would have had no trouble using magic to pull a few levers and push a few buttons. And if she is able to use the same magic now that she had when she was corporeal, it stands to reason she would still be capable of this action. Just food for thought.

In any case, it doesn't seem to matter much, because LP naturally declines Celestia's offer, electing instead to simply send a message back to Spike reassuring him that he didn't kill her when he set her on fucking fire, so he can stop worrying about that. However, that is not the end of it; the conversation meanders for several more paragraphs, and I will have to cover the rest of it in a new post because space.
Anonymous
d6ba659
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No.322031
f9f9c9c1b350c62ddd4aeb9422b30ee1.png
>>321499
I guess I should use this opportunity to be in somekind of faux-outrage at your quirky quip but I'll just point out the fact photoshopping in Glimarkle Spimmer into dfferent images isn't really the same as using the same image over and over again as you said you would.
It's really funny though. It creates this silly narrative of Spimmer running around the world.
Also, because I know you love Twist and anthro.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
edff915
?
No.322034
322035 322040 322115 322117 322133
ab614b22a9b0ed4d006402d70bb32171.jpg
>>321997

The conversation meanders quite a bit from here, but the basic gist of it is that LP is now faced with her big moral dilemma. She can either abandon her deranged mission and return to the life she had, or she can give up that life in service to the world. If she does the first thing, she gets to go back to her friends and Homage and all that, but the state of the world does not change. If she does the second thing, the world is presumably saved, but she has to sacrifice the rest of her life in order to give that future to others.

Celestia points out that the choice is actually not so cut and dry. Her point of view, after 1000 some-odd years as a pony and 200 some-odd years as some kind of talking screen saver, is that you should just enjoy the life you have. She argues that the ponies out in the wasteland are probably going to die one way or the other, and there is really no guarantee that LP's actions are going to change anything for the better. Her advice is to just shrug off this whole insane idea and go lick her girlfriend's snootch.

This is a surprisingly well-reasoned point of view; it's amazing an idea this sane made it into this book at all. To be fair, though, kkat buries it under a pile of the usual sort of autism: there's a lot of meandering bullshit about Twilight Sparkle and other events from the show that have little bearing on anything that's going on, and ultimately LP rejects Celestia's advice anyway.

She decides to stay behind and go through with her silly mission, not because of anything that has to do with the moral choice that was presented, but because Celestia's disembodied consciousness is all alone up here without any friends. So, LP decides to stick around and be Celestia's friend, while simultaneously going through with her goofy plot to destroy most of the Enclave's cropland and screw around with the weather, because kkat is literally this autistic.

With this matter more or less resolved, Littlepoop goes inside the SPP's control room, where she finds Celestia's skeleton strapped into the controls. Whew, that's a relief; it's been almost an entire subchapter since I've seen a skeleton, and I was starting to get worried. Celestia now asks LP to burn the bones in some kind of ritualistic funeral pyre, which she does. Because she has severe autism, she also feels compelled to do the same with all of the other skeletons in the room, before ascending to the control platform. For some completely unexplained reason, the artificial weather inside the room changes from simulated winter to simulated summer once the burning is complete.

From here, the text meanders into an irrelevant side-monologue about Winter Wrap Up. Once this concludes, LP finally climbs into the goddamn driver's seat of the stupid pegasus thing. She opens her saddlebags and takes out a bunch of mementos that she wants to keep with her while she's in her weather-magician coma: Calamity's hat, her gun, those silly M6 figures, some crayon drawing that Silver Bell apparently did for her eons ago that I'd forgotten about, the ashes of that anonymous dead filly that she's still carrying around with her (because that's not creepy or anything), her raunchy memory orb, and so forth and so on.

At this point I really wish she would just flip the damn switch and get this over with already, but it seems that kkat wants to draw things out a little longer. Because she has severe autism, LP now asks Celestia to show her what Calamity is doing right now. Why she didn't ask to see him back when she was asking to see all of her other friends is beyond me. She asked for Life Bloom by name, even though he is a casual acquaintance at best, but the pony she apparently considers her best friend she forgot about until literal seconds before coma-time. Whatever, who cares; we're almost done with this.

In any case, Calamity is doing his usual bullshit: zipping around, dodging missiles, capping bitches left and right, and so forth and so on. Spike appears to have received LP's message about not being dead, so the two of them decide that now is the time to get back to Spike's cave. They reason that the Enclave will want to counterattack it because they all recognize Spike and know where he lives, and they need to get back there and protect it because something something the Gardens of Equestria. After pointlessly monologuing to herself about how similar she thinks she is to Scootaloo, LP asks Celestia if it will be possible to send her friends a last message. Celestia tells her that no, it's not possible; however, since LP is a skilled "toaster repairpony" nice to see that tired old joke making one last appearance, she can probably nigger-rig something.

This is good enough for LP, so she puts on some kind of memory-extracting helmet that is in here for some reason, and begins reciting:

>If I’m going to tell you about the adventure of my life -- explain how I got to this place with these people, and why I did what I’m going to do next -- I should probably start by explaining a little bit about PipBucks…

Aaaaand....that's it. That's the end of the chapter, and the story. Turns out this whole thing was just some narcissist's incoherent autobiography, dictated into some kind of wacky weather machine.

It's been obvious since Chapter 1 that the narrator was telling her story to someone; the mystery was just that we didn't know the who or the why. I've been intermittently wondering what the reveal was going to be; I've even suspected the whole text might just be an extremely long "Dear Princess Celestia" letter. Though I'm glad that kkat at least had enough sense to avoid such a brony-cliche ending, I still have to say: as far as big payoffs go, this one was pretty meh. There are no surprises here; presumably LP just climbs into the weather machine like she planned, and that's that.

Anyway, we still have an epilogue and some other shit to get through. Sit tight; we're almost done.
Anonymous
d6ba659
?
No.322035
>>322034
>Sit tight; we're almost done.
Wow! Glimmer! Great moves!
Wow! Glimmer great.
It's a good day to have a good day.
It's a good day to have a good day.
Anonymous
d6ba659
?
No.322036
322038 322039
I feel that it's common for the ending of a long story to be lackluster for ametuers. They probably wrote from the seat of their pants till the end but since they're pretencious a normal ending isn't enough so they start spouting psuedo-philosophy.
Anonymous
d6ba659
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No.322038
322039
>>322036
To cover up that their ending is the normal, "Good guys win and bad guys lose."
Anonymous
d6ba659
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No.322039
322040 322049 322131
>>322036
>>322038
Though, a bit of an unfair assessment of me since I haven't even read GG's leastest recaps that throughly. I just assumed this would be the case.

>Celestia points out that the choice is actually not so cut and dry. Her point of view, after 1000 some-odd years as a pony and 200 some-odd years as some kind of talking screen saver, is that you should just enjoy the life you have. She argues that the ponies out in the wasteland are probably going to die one way or the other, and there is really no guarantee that LP's actions are going to change anything for the better. Her advice is to just shrug off this whole insane idea and go lick her girlfriend's snootch.
>This is a surprisingly well-reasoned point of view; it's amazing an idea this sane made it into this book at all.
Though, counterpoint (I might not really know all the circumstances to this still) to die to improve the well-being of the world is pretty good way to go. Really, the only problem is that she isn't leaving someone (A child of her own) to continue her bloodline. Otherwise, what should we die for?
Though, I guess one could argue that LP isn't that good and the idea that this character would sacrifice herself for others is questionable. But again, I don't feel as if I know her enough to make a statement like that but that could be why you feel this scene doesn't work, assume.
Anonymous
d6ba659
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No.322040
>>322039
>>322034
Anonymous
c22bd10
?
No.322047
A thought occurs.

F1, you were chosen for a "get your Vault a new Water Chip" quest. Then it became "deal with the Super Mutant menace before it kills us all".
F2, you're looking for the Geck to save your irradiated tribal village and fighting the Enclave along the way.
F3, you're looking for your dad and happen to stumble into the Good Brotherhood's war with the Evil Enclave, eventually following the Brotherhood and your giant robot friend as they fight for you so you can get to the Magic Water Purifier.
FNV, you're a mailman shot in the head for your Platinum Chip because Benny is betraying House who needs the chip to hold onto his Vegas during the upcoming NCR vs Legion war for Hoover Dam. You're thrust into the role of the most important person who does sidequests for your chosen faction to prepare for your victory over the dam.

Fallout Equestria, a celebrity tricks you into taking her tracking device off and she flees the Stable. Fags blame you so you decide to head into the Wasteland to bring her back home. You immediately forget your goal and risk your life fighting slavers and raiders for no apparent reason until you eventually stumble into Velvet singing for and healing the slavers you're effortlessly genociding. Then you have nothing to do. Also you stumble upon Spike and the Gardens Of Equestria. So you decide to talk to the radio whore who loves you. She sends you to get her some CDs. At one point the Brotherhood Of Applejack's Steel Rangers slaughter your vault except not really and then decide to have a goodies vs baddies civil war over whether their organization should be goodies or baddies. There was a rock prison that never mattered again and wasted many words and LP blowing up a dragon meant nothing because Red Eye had a CyberTech Dragon the whole time. And at one point the Brotherhood sends you into Red Eye's lands as a slave hoping you'll work your way to the top and then kill him but you fail and flee with a zigger slave who's now your property and is conveniently unmindreadable. You go to the Goddess who tells you to get the Black Book and eventually your invisible zigger friend nukes her land with a nuke you somehow talked Red Eye into giving to you also you erased your memories of this dumb obvious plan. The explosion happened to catch some Enclave fags in it so they're trying to obliterate the whole wasteland like they think they're the fucking Fire Nation from Avatar showing off for Sozin's Comet. Red Eye always wanted to be a male alicorn but LP killed him and the boss of the Enclave and now she wants to take over a weather machine that will hopefully crown her god of the wasteland. She could have done this with Spike's fire breath at any moment but first she wanted a big war to distract the Enclave so she could see if being very similar to RD and carrying her Statuette would let her into the SPP even though supposedly a poner carrying RD's severed head couldn't get in. Ponies sacrificed and bled on the Day Of Littlepip's Bullshit based on a hunch when all LP had to do was ask Spike to teleport her to Celestia and hope for the best the second she met Spike. All of this could have been avoided. So much of this story was pointless and it doesn't feel like an intentional comedy or tragedy.

This isn't a story! It's just a sequence of events!
Anonymous
c22bd10
?
No.322048
>>321997
>seen ghosts, found weapons from space and had encounters with strange ponies who lived in blue boxes… could feel that she was being actively watched.
Holy shit, is that a motherfucking Jojo's reference? You know because Dio can tell when he's being watched?
It's also a reference to Fallout and Doctor Who. At this rate I'm surprised that stupid fucking Doctor Who cameo wasn't added into the story as a story-swallowing "Doctor Whoves" reference. Come to think of it if the Tardis exists in this story LP's goal should be to avert Edgequestria's destruction, unless the laws of wibbly wobbly writer retards say so.
Anonymous
c22bd10
?
No.322049
322131
>>322039
The scene is incredibly maudlin. Celestia is the last pony who'd encourage another to give up on their dreams and not go for a heroic sacrifice. Even after fucking up, she'd still only offer "want to give up and go home?" if she was testing a pony to see if their heart was true.

Celestia is the last pony who'd ever say "we're all going to die some day so why not give up on the wasteland and bury your face into horse pussy until your heart gives out?".

In good sequels that use the "character from the original has become old and cynical and powerless" cliche, a young idealistic hero brings back their power and determination and hopefulness using a heroic speech full of trite cliches. Or the young hero calls the old faggot a faggot and gives up, only for the old faggot to fly in at the last second saving the day like Han Solo yelling "I changed my mind, kid!".

Celestia has been turned into a prop for this story. A plot device. An object to help LP make herself look good by saying "I want to be her friend". It's pointless. She didn't have to be here like this. She's just a way to force some last second exposition into the story and pay off some """chekovs gun""" about poison apples that never mattered because it never happened to a character who mattered. In the moment everyone assumed "virus or radioactive apples or poisonous pesticide" and moved on with their lives. Bur Kkat wanted to pretend this was some genius twist. It fuckinf wasn't.

also Kkat just read something about the Temptation stage of the Hero's Journey where the hero is offered the chance to give up and fuck off and chooses not to. Or more likely, he watched one movie or game or episode of a TV show that used this cliche and decided his "oh so noble and self sacrificing" OC would look even better if he ripped it off.

I recall seeing it used cleverly in Legend Of The Seeker. The hero didn't really get the chance to give up on his quest, he was just trapped in the villain's Genjutsu and made to think his quest was all just a dream so he'd hopefully give up vital intel to Rahl.
Anonymous
9b07109
?
No.322115
my-little-pony-фэндомы-true-anon-mlp-комикс-3802809.png
>>322034
>Sit tight; we're almost done.
>Doesn't post.
Kek. Imagine not finishing what you start.
Anonymous
9b07109
?
No.322117
5260313ba8a52e50b5da6b68f576bbb6.jpg
>>322034
Add this, https://www.fimfiction.net/story/13565/naked-singularity to your list. I think it'll be up your alley. Hint hint: You're a fucking degenerate! :CCC
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
10c2ba6
?
No.322131
322143 322156
7531956841ad593102e7c9183a58eb70.jpg
>>322039
>>322049

It's probably worth expanding a little on what I was talking about, since it basically touches on some stuff I was going to talk about anyway.

As I've said before, the problem with Littlepoop is that her motivations or goals have never really been clear. She just sort of wandered outside one day, decided that the world was hopelessly fucked-up, and took it upon herself to put things right. The author seems to take it as a given that the reader will just instantly see the sense in her point of view and agree with it, and that her character requires no motivation other than a vague desire to do the "right thing" and "save" the world.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I see Littlepoop as having an attitude similar to someone like Barack Obama. For no reason other than hubris, she takes it upon herself to fundamentally transform the world she lives in according to her own whims. Nobody asked her to save the world, and it never occurred to her to ask the world if it wanted saving; she just decided one day that she could make everything better, and assumed that destiny had given her carte blanche to do whatever was required to bring her ideals to life.

These kinds of people are the ultimate narcissists. They never recognize themselves as such, because they always see themselves as humble servants of some greater good. However, their arrogance always comes through in their actions. Look at Littlepoop: was there any logical in-world reason for her to assume that she would be able to penetrate the impenetrable shield, or that she would have any natural ability to operate the Single Pegasus Project which you literally have to be a pegasus to operate; it's in the name ffs and control the weather? The answer is no on both counts; yet she never once doubted that it was her destiny to do both of these things. Her only motivation is this arrogant belief that she alone has the power to re-create Equestria as an idyllic utopia, but she frames this as an act of humble self-sacrifice. God has called her to die for the sins of the world, and even though she doesn't want to die, she is willing to do so if it will redeem others; this is how LP and her creator fundamentally sees her role.

What I like about Celestia's remarks here or at least my interpretation of them; it's likely that kkat didn't intend for them to be taken this way is that she's essentially telling LP that she's full of shit. She points out that her actions may not produce the results she intends; she's basically destroying the only food source that the pegasi have, and her actions will completely upend life in the wasteland. There's no telling what ultimate effect this will have; it's entirely possible that she will make things worse, or that nothing meaningful will change. She implies that LP is probably sacrificing herself for nothing.

Here is exactly what she says:

>“Life,” Celestia remarked sadly, “is not always a gift. And death is inevitable. Or, at least it should be. Even my Sister died.” The melancholy in her voice was unbearable. “That’s the real evil of the Black Book. It changes that. It steals death from you and calls it a gift. It’s lying. I’ve lived so long, alone, watching ponies die. I’ve seen more than you could know. Please, trust Me when I say that the ponies you save by sacrificing yourself will die soon anyway.”
>I couldn’t believe my ears. This was not the Celestia that I worshipped. “What are You saying?”
>“I’m saying… isn’t it better for the gift of a slightly longer life to be given to those who have truly earned it, who deserve it most? Isn’t it better to hold onto those you love?”
Basically, the pones of the wasteland are the architects of their own fate. There's no miasmic evil floating around turning ponies into raiders and slavers and whatnot; they chose that life for themselves. She basically calls LP's entire worldview into question: maybe the world isn't just black and white, and maybe there isn't some magic switch you can flip that toggles between "wasteland" and "pastel utopia." Maybe the world just is what it is, and ponies are going to make their own decisions with or without her input. Above all, maybe LP isn't fate's chosen one. Maybe she doesn't have the power to change the world, and even more profoundly, maybe she shouldn't try to change it even if she did have that power. Maybe she should just set aside her wacky, purposeless, self-aggrandizing quest, and simply live life for what it is. Solid advice, imo.

Anyway, that's basically my take on it.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
10c2ba6
?
No.322133
322144
04-Black-Hole-Event-Horizon.png
>>322034

Epilogue: Of Forgiveness and Fallout

No more fortune cookies, it would seem.

Anyway, the epilogue starts off with a very large block of italicized text. Since LP's role as narrator is presumably over, I'm assuming this is going to be some kind of supplemental narration from the perspective of some other character, probably one of the nameless NPCs that Littlepoop labored so hard to save, that gives us a quick glimpse of what took place after LP's story ended. My best guess is that this will take the form of a letter, a journal entry, or some other type of communication.

>It’s been two weeks since the afternoon that Wastelanders everywhere have come t’ call the day of sunshine an’ rainbows. The day that massive surges of rainbow light an’ sound -- sonic rainbooms -- burst from twenty-three of the great towers, clearin’ away the blanket of clouds that had covered the skies above for all our lives, an’ the lives of everyone an’ everything born after the great war.
I find that "sonic rainbooms" are a bit overused in this story. I'll admit that the toxic-colored rainboom that Derpy pulls off at one point was kind of a neat idea, but it loses a bit of its novelty each time it happens. Once was probably enough.

In any event, my understanding of a rainboom is that it was an after-effect of Dash flying fast enough to break the sound barrier, and the rainbow color of the explosion was, at least partially, an optical illusion created by her rainbow-colored mane flying at an extremely high speed. Derpy shouldn't even be able to make one; her "boom" should be colored grey and yellow or the color of rotted flesh, or whatever she's supposed to look like in this story. I don't see any reason why the towers should be able to produce this effect.

Anyway, the yet-unnamed author goes on to explain that he/she will always remember seeing the rainbooms firing off, and the clouds clearing away, and the sunlight bursting through the dispersing cloud cover, and so forth and so on. The visuals are decent.

>And then, I spotted a balefire phoenix, her coat a majestic, iridescent emerald an’ gold, dancin’ an’ cavortin’ amongst the ephemeral rainbows forming all across the sun-drenched sky.
This pushes it a bit over the top, though. Velvet's bird doesn't seem to have played any significant role in the final battle; I'm not sure why it's being mentioned here other than providing a pretty visual.

Next, we get a quick synopsis of everything that happened after the rainbooms went off. Conveniently enough, the few remaining Enclave airships I'm not sure how many there are even supposed to be at this point; it seems like the Enclave fleet keeps getting totally wiped out, yet they always seem to have more ships are destroyed by the same force that takes down the cloud cover. Those that aren't completely destroyed begin firing on the civilian pegasi, who for some unexplained reason have suddenly decided to rebel against the Enclave. We also learn that a faction of Red Eye's troops have regrouped as some kind of new army, and they're determined to carve out their own empire, and blah blah blah. As ever, the motivations of these various factions remain vague.

>Hope brought t’ us by our Lightbringer, yes. And more importantly, hope brought t’ us by ourselves. By our embrace of our nobler nature. Over the last few weeks, the actions of so many of you have shown more brilliantly than the sun itself, so much that it’s made this ol’ DJ cry. Children, ol’ DJ Pon3 ain’t never been prouder of ya.
This seems to clarify that the speaker is none other than Homage. I should have known better than to assume that kkat would give any of his NPCs a significant speaking role.

Anyway, the rest of this is mostly fluff. Homage goes on to lecture her listeners about not being prejudiced against the pegasi, because they were (apparently) also victims of the Enclave. As I've said many times already, it was never quite clear what the Enclave was ultimately trying to do, or why they wanted to do it; we just get sort of a vague assurance that they're bad guys, and we should root against them. In any event, Homage draws a distinction between the Enclave and the regular pegasi, ordering her loyal followers to continue blindly hating the former while making an effort to befriend the latter. She also explains that the alicorns are not bad anymore, because reasons.

To save time and space, here is a quick synopsis of the other topics she covers:

>the Everfree Forest is no longer on fire
>the Applejack Rangers have announced plans to cultivate it somehow and turn it into farmland
>the Steel Rangers and the Applejack Rangers are no longer fighting, because reasons
>Fillydelphia remains a war zone for the time being, due to the continuing conflict between the Talons and Red Eye's remaining forces, who are still organized and fighting for some unknown reason despite Red Eye being dead
>Homage has somehow become aware that Celestia is still alive and is living inside the SPP with Littlepoop
>LP has successfully nigger-rigged some kind of communication system so that ponies on the ground can talk to both her and Celestia if they want
>Life Bloom has received an extremely long and convoluted message from Littlepoop, and is presently attempting to transcribe its autism into comprehensible speech
>presumably, this "message" is the 620,000-word-long clusterfuck we just finished reading

The author also subtly implies that Littlepoop is now essentially a Goddess on-par with Celestia herself. Also, it sounds like Homage has some kind of quest to fulfill; presumably she's going to do whatever-the-fuck with the Gardens of Equestria. It was never quite clear what her role in all of that was supposed to be, but LP seemed convinced for whatever reason that Homage is the true "wasteland hero."

When all this is concluded, she invites Velvet Remedy into the studio for an interview, which we will cover in the next post.
Anonymous
3486f27
?
No.322143
322147 322156
>>322131
>Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I see Littlepoop as having an attitude similar to someone like Barack Obama.
Barack Obama seems to me like a corrupt man not a misguided idealist.
> For no reason other than hubris, she takes it upon herself to fundamentally transform the world she lives in according to her own whims. Nobody asked her to save the world, and it never occurred to her to ask the world if it wanted saving; she just decided one day that she could make everything better, and assumed that destiny had given her carte blanche to do whatever was required to bring her ideals to life.
>These kinds of people are the ultimate narcissists. They never recognize themselves as such, because they always see themselves as humble servants of some greater good.
When it comes to LP this might all be true and she might have both been a fool in her ideals and in the execution of those ideals, however, I don't think that people who sets out to change the world for the better need to do so out of hubris. Take Gandalf, his goal in middle-earth is to lead the world into a better place but he's humble. You can believe in your own capabilites and your values while fighting for an alturistic cause without being a narcissist.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
10c2ba6
?
No.322144
322181
that is one big pile of shit.JPG
>>322133

As it turns out, Velvet's interview is nothing but she and Homage jerking each other off and trading cringey banter. It was probably meant to be a clever and humorous exchange, but the dialogue is badly written even by the standards of this story. Neither character speaks in the voice we're accustomed to hearing, and the jokes are just the usual kkat-cringe-fest about threesomes and whatnot. Here is a quick synopsis of the essential information:

>Velvet and Calamity will be accompanying Homage on whatever journey she is undertaking (presumably it has something to do with the Gardens of Equestria)
>Calamity had some kind of surgery recently (though hopefully not the same kind that kkat had)
>Velvet also has some kind of wacky plan to save Fluttershy (you may or may not remember that Fluttershy has been transformed into a tree and now presumably suffers a horrifying living death)
>this plan will involve some kind of potion that Xenith whipped up
>killing joke, which transformed Flutters into a tree in the first place, is no longer a problem, because reasons
>because they all have severe autism, they made some kind of tape recording that they think is going to somehow help wake Fluttershy up
>if it doesn't work and Flutters dies, they are going to erect a gaudy, ostentatious grave marker for Flutters and rig the tape to play automatically once per week for ten years, because that won't be annoying as all fuck or anything

And...that's about it. Homage rambles on about some more irrelevant bullshit, and concludes by playing one of Velvet's angsty jingles for the 7,000th time. Just for fun, I'll dump it here:

>“I want to calm the storm, but the war is in your eyes.
>How can I shield you from the horror and the lies?
>When all that once held meaning is shattered, ruined, bleeding
>And the whispers in the darkness tell me we won’t survive?”

>“All things will end in time, this coming storm won’t linger
>Why should we live as if there’s nothing more?
>So hold me ‘neath the thunderclouds, my heart held in your hooves,
>Our love will keep the monsters from our door.”

>“For I know tomorrow will be a better day.
>Yes, I believe tomorrow can be a better day…”

Wow, pottery. A morbidly obese self-harming thirteen-year-old could hardly have written better. Here it is set to music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

Welp, it looks like that's it; that's all they wrote of Littlepoop and her merry band of nitwits. I was kind of hoping the Epilogue would have tried to wrap up a few of the story's many loose ends; at the very least I thought we'd get a synopsis of the Gardens of Equestria business. It's still not clear what's supposed to happen there, or what exactly everyone's roles are, but apparently kkat decided to leave it to the reader's imagination. Either that, or he just assumed that we've been following his autism and will just instinctively understand where it was headed. I can't honestly say I give a rat's ass at this point, but it was a bit disappointing nonetheless. Kkat went to all the trouble of penning an epilogue, yet chose to waste the extra page space on Velvet blabbering about Fluttershy being a fucking tree. After that it just sort of peters out. Whatever; the entire story up until this point has been nothing but random, meandering bullshit, and I suppose there's no point changing horses at the very end of the race.

Anywho, that's it for the main story, but it looks like there's an Afterword as well, so we might as well take a look at that while we're here.

Afterword: Ten Years Later

>Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria...
>Ten Years Later…

We switch to a third-person narration. A mystery mare is presently reading Littlepoop's autismo autobiography to a group of helpless foals. It probably would have been less cruel to make them fight to the death.

>“Then I began, thinking…” she said softly, reading the very last lines of the book. They were also the first lines, although she wasn’t sure if any of her listeners had noticed. The story had come full circle.
>“…If I’m going to tell you about the adventure of my life -- explain how I got to this place with these people, and why I did what I’m going to do next -- I should probably start by explaining a little bit about PipBucks.”
>“What?” whined the little apricot pegasus sitting in the center of the other foals. “That’s it? It can’t end there! That’s a lame way to end the story!”
I'm inclined to agree. It was a shit opening line, and it's even shittier as a closing line.

After some bickering back and forth between the children, we eventually learn that the mystery mare reading the story is none other than Fluttershy. Not Velvet, not Homage, not Derpy, nor any of the other main characters. We are hearing from Fluttershy, a minor incidental character whose only significant role was being part of the world's backstory.

Anyway, it's clear enough from the foals' banter that whatever the fuck LP's friends did with the Gardens of Equestria, it was successful. The world outside is described as peaceful and sunny, and most of the foals seem disinclined to believe that Equestria ever actually looked like the dark and edgy world described in Fluttershy's tale.

We learn that Fluttershy lives in a place called Junction Town, presumably built on the site of Junction R7, the fortress that LP acquired as a residence at one point in the distant past and then never did returned to. We learn that the ponies here call themselves the Followers of the Apocalypse for some faggy-ass reason, and worship Fluttershy for some other faggy-ass reason. Velvet Remedy is apparently their leader.

>She lifted a forehoof and waved. Fluttershy waved timidly back, her eyes catching the ornate golden PipBuck, encrusted with a nightingale-shaped gemstone, on Velvet Remedy’s foreleg. She remembered when that had been a necklace. Her necklace.
I'm not sure what the significance of this is meant to be. Velvet made a PipBuck out of Fluttershy's necklace? Why?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
10c2ba6
?
No.322147
322150
>>322143
>Barack Obama seems to me like a corrupt man not a misguided idealist.
Why not both.jpg

>When it comes to LP this might all be true and she might have both been a fool in her ideals and in the execution of those ideals, however, I don't think that people who sets out to change the world for the better need to do so out of hubris. Take Gandalf, his goal in middle-earth is to lead the world into a better place but he's humble. You can believe in your own capabilites and your values while fighting for an alturistic cause without being a narcissist.
I'm not necessarily saying that every act of altruism is motivated by narcissism. I'm pretty cynical, but not quite that cynical.

The problem in FoE comes down to Littlepoop's motivation, or rather her lack of one. Kkat never really establishes what LP's stake in the world's fate is; he just sort of takes it as a given that this generic mare would just be so horrified by all the edge in Edgequestria that she would just naturally want to do whatever it took to purge the world of all its ickiness, and that this would serve as sufficient motivation for her. As has been brought up before, she's basically written like the main character in an RPG: a blank slate for the player to make into whatever the fuck kind of character they want to play as. In an interactive medium this works, because it allows the player to do what they want; however, in a novel it comes across as the protagonist just taking random actions for no reason, which can produce weird results. In this case, it made LP come across as narcissistic and insane rather than heroic, and the fact that kkat didn't seem to even notice this was one of his book's biggest flaws.

In LOTR, Gandalf was established as sort of a wandering guardian; his fate was entwined with Middle Earth and he frequently involved himself in its affairs, often at great risk to himself. He also knew the stakes of the quest that the party was on, and that they absolutely had to make it out of Moria alive if everything was to play out the way it was supposed to at least I think it was in Moria that Gandalf "died;" it's been a regrettably long time since I've actually sat down and read those books. His sacrifice was completely in-character and it made sense given the stakes, so it comes across as a noble act. The gulf between something like that and LP's obsessive, illogical, completely unmotivated quest to take control of Edgequestria's weather is wider than a Balrog's chasm :^)
Anonymous
8b21d31
?
No.322150
322151
6v34v3yyfmp41.jpg
1056763-free-download-balrog-wallpaper-1920x1080.jpg
khazad dum.jpg
836ff93842df8f9ba51725f392415af2.jpg
ARZBpf.jpg
>>322147
>Why not both.jpg
I precieved him as corrupt materialist like every other politician higher up in their hierachy, however, I'm no Obama expert so it might just be my democracy cynicism that shines through which makes me think he was a puppet and a materialist form the get go. But again, I can guarantee that you know more about him than I do so maybe I'm wrong.
>I'm not necessarily saying that every act of altruism is motivated by narcissism. I'm pretty cynical, but not quite that cynical.
Well, then we agree on the essential point at least.
>Lp paragraph
Probably. She probably sucks. I don't doubt it. You would again know more about it.
>is wider than a Balrog's chasm
If I was you, I would had been you right now I'd be pedantic about this metaphor. I'd say that the phrase, "A Balrog's chasm," doesn't really make much sense. While it is true that, at least more than one of them, fell into a chasm; I'm unsure if these Balrogs felt possesive of them. So it's a good thing I'm not you ;^P
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.322151
322152
>>322150
>"A Balrog's chasm," doesn't really make much sense
I know. I thought about that a few seconds after I posted it. I was referring to the chasm that Gandalf and the Balrog fell into, which now that I think about it probably wasn't all that wide. Depth was really the central feature there. In my defense, I've been up all night.
Anonymous
8b21d31
?
No.322152
>>322151
It's fine. I just wanted to prod you.
I'm excited for your final posts.
Anonymous
6e83f2a
?
No.322156
>>322131
>maybe there isn't some magic switch you can flip that toggles between "wasteland" and "pastel utopia."
Ironically (I think? Still not sure how irony works) that's exactly what LP's final actions accomplish in this shit story. She makes everything better again, and eventually ponies who are allowed to use the Gardens Of Equestria flip that magic switch for her.
I can't imagine what Kkat's thought processes are right now.
Did he feel it would be too easy if LP organized sixish friends capable of using the Elements Of Harmony to de-Wastelandize the world?
If you hate the cloud covering so much, say that's an unavoidable consequence of turning the EOH on, which takes food-making power away from the Enclave naturally and gives it to the ponies.
He can't have thought this magic switch was too easy for LP because he introduced another magic switch in the form of the SPP anypony could use with Spike's help, given enough plot armor aka "Destiny".
The logic for how it all worked stumped Kkat but it would be easy to just say "Spike's fire breath sends things where they need to go. If he destroys something that needs to be destroyed, it doesn't go anywhere, it just stops existing. That Enclave bitch he burned? Needed to go to hell, according to magic and/or the universe and/or destiny so she ended up there. A letter to Celestia? Whether its writer wants it sent or not, if it gets burned by Spike it's going to Celestia. And Littlepip? She's going where she needs to be: Inside the chamber of the magic machine that fixes everything in return for one noble act of self sacrifice".
Just fucking say magic's a self-aware mystical force like Star Wars's The Force that can do what you tell it to and do whatever it wants, holy fuck, it's not hard to think of this shit.
Did Kkat think the Elements Of Harmony weren't good enough for LP, because they required six ponies to give nothing up while the SPP requires a sacrifice from the star of this shitshow?
That must be it. I don't like to speculate on the motives of trash media creators because it's easy to speculate that everything you don't like has an evil reason behind it. Plenty of reviewers of books and games out there say "He must have made this chapter to piss me off, he must have given this woman huge tits because he's a pervert who hates women, he must have put the option to kill innocents in this video game because he's a demon who hates babies kittens puppies and sunshine". But if you view this story's events with the assumption that Kkat wanted to do his best to precisely engineer a product to get Littlepip "Over" with the audience and make her this eternally-beloved self-sacrificing mary sue murderhobo supreme, a lot of bizarre inexplicable choices about this story suddenly start making sense.

Still, Kkat didn't even do a good job of that.
He should have said there's a virus going around in the Wasteland, a bioweapon made in a Griffon lab built by an evil Private Military Contractor that's running around fucking shit up in the Wasteland "For Science!".
Maybe the virus was supposed to devastate nations built for the sake of deterrence, maybe it was a failed attempt to make a drug to turn wimpy weak soldiers into hardcore killing machines without moral restrictions or self-preservation instincts. That would suit the "Good intentions can go bad" themes.
This virus dies in sustained sunlight but thrives in the darkness of the cloud cover. Afflicted ponies get edgier over time. They become stronger stupider edgy violent cunts with sharp rows of sharklike teeth and bleeding eyes and destroyed psyches. It's incurable, only death can release those afflicted with this sickness from their curse.
The Enclave don't give a fuck about the virus or how their cloud covering makes things worse because Power Armour makes you virus-proof and they rarely visit the surface world anyway. Any Enclave troop who does get infected faces the firing squad and is called a weak faggot who deserved it, though this policy causes infected Enclavers to conceal their infection and spread it amongst their troops and generals faster.

Therefore, LP is practically morally obligated to kill the feral Raiders for being feral beasts that spread the giga-rabies virus by existing, eliminate the Pegasus cloud covering for keeping the virus around, and eliminate anypony in her way. Maybe eliminate an evil-for-fun mad scientist too just for the hell of it, because a mad scientist doing evil shit for Science!(TM) is awesome and dark and the perfect excuse for anything horrific in post-apocalyptic settings like new viruses, zombies, monsters, and any awful event you want to come out of nowhere and ruin the hero's time. Bonus points if Doctor Sciencefag insists he's doing everything for the ultimate greater good: knowledge, and once LP kicks his ass she gets to use his sick resource-generating problem-solving superscience -inators to solve problems without needing the SPP or Gardens Of Equestria.

>>322143
Obama's pure evil, he has to be. Remember "Operation Fast And Furious"? That wasn't a misguided idealist making the best out of a bad situation, that was a calculated operation planned from the start. Fucker armed the cartels with tracker-free guns and then his team preached for gun bans in areas harmed by his plan, or something like that.
Idealistic self-sacrificing heroes on a quest to save the world, whether it wants to be saved or not, seem to work best when their goal is unambiguously good, and preferably entirely apolitical.
Stopping Dark Lord Doom Badguy from taking over the world, or blowing it up, or summoning Satanic McCthulhu, anyone can get behind that. Hero can save the day, kill shit, and retire to his farm and hyperimpregnate his trad qt waifu.
But taking over and rebuilding the world in your own image, redistributing food via altering the effectiveness of farmland with a weathermachine, playing god? That's "What is your tax policy? Why should I support you, you power-mad conqueror?" tier.
Anonymous
480b7f1
?
No.322176
E-74htwVUAQx6jl.png
E-78wLQVQAQe3jW.png
I thought about saying something like...

>If Kkat wanted to get the audience to like and support LP, he should have tried harder to make her not just the biggest shooty cunt in the land of shooty cunts but also Equestria's only hope.

>LP shouldn't just be some faggot who feels she has the divine right to fuck with others. She shouldn't have the option of giving up. Maybe she should think "Maybe I should just let this shit wasteland die" during the obligatory story arc where Achilles fucks off to his tent and feels bad until it's time for his triumphant return to heroism. Circumstances should force her into her quest and give her no way out. Aside from an obligatory moment near the end where she undergoes "The Final Temptation" to give up her quest and then decides not to give up until the job's done, stop the sad music and cue the sweeping orchestral score that swells like my dick when I see Twilight Sparkle. The Wasteland shouldn't just be at war with itself, it should be facing certain doom unless she uses the Gardens Of Equestria/SPP/whatever in time. In a wasteland full of dumb cunts too wrapped up in their short-sighted little problems to think about the bigger picture, LP should be the wandering reluctant hero that gets wrapped up in a bigger deal than she ever expected. She should be reluctant until character growth makes her want to be a hero. Maybe she could have her ass saved by an inspiring badass who dies horribly and is murdered by the villain, making this personal for LP and giving her somepony to emulate. Of course, such a choice would make LP emulate the heroism of another which would get in the way of making her the object of dicksuckery for the author.

>But at the end of the day, that's what this story is missing, a time limit. And a sense of purpose tying all these bullshit events together but that would be harder to add than a ticking clock. We need a ticking clock to add tension and force LP to keep going no matter the odds. Something to weigh on LP's mind, kick her into action, stop her from taking those STUPID FUCKING vacations with Homage at Tower De La Cuntmunchera. Whenever LP feels doubt or fear, she should punt herself in the cunt and say "If I don't save this wasteland, everypony in it dies from Giga-AIDS or Super Poison Joke or starvation or whatever".

Then again, that change would make this story a more effective vehicle for getting LP "Over" with the audience. But it wouldn't necessarily make this story better.

I don't think the greatest writers in the world could turn this story into something good without fundamentally rewriting at least some of the core pieces of idiocy that makes FE what it is.

The pre-war story is a tale of a civilized industrializing nation struggling to help a barbaric race of failures who only want to get high on meth and worship their own hatred of the night sky+spooky shit+meteors+aliens until it and Fluttershy's foolishly suicidal altruism gets everyone nuked, and it feels wrong to end the Wasteland with the descendants of both races (minus the descendants not here because zigger nukes or zigger chemical weapons or wildlife mutated by ziggers or soldier ziggers or rapefugee ziggers killed their ancestors) united around an Equestrian campfire singing cum-on-you or whatever. Cum-by-you? Anyway, if this story is supposed to fundamentally be about good intentions going wrong, it feels absurd that the good intentions of the heroes never go wrong.
They never have to seriously analyze the consequences of their actions, or their motives, or their actions. They don't even have to figure out what their morals are or why they believe they're entitled to their murder sprees.
Despite all of Kkat's blabbering about virtues and having moral lines you won't compromise, one last line you refuse to violate except when you have to, the heroes have patently schizophrenic approaches to morality and what they feel morally obligated to do.
Remember when LP was determined to use violence to save Monterry Jack(even if it meant fighting and killing Guard NPCs), a pony who'd tried to rob LP at gunpoint at her comparatively most vulnerable (when she'd never touched a gun before and hadn't yet transformed into a gun expert instantly) and had almost gotten away with it, a pony willing to commit suicide by cop (with extra steps by confessing to a crime that couldn't be pinned on him, and happened outside the tower guard force's jurisdiction in an area of the wasteland this cheese-seller had no reason to visit while abandoning his family and cheese store) and leave his annoyingly LP-loving family homeless just so LP would have to look them in the eyes and say "Sorry but your dad thinks I'm to blame here"?
LP was willing to get herself banned from Tenpony Tower at best, shot to death or hunted down by bounty hunters/town guards eternally and slandered 24/7 on the radio for trying at worst, if it meant freeing one cunt who happened to have a name and a family. But any capital-R Raiders, or Slavers, or Cannibals, they can go to hell, even if they have families. They're not even life forms, they're targets she has yet to gun down in this gigantic soulless shooting gallery she calls home for no apparent reason.
LP felt morally obligated to save a faggot willing to practically shoot himself in front of LP just so she might feel bad when she told his family the bad news, if she didn't get somepony else to do that.
She felt morally obligated to save the whole fucking wasteland, but not all of the ponies in it, no, she felt obligated to slaughter all the Slavers and Alicorns and Raiders she can find, as if they're mindless killing beasts like Radscorpions.

Fallout Equestria makes me miss infuriatingly preachy books that can't stop soapboxing the author's ideology and political/personal views, because at least those tales have more substance than this sequence of terminally faggoted events.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
10c2ba6
?
No.322181
322198
ParisCatacombs-9b0f678ccab940c28916e64afa309bfb.jpg
>>322144

>She found herself smiling, happy it had found a new Bearer. Although it had taken her a while to grasp the somewhat abrasive mare as a beacon of kindness.
>She wasn’t surprised that the Element had taken a new form. After all, before it was a necklace, it had been a heavy, round rock. And the book did help explain why the Elements chose this new appearance.
Oh, I see. Fluttershy's necklace transformed itself into a PipBuck because Velvet Remedy is the new bearer of the Kindness Element.

>The Book of Littlepip was a good book, she thought, despite some of the darker parts that she had to skim over when reading it to the kids.
Just out of curiosity, which parts of that book does she think are suitable for kids? Or anyone, for that matter?

>It had taken years for her to recover, and she had only been able to find herself again, to put herself back together, thanks to the constant attention and help of her friends -- both her new friends and her old ones.
We don't care. While she may be a significant character in the FiM cartoon series, in this story Fluttershy is an incidental background character at best. She factors into the world's history but not the events of the main story. Protip: the whole point of things like epilogues and afterwords is to tie up loose ends of the story, not to introduce new threads. If you can bring your story to a satisfying conclusion within the space of the main narrative, then you should just do that. If you can't, then an epilogue or a ten-years-later segment can help. However, continuing to drone on about random bullshit involving side characters after the story ends simply because you wanted to shart out more words is just a giant waste of everyone's time. This isn't quite as bad as that god-awful Equestria Girls thing that soulpeener needlessly appended to Sun & Rose, but it's definitely getting close.

>Velvet Remedy had been right. The little statues of her friends had helped her put herself back together. Without them, she probably would have remained broken, insane, forever.
Oh, goody. The fucking statues again. We sure haven't heard enough about these silly things.

Anyway, in typical kkat form, the narration begins to meander from here. We are needlessly informed that Fluttershy was gifted her set of the statues by Velvet, and that she carries them around in her saddlebag with her. We also learn that she sleeps with the petrified corpse of Angel Bunny at night, because that's not creepy or anything. You may or may not remember that Angel Bunny was turned to stone by a cockatrice or some shit; it was one of the hundreds of thousands of tiny, insignificant details scattered throughout the text that kkat expects the reader to remember 30 chapters after the fact.

>As she slid the book back into its place on the bookshelf, she again thought that, yes, it was a good book. Deeply painful at times. But it was nice to feel like she knew Littlepip. So many of her new friends did, and (despite some of her bad times) she seemed like such a nice pony.
>Fluttershy had tried to talk to Littlepip once. But even being in one of the tower stations made her very uncomfortable. The Single Pegasus Project, she had to admit, freaked her out. Littlepip had called it “peaceful”, but Fluttershy had panic attacks at the mere thought of the place -- of being trapped, unable to move, watching helplessly.
Seriously, kkat, are you going anywhere with this shit? Because I have places to be.

Anyway, whatever; Fluttershy used to be a tree but now she's not anymore. She seems to be recovering one day at a time. Good for her, I guess. She gibbers autistically to herself about Spike and eyepatches and the title of Littlepoop's insane autobiography and some other bullshit for a few paragraphs, and then she goes outside. She sees Silver Bell, who we learn is now apprenticed to some literally-who named Palette. I guess they make stained glass windows or something. Good to know.

Flutters keeps walking along and looking at stuff. She sees the children she just scarred for life with LP's terrible book; they are arguing about princesses or something. There's an alicorn filly among them, which subtly informs us that the alicorns have figured out a way to breed. It seems to have something to do with a potion that Xenith made using poison joke extract. I don't remember if that's something we're supposed to care about or not.

Anyway, doot de doot de doo, she keeps walking. She bumps into a few more NPCs whose names we are probably supposed to recognize, and we learn that food production has more or less returned to pre-war levels, though it is still necessary to keep LP strapped in to the weather machine to maintain it. There is also something called the New Canterlot Republic, which I guess is supposed to be some kind of new Equestrian government or something. Whatever has changed in ten years, I don't get the impression that politics in this setting have become any less vague or confusing.

>Rather, the national concern had turned once again to power. The Gardens of Equestria had given back their farmlands, but had stripped them of the radioactive materials necessary to run Red Eye’s engines. For now, most of the energy used by the NCR was generated from devices drawing on star batteries (a donation from Calamity, she had been told). But these resources were finite and heavily strained; the needs of the nation would soon far exceed the limited power they could produce.
Why do they need Red Eye's engines? I don't quite understand why stuff like this is still an issue. Seems like agriculture would be top priority at this point; they can worry about industry later.

>Fluttershy cringed at the notion that Equestria’s power might soon become dependant on irradiated rocks and other materials that could only be found in foreign lands. She’d seen the land she loved go down that road before. It did not end well.
Again, why would this matter? What needs to be powered?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
10c2ba6
?
No.322198
322217 322218 322494
21858f15b566414c7f4ac93397194540.jpg
>>322181

Fluttershy watches Velvet's pet bird eat a dead mouse, and then a bell rings and everyone goes to see what the fuck is happening. Apparently, the bell signifies the return of Calamity. She is happy to see him, because apparently he is going to escort her to Bucklyn Cross later this afternoon.

>She’d always been a weak flyer, even in her youth. And she wasn’t young anymore. The only pink in her mane now was from the streaks Silver Bell had put in it while practicing cosmetic spells.
>Fluttershy felt confident in flying across Junction Town, maybe even to where they were building the new castle. But not all the way to Bucklyn Cross.
The order of these two paragraphs should probably be reversed.

Anyway, Calamity swoops in and is greeted by Velvet. He tells her that the caravan he was guarding ran into some raiders, which he had to dispatch, and Velvet seems surprised that raiders would still be a thing. The rest of the conversation is just light banter.

Page break. It is now sunset, and Fluttershy is riding in a sky chariot being pulled by Calamity. Through their conversation, we learn that Ponyville is now occupied by displaced hellhounds. Seems a little strange that it would still be called Ponyville, but whatever.

>As Calamity guided the sky chariot towards those hills, Fluttershy knew where they were going. Part of her mind insisted on envisioning this place as it once was. She and her friends had once gone golfing on these very hills, back before the war was even a whisper. She remembered Angel had gotten bored and started gnawing on the canopy of their golf cart until she cajoled him to stop.
How exactly does a four-legged creature go golfing? This sounds like it might be a reference to something from the show, but I can't recall any episode in which the M6 ever played golf. In any case, it's a pretty dumb idea.

Anyway, Calamity touches down on this hill that apparently used to be a golf course for equines, but is now a cemetery, also for equines.

>The two pegasi approached the five tombstones. Fluttershy dropped the flowers at her hooves, letting Calamity pick up several of them to place at the gravestone of Elder “SteelHooves” Applesnack. She scooped up the others, and began reverently placing them at each of the other four graves which fanned out behind that first one as Calamity took a few minutes of quiet with his departed friend.
>A soft pang filled her heart as Fluttershy wished she had found the time to know Applesnack better. She stopped at the gravestone nearest to Applesnack’s, reading the inscription:
>Here Rests
>PALADIN STRAWBERRY LEMONADE
>Brave, Loyal, True
>She gave her life that Equestria may blossom once again.
I don't think I mentioned this, but at the end of the Epilogue we learned that Strawberry Lemonade was killed in the battle. I know, I know; you're all deeply saddened by the loss of this barely-mentioned NPC. The world will never be the same without her.

Also, it makes sense enough that Calamity would want to visit SteelHooves' grave, but why exactly is Fluttershy coming along on this errand? SteelHooves would have technically been her contemporary, but it doesn't sound like they knew each other well or were close. She would have no connection whatsoever to Strawberry Lemonade, and as to the other three stiffs, the author didn't even consider them important enough to give names to. Why does she need to be here?

>The stallion was staring upwards and towards the east. She followed his gaze, spotting the gaunt, flying forms of two ghoul pegasi pulling a water-cart, leading the other water wagons as the caravan flew towards Junction Town.
>She knew one of those lead ghouls would have a golden PipBuck on her foreleg with seven diamonds arranged like bubbles. Ditzy Doo, the Bearer of Laughter. Who ever could have imagined?
Not only does Flutters know the exact number of diamonds on a casual acquaintance's PipBuck, but this is the kind of thing she's thinking about while visiting graves. How severely autistic can one pony be? Also: I still don't get why Derpy is supposed to be the Element of Laughter in the first place (though that hardly matters at this late stage).

Oh, also, we find out that Derpy is now for some reason married to Lionheart.

>As if reading her thoughts (a very disturbing notion!), Calamity stepped next to her, expressing, “Ah ain’t normally the religious type, but Ah’ve seen ‘nuff t’ know souls exist. So part o’ me likes t’ imagine that somewhere up there, SteelHooves an’ his gal are smilin’ down on those two.”
>Fluttershy nodded quietly.
>The winds continued to blow, making the trees creek and the water of the lake lap at the shore.
This is the end of the scene. It makes for a nice visual, but what exactly was the point of this? As I said before, Fluttershy really doesn't have a deep enough connection to any of these dead characters to justify an entire scene dedicated to her visiting their graves. Other than kkat presumably wanting to casually drop in some irrelevant side information about Derpy being married and whatever, I don't really understand why this scene was written.

Oh, also:
>making the trees creek
Should be "creak."

Page break. The two of them are now at Bucklyn Cross. We learn that nearby Arbu has since been turned into a prison. Personally, I think turning it into a restaurant would have been funnier, but what are you going to do? Anyway, we finally learn why Flutters had Calamity fly her all the way out here: she is planning to build a sanctuary for the hellhounds, because the ponies have hunted them to near extinction, or something. Isn't that just so Fluttershy? Cue stock footage of bronies applauding. The story concludes on this note:

>“In a world filled with misery and uncertainty, it is a great comfort to know that, in the end, there is a light in darkness.”
>Fallout: Equestria

Aaaand...that's the end of the text. Well, wasn't that special? Stay tuned for final thoughts; I'll return in a bit.
Anonymous
a4904be
?
No.322217
>>322198
>this hill that apparently used to be a golf course for equines, but is now a cemetery
Hah. Of course it is.
Anonymous
a4904be
?
No.322218
322235 325754
>>322198
>in the end, there is a light in darkness.”
I keep reading this as, "Light in the darkness," but I don't know. I think it's because, "The darkness," emphasizes a specific darkness but this sentence reads like this is a common-knowledge fact that you can find light in darkness. However, light is the opposite of darkness so there shouldn't be any light in it. Right?
I'll leave...
Anonymous
480b7f1
?
No.322235
322244 322255
Mormon Mummy.jpg
>>322218
Remember all that "Light in the darkness" stuff The Burned Man said about his Mormon God?
It feels wrong for Kkat to try and steal that shit for vague "Hope is good and Littlepip is the light" shit.
Once I read a "Rationalist" story where the hero kept calling himself "The lightbringer" just because he believed he was a smart guy destined to figure out smart solutions to problems hurting his world like "Many countries fight for control, child soldiers are the norm, people are cunts," and so on. But he'd never really thought of anything particularly clever and lacked solutions for problems he swore he was the only one thinking about. He lacked smart solutions to any of the problems he was presented with. He just went with whatever seemed best at the time and didn't prepare all that hard for bad situations. He had a few smart ideas but nothing spectacular. Despite overthinking things and filling the story with unreadable blocks of concentrated pseudointellectual neo-autism at a moment's notice, he wasn't really that smart, just surrounded by dipshit NPCs and occasional smart characters the author gifted the right to think clearly.
Kind of like this story, with how the enemy NPCs act in absurdly stupid ways so amateurs like LP can outwit and outfight them before LP became telekinetic OP hypergod sue supreme, and only named characters are allowed to think of blatantly obvious shit.
Anonymous
a4904be
?
No.322244
322248
>>322235
Oh, right. I haven't played the games but that's one of the npcs quest givers in Fallout New Vegas, right?
Did Kkat really just plaigarize the last sentence of his fic? That's actually pretty sad. What's the point in writing a story, fan-fiction or otherwise, if you're not even gonna make it a personal deal? I guess, he liked that qoute but still, I mean, not even a paraphrased version of it but an exact copy of it?
Anonymous
fe8994c
?
No.322245
322248
>he believed he was a smart guy destined to figure out smart solutions to problems hurting his world
>But he'd never really thought of anything particularly clever and lacked solutions for problems he swore he was the only one thinking about. He lacked smart solutions to any of the problems he was presented with
>Despite overthinking things and filling the story with unreadable blocks of concentrated pseudointellectual neo-autism at a moment's notice, he wasn't really that smart, just surrounded by dipshit NPCs and occasional smart characters the author gifted the right to think clearly
Dog-earing this for later
Anonymous
480b7f1
?
No.322248
322255
>>322244
Joshua "The Burned Man" Graham isn't just one of the quest-givers, he's the star of the Honest Hearts DLC and he's Caesar's Legion's former second-in-command. When he failed at the first Battle For Hoover Dam he was burned alive and sparta kicked into the grand canyon but he got better and kept being Mormon. If I was still overexplaining everything I'd write it all here but https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Joshua_Graham
The worst part about Kkat plagiarizing his "It's comforting to know there's a light in the darkness" speech is that Joshua was talking about his religion. His God. While dealing with aggression from the Nigger Legs tribe.
But here's the story ripping off that pro-god line and using it after the darkness is gone to call Littlepoop the speshulest pony in the universe for sacrificing herself in a way literally any pony could have pulled off if destiny made them as fireproof as Littlepip.
Come to think of it downing some healing potion would probably be enough to let you survive being burned alive by Spike's fire anyway, it's destroyed battleships but those stupid fucking healing potions can fucking fix anything.

>>322245
To elaborate, the character had just gone through a conversation with a captured bad guy in an attempt to interrogate the baddie.
Because yeah, it makes ALL the sense that the hero kid amateur ninja guy would be allowed to speak with a captured baddie and debate philosophy.
The baddie went into a "this world is cruel and darkness is the only way, you're a faggot from the nicest biggest village but it's done mean things before. also in this world it's kill or be killed" speech that threw the hero for a loop and made him doubt everything except his own ego.
I shit you not, the hero had this little crisis of faith moment only thinking "I'm the smart sexy mega-genius Lightbringer who will solve all the world's problems and bring light to this darkness because I said so!" could restore his faith in himself and help him cope with the "shocking" facts he just heard.
Now the characters said things like "Man, it sure sucks that we live on a continent with many rich cunts who hire ninjas to do their bidding and five big nations with ninja academies and many smaller nations without big ninja academies and child soldiers are the norm and bandits are everywhere and power+cruelty seems to be the only way you can defeat your enemies and scare them into not fucking with you"
But he had no real answers for any of these problems. Didn't consider a system of international sanctions from government alliances, or new types of ideologies with smaller governments and less governance, any way to subvert the rich and reduce their stranglehold on the economy, didn't think of a combination Forward Operating Base and Fortress for his country that could take in poorfag farmers and protect their livestock for taxes instead of leaving farmers to the bandits until they can afford to pay ninja to kill said bandits, couldn't think of a new method of warfare with new weapons like inventing flintlock pistols and eventually revolvers so rich cunts start preferring cheap armies of conscripted farmers to edgy expensive ninjas with tragic backstories.
Say what you will about "Maybe if one superhero/my nation took charge and conquered everything there would be peace under his absolute rule" but at least it's a solution to the problem of war and enemy nations.
Some may hate that option but it's certainly an option.
This faggot couldn't think of anything, he was just so certain he'd eventually think of something that it got him out of a downwards spiral mentally that almost made him lose it completely.
There was also this gigafaggoted bit where his girlfriend's dad tried to make him drink poisoned tea or something and they blabbered over it for at least a thousand words when the obvious solution was "Make a copy of yourself with magic just in case the tea is poisoned, magically swap yourself with it, drink the tea. If he slaps the clone to death and calls the real you a paranoid faggot, say he's paranoid for checking if you're a clone, edgy ninjas in a poorly-written world of smug edgy cunts respect paranoid faggots more than idiots willing to be poisoned to seem polite in front of their potential father-in-laws. If he bullshits you and calls you a faggot for not trusting him, say there's a chance he was replaced by an assassin impersonating him with magic because this is a fundamentally fucking broken setting where the three beginner-level spells any recently-graduated-from-the-academy child ninja can pull off are: Limitless physical transformation via absolute shapeshifting*, illusionary intangible copy creation, and limitlessly substituting yourself with any non-alive object or consenting person, and yet walking on water and walls is considered a higher-level technique for more advanced ninja kids, and yet all fights are still settled by which DBZ character is tougher and punches and fireballs harder eventually".
*many fans headcanon that shapeshifting "only makes you seem changed" because limitless shapeshifting is so OP yet nobody uses it. Many badfics say that Naruto's perfectly ordinary transformation spell now makes him special because everyone else is using a worse one and "by incorrectly trying to copy a fake shapeshift spell he invented a real one" just makes ALL the sense. But this headcanon doesn't line up with canon at all. This is a setting where anyone can shapeshift and nobody ever thought of using it outside of naruto and sasuke's double-shuriken-but-the-second-one-is-naruto trick. Oh and that time Gamabunta told Naruto to shapeshift him into something with "fangs and claws" and immediately thought of his own fox Fursona.
Anonymous
ab47904
?
No.322253
Well damn I took a long break from the site not sure when Glim Glam would get back and returned to see this God forsaken fan fic almost being finished. Crazy to think how much has happened since he started this story. Moved to a new state, working on becoming a certified plumber and service technician. Just glad this story is going to be over.

Glim's commentary has been a riot but after awhile the story just kept repeating the same stuff so there wasn't much new for us to comment on unlike Sun and the Rose. Really glad Glim and all of you stuck it out to the end though. All the MLP groups I'm in worship Fallout Equestria with a zealous reverence so it felt like a bastion of sanity.

Not sure what Glim will review next but here's to hoping it'll be a fun read like the last story when we were all being wow'ed by new developments and jokes like the ambassador pill or the main character being a rat catcher. Plus the sparks of good ideas and scenes that story had so it was fun to discuss the merits it had.

Hats off to you Glim Glam for finishing the fight and look forward to what you review next unless it's a story about an op lesbian unicorn or any lesbian stuff in which case I'll take a shotgun cocktail.
Anonymous
c59b33f
?
No.322255
I don't enjoy killing.jpg
time for talk has passed.jpg
>>322235
>>322248
>Legate Graham
>Pic related
Anonymous
480b7f1
?
No.322324
Man, it's crazy that the Raiders went to Vlad The Impaler's landscaping company. I guess they wanted to get aHEAD in the competition. Sorry if that joke was a bit gore-mless, I held it in for way too long.
Anonymous
480b7f1
?
No.322378
322494 325754
>>311564
I know there's a chance I won't like the answer to this question, but I want to ask it anyway. My rewrite of my old shit is almost complete, and I want to know how this shit stacks up to my old shit.
Glim, do you think Fallout Equestria is better or worse than the FIMfic I wrote almost a decade ago?
You know, the one with the hoverboards and the bad anticommunist rant and the clusterfuck of a backstory invented to justify all the OC's bullshit powers?
Now that I think about it, I think my old shit had a few of this story's mistakes.
Ranting about Pipbucks and the world's history just because the hero has a pipbuck and characters from history will show up eventually, VS ranting about hoverboards and my OC's backstory just because the hero has a hoverboard and characters from his history would have shown up eventually.
I wrote much of the mane six as annoying fangirls smitten with my OC, while in this story everyone's head over heels in love with Littlepoop except for the villains and the mane six become war criminals and morons whose ineptitude and good intentions doomed an equestria only Littlepoop's good intentions are allowed to save.
My OC started off overpowered and got stronger with each card he'd get (unless it was needed to make a villain threatening or a weird chapter possible), while LP started off pretending to not be overpowered and then she stopped pretending, eventually becoming a fucking half-alicorn unicorn and thinking this and her RD statuette with a chunk of Rarity's soul imitating RD's soul in it would grant her entry to the SPP.
Both stories made the Unicorn protagonist overpowered, but while the shit Star story had fun putting him in over-the-top anime fights, this story pits a regenerating canonically-plot-armoured fireproof half-alicorn boxcar-tossing blood mage and expert sharpshooter against a bunch of starving faggots with sticks and weak guns and under-utilized cheat abilities and at best gay power armour before pretending this is totally balanced. My fight scenes weren't shakespeare but at least some could be called fun.
Star was an irritating cunt even in scenes where he was supposed to be nice or cool to show he isn't always an irritating cunt, but Littlepoop is always an irritating cunt even in scenes where she isn't supposed to be one. But worse because she has that annoying fake-modesty shit. Whenever Star would use fake-modesty it would be a joke, he'd tell people to stop praising him and then tell them to continue if they did stop, comedy gold.
And while Starshit tried to justify his overpoweredness with a convoluted backstory involving ninjas and farms and thieves and foxes and more bullshit I had to cut from his new version so I really could "Shorten it to 20 words or less" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPmXmMpNuPU and at the time I thought he had to be strong because the story was about his growth(I made some particularly retarded assumptions on how stories "Had to be" based on what little I saw of stories before writing one)...
This story chooses to pretend the overpowered Littlepoop is actually nopony at all, even though she is pointlessly overpowered in a way that regularly harms the story, even though none of her overpowered abilities were necessary and anypony with destiny's blessing and Spike's help (or hatred) could have survived the trip to the SPP and fired it up.
LP was often wounded and then healed by bullshit magic potions and other healing items, Star was never wounded in a way that mattered sidestepping the issue entirely.
Both stories were written by idiots with a child's idea of what cool is, but I was a teenager when the Star story started while Kkat was over thirty and pushing fourty, maybe older.
Anonymous
480b7f1
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No.322493
322523
Squilliam_s6.png
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Squilliam Fancyson.

That's what this story needed to tie it all together.

Every time this story had to bend over backwards to blame some aspect of the Wasteland's awfulness on a beloved canon character, Squilliam could be there to take the heat.

Every time this story murdered or beheaded or tortured a beloved canon character, Squilliam could have been blamed for each one.

Kkat wanted so badly to blame human nature, pony and zigger nature, and the idea of evil itself on the environment and the important ponies who make it what it is. But there was always one option.

Squilliam Fancyson, immortal bastard running around with a machine gun ruining everything for his own fun. Spite for Rainbow Dash for being a more talented guitar player than he's a clarinet player convinced him to destroy everything she ever knew and cared about and then shit on her irradiated front lawn under the cover of clouds and dust. Because why derail a pony character like Fluttershy into inventing nukes or Applejack into inventing guns when Squilliam comes from a setting where Spongebob and Patrick can make functioning World War weaponry out of sand proving such weapons already exist and they know what they are? Everything this story ever did could be fixed by making Squilliam Fancyson responsible for everything bad that ever went wrong and then making Littlepip kill him in a sick nasty fight at the end with over four phases marked by transformations including one where he glows and gets wings and one where he drinks a radioactive smoothie of nanomachines and popeye's spinach to become a giant dragon and one where he becomes a gigantic squid unicorn bigger than the universe and he says "Now I'm a big guy" and she whips out her gun and says "for you. How about a kiss from this?" and he tries to bitchslap the planet into the sun but Littlepip uses her trusty revolver to shoot his giant hand into nothingness by fanning the hammer fast enough and then she fires her gun at the sun to ricochet her bullet off it into his eye and then she fires her Little Macintosh(tm) at his other eye and then fires it faster so the second bullet pushes the first bullet in midair making a bigger faster bullet big enough to penetrate his other eye and I'm fucking with you I don't actually think this would work at all. No, instead, the real culprit behind everything that ever went wrong should be Dio Brando, whose evolved stand The World Over Heaven lets him do whatever he wants and overwrite reality freely just like in Eyes Of Heaven only not gay. Dio was fucking bored and felt like fucking with FIM so he created Fallout Equestria but not even sans undertale could stop him from stealing the infinity stones and that magic book from Jackie Chan Adventures and the Ultimatrix's upgraded form The Absolutrix. It's called that because it's the absolute best watch possible. No wait that's stupid. Call it the Bestrix or the Perfectrix or the Magictrix or the Infinitrix or the Overclock. With the power of Axel's Overclock he becomes more powerful than Nick Bolton even with his tactical blactical black flashlight and hyperlink blocked. He can take your fucking kromer. He's even stronger than lunafell and her magictrix which is an omnitrix but with magic. Like he's more than 1000% of shaggy's power level and I'm kidding this is retarded, all of it, it's all fucking retarded. Some grown fucking man out there wept when Han Solo died and wept when he read Fallout Equestria and if I rewrite Fallout Equestria into something that appeals to big brain geniuses like us it won't have mass appeal like Fallout Equestria did. He cried when he saw what he convinced himself to love out of the sunk cost fallacy and if he saw a better version of FE he would zealously loathe it for not being the version all five hundred pounds of him feels nostalgic for. His dick's so small it inverted to penetrate his own asshole creating a quantum singularity of gayness. A singaylarity if you will. But if I made an even gayer piece of media he'd cum buckets for it. An even bigger gayer crossover with less artistic integrity and artstyle consistency than a child's first sprite comic on comicfury. Is art dead? Is there meaning in trying to make anything good or even your dream project if something with less soul would get more fame and money?

Although, all gayness asside, consider the following...

If the story started with LP being bullied by someone like Squilliam Fancyson only a pony, we'd feel bad for LP. If Filliam Ponyson left the Stable after LP left it specifically to murder LP in a lawless place and make life harder for her along the way it would make her adventure harder. Everything's too easy for Littlesue supreme, crank that difficulty from Couch Potato to Exterminator so things can be cool, that'll fix all the problems. Well at least some of them. Probably none of them. Self doubt consumes me and pretending to be invincible is my hobby because secretly I'm very lonely and entirely insecure. Every good hero needs a well written rival, someone to push them forward and measure their progress and success with. Like Sasuke before the author derailed him completely and ruined the story. Rewatching the kai recut of the show made me realize that's when shit falls apart for good for this character. Once he loses his revenge quest he breaks as a concept but becoming an object in the Orochimaru arc was the start of his downfall as a character. But that isn't happening here because Squilliam and Sasuke will be used as inspiration for a rival character who doesn't ruin the show. Littlepip needs an edgy evil rival character who's better than her at everything. Take all the "we're the same" villain speech shit from Red Eye and give it to the edgy rival OC who exists to be maximum Satsuki x100 with huge tits. Because rivals should look bigger than the hero and it would be funny if the edgy rival had milky way tiddies yet was still peak wasteland murderhobo supreme instead of LP.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
8d9e463
?
No.322494
322499 322522 322526
the_wasteland___fallout_equestria_by_deftwise_zero-d6k64aj.jpg
>>322198

Final Thoughts:

Welp, at long last, we have reached the end of our journey. Checking the post dates of the original thread, I see that we have now spent over a year of our lives slogging our way through this ridiculous pony fanfiction; so, what have we gained as a result of this experience?

Well, on the downside, I have spent over a year of my life slogging my way through this ridiculous pony fanfiction. Considering all of the quality books on my shelf that I still have yet to read, that is a not-insignificant opportunity cost. However, on the upside, if anyone ever asks me: "What is the most objectively terrible work of fiction ever written in the English language, and why is it Fallout: Equestria by K 'my asshole is such a raging AIDS inferno that I can literally shit molten dildos' Kat?", I will be able to provide a thoughtful, detailed, well-reasoned response. It is also my hope that, as a result of my efforts, you can do the same.

So, after everything we've read, how would I summarize my view of Fallout: Equestria? It should be clear enough to anyone who has been following these threads that this story wasn't really my cup of tea, but does it have any redeeming "virtues" see what I did there? at all?

Well, let's try and start with the positives. As much as I hate to admit it, kkat probably deserves at least a small amount of credit simply for attempting a project this large and seeing it through to the end. As incoherent and poorly-written as this story is, it's clear that the author put quite a bit of work into it, and word-vomiting something of this size is admittedly not as easy as it looks. Also worth noting is that it maintains a surprising level of internal consistency.

Though the worldbuilding is shoddy at times, it's clear that kkat put quite a bit of forethought into mapping out the world's backstory before he sat down to write, and there are remarkably few continuity errors for a story of this size. To compare, Peen Stroke openly admitted in an interview that Past Sins was just word-vomited without any advance planning, and the result was that his text was mostly a complete mess. For all this story's size and complexity, kkat clearly employed a more disciplined writing method, and the results of this discipline can be clearly seen.

Taken purely as a work of MLP fanfiction, while I certainly wouldn't say that I thought this was good or that I enjoyed reading it, I'll admit that there are probably worse things out there. Having now read several of these pony stories, more than one of which are considered fandom classics, I think I can safely say that the bar for pony fiction is not set tremendously high, and kkat probably clears it as well or better than many of his peers. He is a more disciplined writer than Peen Stroke, his grammar is significantly better than soulpeener's (though I did notice a few glaring errors here and there), and he is a much, much better storyteller than Assman (though that is an extremely low bar to clear).

At the same time, however, there are areas where the other writers we've looked at clearly outshine him. Despite soulpeener's piss-poor grammar and tryhard prose, he managed to tell a (more or less) complete story from start to finish, while keeping the length reasonable and not veering off on too many silly tangents. By contrast, kkat's text is absurdly bloated and unfocused; if someone asked me to sum up what it was about in a few brief words (without referencing either Fallout or MLP) I don't think I'd be able to do it. There is no plot worth speaking of; it's just an endless narrative about an dull, undeveloped character wandering around a world performing increasingly nonsensical actions. As Nigel succinctly put it: it's not a story, it's just a sequence of events. Soulpeener's work also had better developed and more likable characters. Though I don't recall being overly fond of his protagonist, "Moody Rat-phobic Medieval Guy" didn't inspire anywhere near the level of visceral hatred for me that Littlepoop did.

As to Peen Stroke, his prose was generally a bit better than kkat's, and his work was at the very least the product of his own imagination. By contrast, FoE appears to be mostly a clumsy pastiche of storylines from various Fallout games with a thin coat of pony applied to it. Kkat has demonstrated little real imagination or creativity; his main talent is being able to keep track of an insane number of details. While Past Sins failed in that it missed its own point by a wide margin, FoE more or less makes the point it was trying to make (I'll get into this in detail in a minute); however, the point it attempts to make is far simpler, and it uses about 500,000 more words to do so than were necessary.

And Assman? Well, I remember saying that the thing I liked best about Friendship is Optimal is that it was short. I definitely can't say the same for FoE.

Anyway, however well it might hold up against other fandom works, if we treat Fallout: Equestria as literature we have to judge it a bit more harshly. Even before I became interested in MLP, I remember hearing bronies arguing that many of their fandom's works have genuine literary merit, and deserve to be taken seriously outside of the fandom. FoE was one I specifically remember being cited as an example on multiple occasions. For this reason, I think it's fair to take the kid gloves off and analyze this text as literature.

It's probably better to start a new post for this, even though I've still got a couple hundred chars left. I'll be drawing from an EqD interview with kkat that I found, for reference it can be accessed here:
https://www.equestriadaily.com/2016/05/equestria-daily-interviews-kkat-author.html

>>322378
I'll address this in a bit.
Anonymous
6183881
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No.322499
322502 322503 322519 322525
>>322494
>Anyway, however well it might hold up against other fandom works, if we treat Fallout: Equestria as literature we have to judge it a bit more harshly. Even before I became interested in MLP, I remember hearing bronies arguing that many of their fandom's works have genuine literary merit, and deserve to be taken seriously outside of the fandom. FoE was one I specifically remember being cited as an example on multiple occasions. For this reason, I think it's fair to take the kid gloves off and analyze this text as literature.

I know you have another post coming, but I have a genuine question i've always been curious about: How do you feel about this fandom's overall level of quality when it comes to horsewords? You've judged "The best of the best" and found them to all be horribly lacking, to say the least. Do you know of any works you'd regard as genuinely great? Stuff you'd wager outperforms even above average when it comes to published literature? Or is this fandom as a whole populated with mostly trash?
Anonymous
aa18237
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No.322502
322505
(you).png
>>322499
I wonder who could be behind that post.
Anonymous
c47b423
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No.322503
322505
friendship.jpg
>>322499
I bit bitter, aren't you?
Anonymous
6183881
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No.322505
>>322502
>>322503
Huh? I've been posting throughout this thread for months now as the only Canadian poster (I think) here. Im curious as to what Glim thinks of overall ponyfic quality, because to me it seems like there's a whole lot of "meh" and i'm not sure what ones would be considered quality. I guess I need to read a lot more pony fics to sift through it all and figure it out myself.
Anonymous
480b7f1
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No.322519
>>322499
Despite all the fanfics I've read I think they were all at least a bit shit. They all had problems that got in the way of me recommending them to anyone as real literature. Even stories I liked or even admired as a kid, I can admit they aren't anywhere near the quality of a real-ass good book. Obvious mistakes (some I noticed back then, some I notice now thinking back on them) keep me from calling them perfect or genius like an excellent game or tv show or movie or book or manga can be. If I had more access to real books as a kid I would have read those instead upon experiencing good books, but my internet access was highly limited and the handmedown ipod I got from a friend as a teen could have text from fanfiction.net loaded onto it.
If I had to choose one for "least shit fanfic ever" candidate I'd choose The Sun Soul (a pokemon fanfic) for having worldbuilding and depth and being more than just a sequence of events in which a child of ten or younger travels a country fighting gym leaders and eventually the elite four and champion just because that's what kids in pokeymanz land do. This one's got a cool main quest that justifies the hero running around fighting strangers and it's got exciting twists. It even does something unexpected and ballsy like killing off the hero's girlfriend and giving him a new one and starting the story with Ash fighting Team Rocket only for them to turn out to be good guys and it had an ending much smarter than the usual "and then the hero defeated every baddie and lived happily ever after" thing. Even leaves things open for a spinoff featuring May and Hoenn I haven't read yet. May's character was a bit flat but she didn't have much screentime compared to others. Maybe it's recency bias talking but I just don't remember any fanfic for anything else I could unironically recommend.

Plenty of fanfics are still better than Fallout Equestria though. Especially that Smash Bros Brawl fanfic that's over four million words long.
Anonymous
bafb19d
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No.322522
322528
f.jpg
>>322494
>For this reason, I think it's fair to take the kid gloves off and analyze this text as literature
>This is the moment you've all been waiting forrrrrrrrrrr!
Anonymous
0d404de
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No.322523
>>322493
Well, this shitpost was shit. Too many refrences to shows you like for one, as if it was a commercial or something. Maybe you should ask John Elway about the ins and outs of shitposting.
>I removed the vid with the former post. Felt unfair since you have been trying to improve.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
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No.322525
>>322499

Sorry, I know you've asked this question a couple of times already, I've been meaning to respond. There have been quite a few posts made that I've meant to reply to but haven't.

I haven't come across anything that's impressed me terribly, but at the same time I haven't really read that many pony fics. Apart from what I've reviewed here, I've only read a couple of short random things that were linked on /mlp/ or something; it doesn't really seem fair for me to say that everything the fandom has produced is shit based on such a small sample of what's available. However, based on what I've read so far, coupled with what I know about the way that amateur writing projects in general tend to turn out, I do think it's fair to say that most of what the fandom has produced is probably shit.

One thing I have noticed is that lighter, shorter stories that are intended to be satirical or funny tend to be a little better. For instance, awhile back I remember someone suggested I read a short one called Would it Matter if I Was? or something to that effect. It dealt with Fluttershy being a changeling. While the story itself was pretty meh, I remember I also read a parody of the same story that I thought was better done than the original. Part of it is probably that it's easier to riff on something than it is to come up with an original idea, but I also tend to think that the less seriously you take yourself the better your chances are of producing something good.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
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No.322526
322531 322532 322548
the_wasteland___fallout_equestria_by_deftwise_zero-d6k64aj.jpg
>>322494

So, how to go about assessing FoE at a literary level? I don't see much point in rehashing the myriad small complaints I have about the text, as I feel like I've covered all of that pretty extensively. Probably a good starting point would be to ask the author what he thinks he was writing about, and then assess how close to the mark he actually came:

>Fallout: Equestria is a story about standing up against evil no matter the cost. It is a story about lighting candles in the darkness. About the value and vulnerability of virtue, and the necessity and strength of friendship.
>Fallout: Equestria is definitely not for everyone. It contains darkness and mature (in the true sense of the word) themes, not to mention a great deal of violence. However, these things are used in service to a story that puts the themes and morals of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic to the acid test and shows how they stand up… and even shine.
Basically, from kkat's point of view, this story is a treatment of the same ideas found the FiM cartoon series: that strong friendships are the key to enduring whatever challenges life might throw at you, and that having the support of good friends can mean the difference between hope and despair. However, while the cartoon deals with these topics in a lighthearted format aimed at children, FoE attempts to address them from a more adult perspective, bringing in issues like death and rape and world destruction that would be inappropriate for a children's show.

So, let's tackle the issue of "mature themes" first. There's a common belief held mainly by hacky amateur writers and readers with no taste that just because a story has content that would be inappropriate for children, this automatically makes it "mature." This is demonstrably false; loading a story up with sex and violence doesn't give it more depth or maturity, it just means your story has a lot of sex and violence in it.

As a quick example off the top of my head, the Friday the 13th films are nothing but sex and violence, and I don't think many would critics would call those films mature, or argue that they had anything terribly important to say (though they are admittedly fun to watch). Meanwhile, The Lion King is a retelling of Hamlet, packaged as a G-rated cartoon aimed at children. There is violence and death in TLK, certainly, but it is tastefully downplayed. We don't need to see graphic depictions of Mufasa getting trampled or Scar getting eaten alive by hyenas for those moments in the story to have the intended impact. Conversely, if you cut all the tits and blood out of Friday the 13th, all you'd be left with is a weak story about a serial killer in a hockey mask. Which of the two stories seems more mature?

This might seem like a silly comparison, but it's important to keep this distinction in mind when looking at Fallout: Equestria. For all of kkat's claims about this story having mature themes, one of my earliest observations was that his treatment of good vs. evil was overly simplistic, and the excessive gore and violence did little to mask this. Personally I would argue that, far from being a more "mature" depiction of the FiM setting, FoE is quite a bit more juvenile than the cartoon. In trying to present itself as edgy and dark simply by amping up the gore and profanity, it becomes less mature, not more. If MLP:FiM is Equestria from a child's viewpoint, then FoE is the same setting from the viewpoint of a moody, edgy, comically self-important teenager.

In one of the earliest episodes, in which Littlepoop is captured by slavers who are then set upon by raiders, I remember being very confused. It was not clear who the "raiders" were, or why they were attacking; my initial assumption was that the word "raider" was meant to be taken at face value, and that these guys were just ordinary brigands or robbers. Their cartoonish, over-the-top sadism struck me as more comical than frightening, and it continued to be comical even after it became more or less clear what the deal with them was. Up until about midway through the story, when characters like Red Eye and the Goddess were being introduced, all of the villains were the same: just generic baddies who performed acts of wanton destruction and cruelty for no reason other than le edge.

If the Ponyville raiders had just been simple brigands who attacked weak ponies and took their stuff, it would be less edgy but more believable. It would be a simple and obvious cause-and-effect relationship: times are hard, supplies are scarce, you have to do what you can to survive. The Monterrey Jack character didn't do anything as horrid as what the raiders did, but his motivations were more believable; or at least they were, until kkat decided to graft all that weird shit about "corrupted honesty" or whatever the fuck to his character.

Realistically, in a world with scarce resources and no formal authority, unsavory trades like slavery and banditry would be commonplace, and presumably there would be an uptick in rape and child molestation and so forth simply because people who are into that kind of thing would no longer fear reprisal. However, it's unlikely that otherwise-normal people would suddenly start decorating their houses with guts and murdering people for the fuck of it simply because "friendship" and "harmony" had gone away.

Kkat uses overblown violence in the same way that Peen Stroke uses overblown sadness: he just dials it up to eleven and uses shock to compensate for an inability to move the reader in any other way. A more nuanced and plausible Edgequestria would have made for a much better setting, but the tradeoff would be that the bloody horror-show would need to be dialed back quite a bit. Kkat is either incapable of realizing this, or unwilling to make the trade; either way it shows a significant lack of maturity.
Anonymous
480b7f1
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No.322528
>>322522
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q5th225wgsk
Anonymous
5c3bf9f
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No.322531
>>322526
>In trying to present itself as edgy and dark simply by amping up the gore and profanity, it becomes less mature, not more.
This.
>Realistically, in a world with scarce resources and no formal authority, unsavory trades like slavery and banditry would be commonplace, and presumably there would be an uptick in rape and child molestation and so forth simply because people who are into that kind of thing would no longer fear reprisal.
Mmm, maybe.

Looking forward to the rest.
Anonymous
480b7f1
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No.322532
322534
>>322526
Can anyone here remember all the times (or any time) friendship as a concept was important or useful in Fallout Equestria, as opposed to simply friendship with the correct people?
Leftist writers subconsciously (or consciously if they are subliminally messaging their target audience) tend to promote the idea that friendship isn't this wonderful universal thing but simply a way to get powerful useful individuals to do what you want, making you powerful.
I think that's why Golly Filly from late-season FIM never met a silly useless pony who emotionally helped her or in some other manner taught her how friendship can be good even if you can't exploit the hell out of it for personal gain. How friendship can be good without having to exploit the hell out of it for personal gain.
Anonymous
d8e0c27
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No.322534
322537
>>322532
>Can anyone here remember all the times (or any time) friendship as a concept was important or useful in Fallout Equestria, as opposed to simply friendship with the correct people?
This. LP's group are hardly friends.
Anonymous
480b7f1
?
No.322537
>>322534
Come to think of it, did LP ever show any interest in anypony who wasn't obviously useful to her or in a position of power?
She didn't feel like getting to know Mouse And Whatshisname or Gawd and her Griffons as people. Just ordered them around once they joined her gay nigger faggot army.
She only felt like talking to Crane when she heard he was a powerful telekinetic and assumed he could give her tips.
She listened to the mayor of WhoCaresville rant about how "karma" fucked him over for letting Littlepip run around fucking up the Slaver operations even though she gave him a nuke or something, but she didn't bother with the politics of that other town that only existed to be destroyed by the Enclave.
Only felt like visiting Tenpony after she wanted to know how the radio whore knew so much about her and why she was sucking her useless lesbian negative-six-inch cock* so hard over the radio.

*You know what they say about small weak men with small dicks? Imagine a smaller weaker man with a negative six inch dick, and you've got what shit women effectively are when they reject cute helpful femininity and try to compete with men but can't intellectually/physically compete with the average man fairly because they're not in the top percentage of women. If women won't do the only job God wanted women to have (breedable housewife) and instead seek to pretend they're men the result is an inferior imitation of a real man full of neuroticism and rage and foul language and denial of the fact that she'll never measure up to even the men artificially placed below her literally or penisually. Littlepip's horny inner narration as an ass-obsessed lesbian isn't cute at all, lesbians are cute when they're adorable shy little sweethearts who blush at the thought of hand-holding before marriage and still want to be good women anyway. At most, one can be a tomboy(as long as she's a legit one with the positive qualities of a man and not just a failed woman eager to cosplay a man), but the other one has to be extra adorable to make up for it. It's the difference between idealized yuri sweetness and messy sloppy femoid pussylust, which this story has. Fucking hell, Homage's idea of post-fucking pillow talk is "You're going to fucking die out there in the wasteland lmao, you'll be eaten alive and forgotten after barely accomplishing anything". That's in the sex scene, just so Littlepip can reply to that Supervillain "Cancer always wins in the end" speech with a trite speech about never giving up even if it means "floating her body down the river styx to make the wasteland choke to death on her" or some shit.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
eda9be8
?
No.322548
322549 322578 322580
the_wasteland___fallout_equestria_by_deftwise_zero-d6k64aj.jpg
>>322526

About the only nod to maturity I've found in the entire story occurs at the very end. The Afterword, which tells the story of a revived Fluttershy visiting some strangers' graves and then traveling to Bucklyn Cross to inform a bunch of Steel Rangers that she is opening a hellhound sanctuary, takes place about a decade after the events of the main story. It's a fairly standard "this is what the world looks like as a result of the hero's actions" segment that makes more sense as an epilogue than an afterword. Really, the author would have been better served by deleting the existing Epilogue, which consists of a dumb and irrelevant exchange between Homage and Velvet Remedy and little else, and using the "10 years later" story as the Epilogue instead. But I digress.

What I noticed is that, while Edgequestria has become noticeably less edgy during the interim period, there are still hints of trouble lurking in the shadows. The Enclave is apparently still something of a threat, Red Eye still has loyalists who continue to fight for his cause for some unexplained reason, removing radiation from the air has eliminated a vital energy source and this is causing conflict, and so forth. Basically the idea is that, while the bulk of the world's problems were solved by Littlepoop's actions, as well as whatever the fuck the "Gardens of Equestria" did exactly, there are still traces of old problems that haven't been completely resolved, as well as new, unanticipated problems that were unintentionally created when solving the existing problems. While there is still plenty of stuff I can nitpick, I'll say that it's actually one of the better-written sections of the text, and it was a more tempered and reasonable ending than the "everything is magically fixed" ending that I'd spent most of the story expecting.

Anyway, we'll tackle this part next:

>Fallout: Equestria is a story about standing up against evil no matter the cost. It is a story about lighting candles in the darkness. About the value and vulnerability of virtue, and the necessity and strength of friendship.
What exactly is the "evil" that Littlepoop stands up against? What exactly does standing up to that evil ever cost her?

As I said, kkat's treatment of the concept of good and evil is childishly simplistic. For the first half of the story, Littlepoop's only antagonists are random monsters and generic, cookie-cutter bad-guys who pop out of the shadows and attack her for no reason. I remember observing that these early battles resemble video game fights, in which swarms of generic baddies keep attacking the player until she can destroy the spawn point. There is never any attempt at humanizing these characters or even giving them a basic motivation for doing what they are doing; the raiders and slavers are just mindless zombies that do horrible things because they're horrible. Most of the early fight sequences are used as opportunities for gratuitous violence and edge, and to give the author's insufferable OC a chance to level up.

Kkat himself even seems at least partially aware of this:

>I recommend reading the first dozen chapters. They are short and easy to read. (The third chapter holds the worst of the gore in the story, so if you can get through that, you have nothing to worry about.) If the story hasn’t caught your interest by the chapter “Must Go On”, leave it be. You’ve given it a true chance. But if it has… well, then you are in for a treat, because the story only gets better and better from there.
Though he and I clearly have some different ideas about what "short and easy to read" means, what's telling is that kkat seems to acknowledge that the earliest parts of the story are basically just mindless level-grinding, and that you have to slog through twelve whole chapters before anything important even starts happening. Incidentally, the total word count through Ch. 12 is 85,009; this is enough text to constitute its own novel.

Eventually, once all the stuff about "virtues" starts becoming more central to what I will generously call the plot, we are given a little more of an explanation for why the raiders and slavers and whatnot behave the way that they do. Every pony apparently has a "virtue," a concept which is never fully explained, but is probably analogous to the Elements of Harmony concept from the cartoon series. Your "virtue" is what defines the core of your being, and following it is the path to a happy and meaningful life. However, a "virtue" can (somehow) become "corrupted," at which point you begin to follow a dark path that (somehow) reflects a warped or inverted version of your "virtue."

Again, like quite a bit of what's in FoE, the "virtue" idea is never fully explained, so we have to infer quite a bit. However, I think the basic idea is that, due to the lack of friendship (or something), ponies in the wasteland (somehow) had their virtues corrupted, and began to follow dark inversions of their virtues that (somehow) led them to conclude that shitting all over their mattresses, decorating their homes with intestines, and organizing caged death matches between foals was rational and sensible behavior.

Even if we take all of this at face value and just roll with it, we still don't have an answer to the fundamental question: why? By explaining the raiders' behavior in this way, kkat seems to open a path to redemption for them: it's not entirely their fault that they wound up the way they did, they just need some kind of guiding light to bring them back on the right path. Ditto for Red Eye and Trixie and the other "bad" characters; they aren't necessarily evil, just misguided. This is in line with the spirit of the show; most of the villains who appear in FiM are presented as misguided souls who can be redeemed by the power of friendship (or something). Okay, fine. But this still doesn't explain just what causes "virtue" to become "corrupted" in the first place.

I'll continue this thought in a new post.
Anonymous
480b7f1
?
No.322549
>>322548
You like how the story ended?
Get ready for another Charlie Brown football moment.
The hero sacrifices himself to turn on a big machine that de-irradiates the country and gives it pure drinking water, that's from Fallout 3 and its Geck/Project Purity thing in the main quest.
All Fallout Equestria did was copy it while changing pure water to food. The cloud covering problem is still solved. LP just goes into a weather controlling machine separate from the GOEden while in the original the GECK powered Project Purity which deirradiated all water*
Littlepip fights the Enclave and fights her way into The SPP instead of Project Purity but she still fights The Enclave to get into a thing that fixes most of the Wasteland's problems.
There are still enemies to shoot because in the Broken Steel DLC that lets you pay money for the right to continue playing Fallout 3 after the main story is complete, there are still enemies to shoot.
The only thing I can really call original is how the lack of radiation is somehow causing power/resource problems for some retarded reason. Does... Does Kcrap think nuclear power plants generate power by taking in radioactive waste goo barrels and burning it like coal to turn it into electricity? Fallout's exploding nuclear cars (which "inspired" this story's nuclear chariots so much, ghoul melee strikes can glitch cars into exploding randomly) don't use radiation as a fuel source. Radiation is generated as a byproduct when the nuclear engine is on.

*even though it's actually pretty easy to deirradiate water without needing magical scifi energy-blast machines that magically do impossible things. And even though there isn't much point deirradiating the Pachamac River - I mean Ptolomac - if you're only going to dump that purified water back into the irradiated riverbed. Bethesda just really wanted you to look for a GECK during the course of the story because you looked for one in fallout 2, and they wanted you to find a vault full of radiation and super mutants so you can befriend Fawkes the overpowered invincible OC with a gatling laser and no character depth. Bethesda's Fallout relies on iconography stolen from earlier fallouts and other scifi media, no wonder it inspired Kkat to steal Fallout and FIM to write this.
Anonymous
480b7f1
?
No.322553
Speedrunning FOE idea

>be littlepip
>bored as fuck
>leave stable one day for literally no reason besides "i want adventure"
>oh shit oh fuck adventuring in the wasteland is hard, desperate non-edgy pitiable raiders are starving and trying to rob you and shooting them feels morally wrong
>get kidnapped and taken north of your stable straight to a Red Eye prison camp built out of a pre-war insane asylum that used magic to make PTSD cures for soldiers
>LP tries to flee and accidentally plugs herself into a memory alteration machine that fills her head with over sixty terrabytes of combat experience and gunplay stolen from mindwiped soldiers
>LP kills slavers epicly and is hired by Gawd's Griffons, former Red Eye mercenaries now working for the now-heroic enclave because Red Eye's violating Gawd's moral code also Gawd is a dude now and a pegasus because fuck griffons
>Gawd makes the plan to get Littlepip into the SPP Red Eye took over. LP is just a pawn in her game and an angry underling of Gawd calls LP a lucky talentless faggot who's only special because of her PipBuck and high luck stat
>Littlepip falls in love with Gawd
>Red Eye trying to become an alicorn to get into it and succeeds becoming a sick final bossfight while stealing a cryogenically frozen experimental lone alicorn babe's wings and horn but not absorbing her fully because if he did that would make him partly a girl and that's gay. All traces of gay were removed from this story.
>Red Eye says enslaving others is optimal and he stole the magic from countless slaves to become an alicorn. Gawd calls him a faggot and says friendship and kindness and teamwork and mutual cooperation are better
>Red Eye said the meteors that fell to earth ending equestria are a challenge from Gigasatan to become even crueller than darkness itself because only evilness can make you strong and then he injects himself with darkness to become buff
>now he's a big guy (for Littlepip) and worshipping Gigasatan gives him powers because he's evil. His shadow rises up to make him bulletproof or something so LP and Gawd have to get creative.
>LP and Gawd win a sick fight scene with Red Eye using the power of friendship and Red Eye kills himself in an ironic way by his own hand (hoof whatever) due to lacking friendship
>gigasatan betrays Red Eye and sacrifices RE to summon himself but LP fires a rainbow blast of friendship to kill gigasatan.
>LP takes over the SPP and eliminates the dusty cloud covering Red Eye set up over all the wasteland except his slave-filled farmland. Now rain washes the dust away. Or maybe Red Eye was using the SPP to make everywhere a desert except his farmland and LP fixes that instead while magicking away the dust cloud covering.
>story over, Gawd sacrifices himself to turn the SPP on saving the world, LP cries and rebuilds Equestria with the heroic enclave's help in his name. Or maybe the other way around, LP sacrifices herself and he carries on for her.

no alicorn army. No foal thunderdome. No gore decorating houses. No time spent working for red eye as a slave. No pre-war surveillance tower somehow full of snooty retards who make their living by trading luxuries like massages and small portions of irradiated scavenged beans to wastelander visitors who lack rights while they're in the tower and also the tower contains a secret society that put Velvet in charge of the radio tower just because her family has passed down a voice-sex-changing blackface-voice-impersonating spell down through her family line for generations. No killing joke or futanari potion made from it. No fluttertree or crackhead pinkie. No zigger or calamity or velvet or homage or radio or other stables or experiments or Scootaloo lore or Flutternukes. No giant dragon secretly in the rock breaking prison and no bonus giant cyberdragon and no Canterlot and no zigger nuclear war and no edgequestrian war backstory, LP is from the only stable in Edgequestria and Manetanner built it as a tax writeoff not expecting it to see use. But LP's ancestor snuck in and lived there in secret while pregnant for the lulz and free food and robot servants until one day meteors and the doors sealed automatically. Yep.

Speedrun. I skipped and cut out as much bullshit as I could think of while replacing anything convoluted ot unnecessary with the simplest thing possible or the easiest to explain.

It's no shakespeare but it's a FIMfic. They'll only be shakespeare if a professional patreon-having fanfiction author decides to rip off Lion King next.
Anonymous
84361e7
?
No.322578
322579
>>322548
>I recommend reading the first dozen chapters. They are short and easy to read.
>If the story hasn’t caught your interest by the chapter “Must Go On”, leave it be.
>You’ve given it a true chance.
No. At that point, It's been given way more than that.
While it's too hardcore to hook readers by the first sentence, as a writer you still have a responsibility to engage your readers. It's their time they spend on your story, not yours.
Anonymous
2820e4a
?
No.322579
>>322578
Well, in a way it's merciful of him not to hook his readers with false promises of potential in the earlier parts of the story since we know that it doesn't, "gets better and better from there."
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
1ea4685
?
No.322580
322592 322637
the_wasteland___fallout_equestria_by_deftwise_zero-d6k64aj.jpg
>>322548

Far from humanizing or redeeming the raiders, attributing their insane behavior to some kind of vaguely-defined corrupting force just buttresses the argument that they are nothing but mindless cardboard-cutout monsters that don't serve any purpose in the story beyond giving the hero something to shoot at. I observed fairly early on that a lot of this story is just mindless splatter-porn, and that its half-baked morality is only meant to provide the reader with a flimsy excuse for enjoying the senseless violence. The modern civilized world frowns upon reveling in such violence; however, there's still some residual animal part of the human imagination that enjoys it anyway.

In order to allow the reader to have their violence and condemn it too, a writer can designate a certain group of characters as "bad," and have most of the story's violence caused by and/or directed towards them. The baddies are always the instigators of any violent conflict, while the hero is never violent by nature; she is always just an ordinary person who, through some injustice perpetrated by the "bad guys," keeps getting roped into situations where she has to defend either herself or others. The more evil you can make the bad guys, the more righteous the hero's vengeance against them will appear, and the more the audience is likely to root for the hero and give your story a good rating.

In this way, the reader not only gets to enjoy the splatter-porn aspect of the story, they can double-dip and enjoy it from two perspectives. They get to vicariously partake in whatever original evil is being perpetrated by the bad guy, which is usually thrilling on some level, and then they get to watch the righteous hero ride in and brutally revenge herself upon the villain, which is not only thrilling but makes the reader feel like they somehow contributed to her victory by rooting for her. It allows the reader to indulge their thirst for mindless violence, while at the same time feeling morally superior for having done so.

This type of story is called "melodrama," and it's one of America's most successful and enduring varieties of entertainment. It should come as no surprise that most of it is pure lowest common denominator. The "bad guys" are usually thinly-veiled metaphors for whatever sort of person the writer expects the audience to hate already. At various points in history, this role has been filled by Indians, cowboys, blacks, whites, Republicans, Democrats, Jews, Germans, the Irish, Christians, Muslims, people who don't support the war, people who do support the war, rich people, poor people, immigrants, citizens, and so forth and so on; basically, whatever swath of the population has most keenly drawn the ire of the mob at the time of publication. Meanwhile, the hero represents the opinions and values of the average audience member, with the added benefit of being stronger, prettier/more handsome, wittier, smarter, more resourceful, and generally more "heroic" than the average audience member is likely to be in real life. In short, it's a type of story that validates what the reader already believes, and makes them feel like they've learned something or grown as a human simply because they read it and agreed with it.

In Fallout: Equestria, the baddies are all representative of things that the average reader can be safely expected to disapprove of. The raiders are mindless blood-gluttons who engage in pointless cruelty that goes quite a way past absurd. The slavers are cynical, amoral flesh-peddlers who engage in the icky-doo-doo practice of depriving cute widdle pony-wonies of their liberty-wibberty. The Enclave is a vague metaphor for American imperialism or something I guess, and Red Eye is just your typical, run-of-the-mill insane dictator. There's not really a whole lot of depth or moral ambiguity to any of these characters; it's a pretty safe bet that few readers are going to sympathize with a bunch of foal-murderers and slave-traders, so they're all safe to kill. Thus, the kind of person this story is aimed at, presumably bronies in the mid-to-low IQ range who share the same soft-liberal middle-American values as its author, are likely to derive at least some enjoyment from booing its assorted villains and cheering for its intrepid protagonist. This might be entertaining enough for some people, but is there anything actually valuable to be gained from watching an insane lesbian run around disemboweling generic thugs for roughly half a million words?

Well, here is basically what kkat thinks we can gain:
>these things are used in service to a story that puts the themes and morals of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic to the acid test and shows how they stand up… and even shine.

Remind us again: what are those themes and morals exactly?
>the value and vulnerability of virtue, and the necessity and strength of friendship.
Woah, that's a lot of 'v' sounds. Reminds me of Velvet's voluptuous vulva vibrating vivaciously.

Anyway, if I'm following kkat's thought process correctly here, the basic idea is that having strong friendships is the key to weathering hardship and keeping yourself on the righteous path. It's a little simplistic, but it's more or less in keeping with the spirit of the show, so it's probably fine as a message for something like this. The story kinda-sorta communicates this message in the end, I guess. However, to me, the relevant question is: did kkat really need this entire 620,000-word convoluted clusterfuck just to convey a simple Aesop-moral that an episode of the show could have easily communicated in the space of 18 minutes? Did all of the over-the-top violence and gore really help to convey this message any better? Was all of the endless autism about meteors and megaspells really necessary? Did all of those purposeless side-quests and dungeon crawls help to drive this point home any better? Personally, I would say no, to all of it.
Anonymous
9c3bea6
?
No.322592
322594 322595
>>322580
>The modern civilized world frowns upon reveling in such violence
It does?
Anonymous
480b7f1
?
No.322594
>>322592
The modern civilized world frowns upon those who engage in violence and aren't given permission from the ruling class to do so.
Niggers stab and rape thousands, muslims bomb and rape thousands, women gaslight and rape their way to the top and steal civilization and opportunities and cash and children from men with narcissistic-authoritarian aka feminist votes, antifa terrorists burn down buildings and tear down the dreams of small business owners, business as usual.
One white guy fights back against the invaders in any way, the system loses its mind.

By the way, does anyone recall the final words of any of the villains in this story?

I was thinking about how the final words of well-written villains usually say something deep about the character.

For example, Light Yagami's final words weren't just "oh shit oh fuck I don't want to die", there was also screaming for help from friends he lost or sacrificed along the way, which is deep. Limping away his mortal wounds bring him down and he can't think of a solution in time to save himself. He even dies on stairs symbolizing how he cannot ascend and won't go to heaven or hell.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DoAlXlRGNIc

But Red Eye, the rock breaking prison's dragon, Goddess Trixie, any significant raider or slaver or other villainous character... What were their final lines? Were they given the decency of good final lines and a decent death scene, or were they treated like afterthoughts to be disposed of once they could no longer serve their purpose as arbitrary obstacles in Littlepoop's way?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.322595
322598
>>322592
You might be right; depending on the situation violence is becoming more acceptable to more people. What I was getting at though is that, by the standards of middle-class liberal morality, reveling in violence for the sake of violence is generally frowned upon. However, "righteous" violence is another matter. If someone says that they read a story about a pony stomping another pony's skull into goop and really enjoyed it, that person comes across as mentally unbalanced. However, if they clarify that the pony getting his skull stomped in was an evil "raider," and the pony doing the stomping was exacting some kind of righteous vengeance because the raider had been organizing caged death matches between foals, then all of a sudden the skull-stomping becomes acceptable.

When I brought up the social acceptability of violence, I was talking about acceptability within the specific context of entertainment; however, this same hypocrisy extends into real life as well. Generally, people in modern, first-world civilizations will outwardly condemn violence, but at the same time will readily endorse extreme violence if it's directed against someone or something that they and other members of their social group find morally reprehensible. This tends to produce weird, contradictory positions: it's a moral outrage for a police officer to use lethal force against a dangerous non-white suspect, but an angry mob burning down a police station is an acceptable act of "peaceful protest." A normie Glen-Beck-tier conservative guarding his house with a rifle while an angry mob marches up the street is an unacceptable act of violence, but a Communist agitator clobbering "Nazis" in the head with a bike lock is fine. It's all rooted in the same basic idea: violence is deplorable except when it's being directed against someone that the herd has condemned for some reason or other; then it's fine and there are no limits.

This attitude is central to kkat's writing, and that's why I'm always hammering him so hard on Littlepoop's weird murderhobo morality. If kkat gets off on writing stories about pastel ponies disemboweling each other in excessively violent ways it's his own business; I don't take any particular offense to the violence in his story in and of itself. For me, the issue is the strange way he attempts to moralize it. His basic formula is this:
>some generic cookie-cutter baddie, a "raider" or a "slaver" or something, engages in some absurdly over-the-top act of sadism for no obvious reason beyond gratuitous violence
>Littlepoop and her friends happen by, are immediately horrified by the sadistic acts being perpetrated, and proceed to inflict equally over-the-top sadism on the perpetrator
>everyone still alive applauds the noble heroes for being so noble

What's curious about it is that kkat never attempts to explore whether or not his heroes' violent actions are justified, nor does he attempt to make any argument about why the raiders and slavers and whatnot in his story deserve to die. He just sort of takes it as a given that they do, in fact, deserve to die, and also takes it as a given that his readers will feel the same way. Incidentally, if you would like to see a considerably less subtle and more insanely autistic example of the same kind of thing, I'd invite you to check out Nigel's 35,000-word-long "Silver 'shove a plum up my bum and make me cum' Star walks into a party and starts randomly beating the shit out of Starlight Glimmer" story.
Anonymous
480b7f1
?
No.322598
55t0dmn4bvr71.png
>>322595
The moral hypocrisy reminds me of that time some big nigger attacked a white old man, tried to mug him or something, shoved him onto his back, and the white old man opened fire with his gun.
The white man got away with it thanks to Stand Your Ground laws.
A horde of niggers "protested"(Threatened violence that would be illegal if they were white) outside the local police station with signs jewish/whitefemale organizers likely wrote for them saying shit like "Justice for Trayvon". The name was Trayvon, right?
Truth is, Trayvon already got justice when he was gunned down for acting too black instead of remembering to act human. And the white man got justice when he wasn't made into an example by the antiwhite system for defending himself.

Also I know that Silver chapter was shit.
At the time I was going for "Upon seeing her he thinks she's still a villain and tries to take her down, like seeing a famous serial killer free at a violin recital, but then when he's told she's good now, he doubts that. They talk but he questions her about the commie shit because he hates commies and when she attacks him it gets her ass kicked and she's kicked out of his story" with that scene. How'd I do?
I don't remember if she was the first one to attack or not, considering how quick she was to age-regress her boyfriend for having responsibilities that dragged her away from him and brainwash the individuality out of the mane six minus Twiggles for not doing exactly as she wanted when they were supposed to be hanging out casually and having a good time it fits the poorly-thought-through clusterfuck her character was at the time.
I don't know if they fixed her character in later seasons, derailing(Applejack became a meme)+author favoritism made me drop the show. Seeing FIM consumed by the same Steven Universe-style "Friendship is nothing but one of many tools to get powerful allies on your side like Discord/Glimglam and forgiving all their sins is fine as long as they sorta try to be mostly good and serve your side" narrative just left a foul taste in my mouth.
I think they put her in charge of a friendship school for foreigners and had them steal the spotlight?
But now I know if I want the audience to walk away from a scene saying "Fuck communism" the audience needs to see communism destroy things they like and hurt characters they like. I can't just put my character in an argument with a commie for a bit.
The commie needs to unjustly win for a while before the final fight so the audience gets madder every time the commie gets away with being evil.
Plus looking back I really should have focused more on the idea that he wants to protect others from her, instead of just getting really mad at the commie for being a commie and not agreeing with him about the free market. Maybe if she fired a spell at him, he dodged, and it hit somepony he cared about, that could piss him off. If it was Apple Bloom I could have foreshadowed his family relation to Applejack, was I building that up to be a big twist in that version? Maybe there should have been a scene where he tried to get the conversation out of the party so there were fewer ponies around to potentially get hurt.

What I'm not sure how to handle is the black hole of confused bullshit that is Glimmer. It's like there's two of them: A socially-awkward lonely girl who likes kites and gets along best with other misfits like Trixie and Maud because they're popular amongst bronies (cough cough) I mean because they're weird in a way supposedly similar to hers even though damn near every FIM character is weird in their own way.
And then there's a scheming manipulator who knows social situations and the minds of others inside and out.
One struggles to handle any kind of social interaction so badly, fucking Trixie's the normal mature one who whispers something like "Are you okay? Do you want to leave?" in one scene of the show.
The other one's such an unparalleled master of bullshit, she can (in under a minute, right after travelling through time one more time after a long day full of constant levitation and repeated timewarping) convince schoolyard bullies and their victims to stop racing and become friends. In fact, she's so spectacularly suddenly hypercompetent, it magically saps competence from Twilight who fails to think of yelling "Hey, Rainbow, I'm clearly an Alicorn from the future, now do a Sonic Rainboom before everyone you know and love suffers a horrible fate thanks to Glimmer's timebending BS" loudly enough.
When we're first introduced to the hypercompetent manipulator on a pseudomoral crusade against talent as a concept, we don't know her stupid "My friend discovered his talent and moved away to improve it" backstory and that's for the best because it lets everyone conjure up hyper-tragic bullshit on a scale necessary to even slightly explain away lies of this scale. The "Staff of sameness" was just driftwood, she's actually an OP mage who flees from Twilight and pals. Next time we see her, she's flying better than the average Pegasus and fighting Twilight countless times for hours without ever showing any signs of getting tired, she's refucked the timeline countless times (or at least fucked the timeline once, then floated around in Cloudsdale every time the time spell Twilight casts sends them both to the past), it's bullshit.
You're left wondering "If she's so strong, why did she ever bother with lies? If time-fucking was on the table, why did she choose to fuck Twilight's life over specifically when she could have prevented her boyfriend from discovering his talent? What happened to all the show's talk of everypony being important if an autistic butterfly's wingbeat fucking the Sonic Rainboom up ruins Equestria for everypony?".
Glimmer's suddenly stronger than anyone so Twilight's "Only" option can be forgiving and enabling her.
Blaming Glim's OPness on a "Mary Sue Aura" Silver can magically disable seemed smart at the time.
How should I fix it differently?
Anonymous
480b7f1
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No.322600
I know that on one hand, if dogshit was produced what the shitter intended to produce is irrelevant. On the other hand if you know the goal was to produce muffins you can judge the resulting shit by the goal and figure out what went wrong and how.

Perhaps if Littlepip was a robot, and all she remembered about her Stable and the pre-war world was a load of nonsense built from conjecture and bad fanfics written by 200 year old dead ponies who hated the government?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
37c0d7d
?
No.322637
322656
the_wasteland___fallout_equestria_by_deftwise_zero-d6k64aj.jpg
>>322580

Another glaringly obvious issue is that, if the value of friendship is supposed to be such a crucial part of the moral, the subject is actually addressed rather poorly throughout most of the text.

If the overall lesson that Littlepoop, and through her the reader, is supposed to learn is that building strong friendships is the key to finding and retaining one's virtue, then you would expect to encounter quite a few smaller lessons about cooperation and friendship peppered throughout the story. We should ideally have witnessed a number of episodes in which LP attempts to solve a problem on her own, only to discover that she is not up to the task for some reason or another, and ultimately has to learn that it's okay to lean on your friends. In a story about friendship-building, having the main cast solve the problems they encounter as a group should be a central part of the plot. It would also be consistent with the story's RPG-inspired format, since usually in an RPG you have a party made up of various specialists who combine their unique talents to get through situations that none of them could get through individually.

However, Fallout: Equestria is mostly a one-pony show. Littlepoop occasionally pays lip service to the idea of friendship, or conscripts her friends to perform various roles in her plans, but every time the group encounters a problem, it's always Littlepoop who thinks up the solution and carries it out (mainly) on her own. Since, as I've frequently complained, the author has very little imagination, most of the solutions she comes up with are pants-on-head retarded and usually involve some flagrant abuse of her obscenely overpowered levitation spell. Her friends occasionally play crucial roles in her schemes, such as Xenith planting the bomb under Tenpony or Calamity providing essential air cover, but LP is always the star of the show, and the others never have any significant input; they just follow LP's instructions.

As large and complex as this world and its backstory is, nearly everything in it revolves entirely around this one character. Some of this can probably be attributed to the first person perspective, since the only events we're witnessing are the events that she's involved in; however, very little happens that doesn't directly involve her. Almost every major event in the story is the direct or indirect consequence of some action that LP took. Even the backstory revolves around her; at one point Pinkie Pie is telepathically communicating with LP in the future, implying that her role as wasteland savior was preordained.

Also worth noting is that the other main characters are relegated entirely to supporting roles. They receive almost no development, and everything they say and do usually relates to LP or some problem that LP is trying to solve. They constantly fawn over her and praise her and take a meticulous interest in whatever is going on in her world, but she seldom returns the compliment. For instance, Calamity is a character who clearly has an extensive and complicated backstory, but the author only really gives us the broad strokes of it. Part of the reason that Autumn Blaze (or whatever his name was) made such a poor villain is that we were never really given a sense of who he was. Calamity mentioned in passing a couple of times that his brother was some kind of Enclave higher-up, and that they didn't get along, and that was about it. Then, suddenly, this guy appears out of nowhere and is immediately treated as a major character.

Bottom line is: FoE is not an ensemble show. It revolves almost entirely around Littlepoop, and her various friends and well-wishers serve no other role in the story other than to support her personal growth.

One last issue I'd like to address is the insufferable Mary-Sueness of the main character. The term "Mary Sue" gets bandied about a lot, and I'm as guilty of overusing it as anyone else. However, in the case of Littlepoop, the shoe definitely fits. Honestly, it fits her so well I'm thinking that, as I continue to review stories, any time I encounter such a character I'm going to call them a "Littlepoop" instead of a Mary Sue.

In the EqD interview, kkat is at one point offering tips to aspiring writers. Most of it is generally decent advice (though I'm not sure to what extent kkat actually follows any of it himself), but this one line stuck out for me:

>Be familiar with some of the pitfalls that writers, particularly new ones, fall prey to and make it a point to avoid them. For example: know what a self-insert character is and what a Mary Sue character is and put effort into making sure your characters aren’t either of those.
I don't know to what degree LP is a "self-insert" character, since I don't know that much about kkat personally, but I don't get the impression that he was writing her that way. "Mary Sue" is also one of those terms that doesn't have set-in-stone definition. However, I think I can make a pretty solid case for why LP fits the bill.

We should probably start by settling on a working definition for the term. The one provided by TVtropes is probably reasonable enough. Here is the article on it if anyone wants to have a look:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MarySue

So, let's take a look at it one item at a time.

>The prototypical Mary Sue is an original female character in a fanfic who obviously serves as an idealized version of the author mainly for the purpose of Wish Fulfillment.
Original female character, check. However, as I mentioned, she probably isn't an idealized self-insert. An argument could probably be made that, being both female and a lesbian, she might represent some kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy for kkat.

>She's exotically beautiful, often having an unusual hair or eye color, and has a similarly cool and exotic name.
This probably doesn't apply either, since LP is never physically described.

To be continued, almost out of chars.
Anonymous
480b7f1
?
No.322646
322647
Kkat believes in the current definition of a Sue generally agreed upon in the fanfiction community, and his belief that Littlesue can't be a Sue because she doesn't look like one illustrates the problem inherent to conflating writing mistakes and character traits with writer competence.

It isn't really the sue's sparkly eyes or multicoloured vibrant anime hair that makes her obnoxious, it was never about how she looked.

It's that patented level of author favoritism. Everything revolves around her, nothing is allowed to be bigger than her in a way that matters, everything exists for her, she inherits everything in the past that mattered, characters love her and are willing to die for her, the plot and setting and characters and rules all come second to her in importance, she never faces the consequences of any bad choice she makes in a way that matters, her in-universe appeal is universal and unquestioned, she might he a rookie who just started fighting and she might swear she's a clumsy oaf but suddenly she's slaying all her foes and impressing all the boys. She's a goddess masquerading as an ordinary plain-jane everywoman, she's almost as bad as Rey Skywalker from Disney's Star Wars.

It's easy for an author to say the secret to writing good characters is to avoid making bad ones. That's kind of funny. But imagine if "be careful not to make your character a sue" was the best writing advice you can give! Sues aren't sues because they have one too many positive qualities and one too few downsides to balance it out. Sues aren't sues because they look stupid. It's not the catgirl ears and tail and purple hair that makes a theoretical Pirates Of The Carribean swordfighter chick a sue, for example, it's the way she dominates the story and knows everything and shags Captain Jack Sparrow and outfights all men despite weighing 120 pounds soaking wet and ruins the story by existing in a state so "perfect" it compels the author to break the story and rules of canon for her. Sues aren't sues because they break rules like "one keyblade per wielder outside of very specific circumstances", they're sues because the author is willing to break rules like that for them not because the story requires it but instead for no real reason besides "lmao its my character she can he as OP as she wants".

Sues are sues because they actively harm the story they're in by being so overwhelmingly all-important and perfect that no real story can be honestly told. Any overpowered too-perfect bullshit character who ruins their story could be salvaged by a better author into a better character in a better story because it's not as much a problem with the character specifically as it is the level of amateurish story-breaking favoritism displayed by the author.

Some faggot will probably say "Littlepip is not godlike because she gets beat up sometimes" and "at least she doesn't have purple hair and rainbow cat eyes" and that's bullshit. She's not just a sue, she's more of a sue than many characters consoomers are willing to call sues! She could probably take on Itachi Uchiha and win by force choking him. She lacks any counter for his soul-sealing sword(then again"because destiny" allowed her to survive being burned alive so it would probably save her from that and his edgy black SuperFlame attack too. Yeah that guy's so OP in a world where fire spells do nothing he wields Fire 2TM) but he'd never get in range to use it and she could brute-force his reality-overwriting power like Gaysauce Coochieha did when fighting Danny McArmfullofeyes. Littlepip feels fundamentally dishonest as a character, like the author tried to figure out how he could get the audience to accept her preposterous power. There are excuses for damn near every ability she has, even telekinesis has the "trained with Crane for a bit" excuse, but none of these powers are vital to her as a character or her story. Like Glim said, her PipBuck can find things and it's what she relies on to find things. She never needed a Cutie Mark of a Cutie Mark or overpowered boxcar-lifting telekinesis or her repair skills or anything else because at the end of the day all she really had to do was get teleported by chad Spike and "destiny" into Weather Wizard's secret sex dungeon. Man I'm surprised they didn't think to call him or any other character Weathervain, that name would be sick for an evil Pegasus. Littlepip is the sueist sue who ever sued, and NONE of it was necessary for the story!

The moral of that old woman's 1960s fan-submitted unofficial fan magazine fanfic "A Trekkie's Tale" wasn't "stop making characters like Mary Kirk Picard Janeway Sue", it was "Stop writing stories like A Trekkie's Tale!".
Anonymous
480b7f1
?
No.322647
>>322646
Come to think of it, Littlepip is still Sueishly beautiful.

Not many people noticed this because obvious sues are easier to detect than more subtle ones, but obviously-beautiful sues with huge tits and random anime hair colours are outnumbered by supposedly-average-looking sues who are still treated like they're supremely beautiful anyway.
I hear some call them "middling sues" because they'd get a middling score on a sue litmus test instead of an "Unsalvageable mega-sue" rating. But young adult literature and especially unreadable woman's shit is full of this shit.
She swears she's plain and boring and ordinary and maybe even ugly. She might call herself ugly by whining about subjective physical traits that are appealing to some. Somebody who hates when her hotter female friends whine about spine pain and the envy of ugly girls and the attention of unwanted men told her to never write "I'm so beautiful it's a curse" so she goes for the opposite. "I'm so ordinary looking it's a curse".
And yet she's still beautiful despite what she tells herself. She never gets disfigured. She'd be more likely to be disemboweled and then get better. She never looks ugly, not even after spending months trekking across the country through sewers and swamps and deserts and hyper gore zones. Going months without showering never disgusts any characters who matter. Her scent can't be used to track her. She might supposedly be small and mousy and beneath notice and usually brown or black-haired but she can still catch the eye of ridiculously important attractive characters miles out of her league. In this story we have Homage the celebrity radio whore, and Velvet the celebrity singer once threw herself at LP to try and exploit her crush and piss Calamity off only to be told "No". It's a shame that scene wasn't used to make the characters grow in a way that mattered.
Anonymous
adac422
?
No.322650
322653 322655 322666
I've got a simple request, if there is to be more to this review series.
Please, let it be a fic that our resident sperglord hasnt read? Please?
Anonymous
3ac3469
?
No.322653
>>320770
>>322650
Pretty sure nobody read the one I linked. Again, donno how I managed to get through basically the entire first (of three) books before moving on with my life. If you guys do go with it I'll probably go along with it.

what is the current "maybe" list anyway?
Anonymous
6183881
?
No.322654
Actually, I have a fic to recommend, Glim:

https://www.fimfiction.net/story/495309/and-hell-followed

I remember reading this as it was updating. It saw pretty decent success, but I was incredibly disappointed despite the critical acclaim it received. It read like the script of a crappy, generic-as-can-be zombie movie with forced drama and really bizarre characterization. I'm curious if i'm just crazy and missed something, or what. It's /only/ 110k words, so maybe you could check this out..
Anonymous
784140a
?
No.322655
322666
>>322650
>Stop Nigel
>Simple
You new here?

Though, this rant here is his old what's-a-Mary-Sue? deconstruction, which I actually like or think has merits; especially the Mary-Sues-are-dishonest part. It's similar to what E;R said about Rey in his Last Jedi review.
Though, isn't this typical? The core idea of his post can be intresting but due to his tangential speech pattern it's exhausting to read.
>Some faggot will probably say "Littlepip is not godlike because she gets beat up sometimes" and "at least she doesn't have purple hair and rainbow cat eyes" and that's bullshit. She's not just a sue, she's more of a sue than many characters consoomers are willing to call sues! She could probably take on Itachi Uchiha and win by force choking him. She lacks any counter for his soul-sealing sword(then again"because destiny" allowed her to survive being burned alive so it would probably save her from that and his edgy black SuperFlame attack too. Yeah that guy's so OP in a world where fire spells do nothing he wields Fire 2TM) but he'd never get in range to use it and she could brute-force his reality-overwriting power like Gaysauce Coochieha did when fighting Danny McArmfullofeyes.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
0de8421
?
No.322656
322659 322670
the_wasteland___fallout_equestria_by_deftwise_zero-d6k64aj.jpg
>>322637

Here is where it starts to get interesting:

>She's exceptionally talented in an implausibly wide variety of areas, and may possess skills that are rare or nonexistent in the canon setting.
Sooooo many checks here. At the beginning of the story, LP is an apprentice PipBuck technician, training under a guy who clearly doesn't take his job seriously, in an environment where there is little work to be done anyway. We can probably assume that she has a basic, working technical knowledge of PipBucks but is probably not a genius at it by any means, and there is little reason to assume she would have many other skills. Logically, this should be her area of expertise throughout the story, and the skills she develops should be built on this foundation and improve at a reasonable rate. However, after only a handful of chapters, she is a firearms expert with over 9000 confirmed kills, an expert hacker (incidentally, she starts out with this ability, and it's never explained why she has it; presumably it has something to do with her time spent tinkering with PipBucks), and a skilled safecracker who can quite literally pick locks with her mind-powers. She is also a non-pegasus who is somehow able to mind-meld with a complicated pre-war machine designed to be operated by a pegasus. This is one of the areas that kkat didn't 100% explain, but the implication seems to be that she somehow gains alicorn powers somewhere along her long, convoluted journey across Edgequestria. Also:

>may possess skills that are rare or nonexistent in the canon setting
I would argue that her preposterous levitation powers fall squarely in this category. Though it is canon in MLP lore that unicorns can levitate things, usually it's limited to small objects. I don't know that there are any hard and fast rules about it, but from the way this ability is depicted in the cartoon, the average unicorn's levitation beam is probably capable of a range and weight limit comparable to what an average human could do with their hands. The only notable exceptions are alicorns and magical prodigies. This means that by definition, LP's ability to levitate obscenely huge objects for unreasonable amounts of time across unreasonable distances (which happens many, many times throughout the story) makes her a magic prodigy on par with the greatest magical prodigy of the canon series, Starlight Glimmer. Her levitation powers therefore would count as a skill that is "rare or nonexistent" in the canon setting.

>She also lacks any realistic, or at least story-relevant, character flaws — either that or her "flaws" are obviously meant to be endearing.
This is also a great big check. What I find most obnoxious here is that the author goes out of his way to try and present LP as flawed, but she is not seen this way by others, and her "flaws" usually work to her advantage an overwhelming majority of the time.

The most egregious example of this is, again, her preposterously overpowered levitation spell. It's bad enough that she has this power in the first place; however, the author rubs salt in the wound by treating this ridiculous superpower as though it were actually some kind of weakness. LP is forever whining about how tragically underpowered her magic is because she "only has one spell." This is another area of his lore that kkat doesn't really clarify, but from what I gather, a unicorn is only able to do a particular magic trick if they have learned a specific spell that teaches it to them. Presumably, this works according to RPG rules, where a given unicorn will have X number of spell slots and will have to choose which spells they want to learn. The basic idea seems to be that LP is magically "weak" because she only has one slot, and the spell she has in it is the most basic-bitch unicorn spell that exists.

This would all be fine, except for the fact that, again, the author decided to make this one spell she has obscenely overpowered. So yes, technically, LP is underpowered in that the only spell she can do is mundane and utilitarian; however, in practical terms, that one spell gives her a completely ridiculous advantage in nearly every situation. The phenomenon is comparable to a shrimpy, skinny, physically unremarkable guy who, for some completely unexplained reason, is able to pick up cars and throw them at people.

Also worth mentioning is that her PipBuck is handled the same way. Early on in the story, we are told that PipBucks are commonplace items and that everyone in LP's stable has one; she spends quite a bit of time whining about how she has a cutie mark of something so simple and mundane. However, conveniently enough, as soon as she leaves the stable, she discovers that no one in the wasteland but her has one for some reason, so the powers it bestows, particularly radar and auto-aiming her gun for her, give her yet another unfair advantage over her enemies right out of the gate.

LP's self-assessment that she is a boring, unremarkable plain-Jane with no natural talents or endearing qualities is basically accurate; however, what she leaves out is that through several extremely unlikely twists of good fortune she has a number of cheap-shit advantages over her enemies that enable her to become an ultra-badass without having to put any actual work into developing herself. The fact that, in addition to whining about how plain and boring she is, she is also endlessly whining about how bad her luck is, just makes her even more obnoxious.

This brings us to the most obnoxious character trait she has: her endless false humility. LP is constantly groaning about how she's just some nobody, and she doesn't want to be called a hero, and so forth and so on, even as she runs around toppling empires and effortlessly slaughtering enemies that by all logic ought to severely outclass her; meanwhile, every other character does nothing but gush over how wonderful she is.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
0de8421
?
No.322659
322670 322684
the_wasteland___fallout_equestria_by_deftwise_zero-d6k64aj.jpg
>>322656

>She has an unusual and dramatic Back Story.
At first glance, it would appear that this one does not apply. LP's backstory is unremarkable: her mother was an uncaring drunk, and she spent most of her early life cleaning walls and whining about how lame she is. However, if you consider that Pinkie Pie, who is not only a significant character in the canon material but a major figure in this world's backstory, was having drug-induced prophecies about her, you could probably argue that LP does have an unusual and dramatic role in the world's backstory. I'm actually on the fence about this one, since the unremarkable, ordinary commoner, who doesn't initially realize that he's been preordained by fate to perform heroic feats, is an accepted trope for hero characters and not necessarily a Mary Sue trait. However, when you add this on top of all of LP's other Sue qualities, it's not an especially good look for her.

>The canon protagonists are all overwhelmed with admiration for her beauty, wit, courage and other virtues, and are quick to adopt her as one of their True Companions, even characters who are usually antisocial and untrusting; if any character doesn't love her, that character gets an extremely unsympathetic portrayal.
This is a bit of a sticky area, since technically all of the canon protagonists are dead and LP never meets them. However, this definitely describes how pretty much every living character in the story treats her, so we can only assume that if she ever actually met the M6, they would gush over her and praise her just like everyone else does. If I remember correctly, there is a point in the story where she is having some kind of inner psychic battle with the zebra book, and the ghosts of the M6 suddenly show up and lend her their powers or something; that scene was pretty autistic and hard to follow, so I'm not sure if it counts as an actual interaction with them or not.

However, she does have some brief interactions with canon characters that are worth calling attention to. LP does befriend Derpy, who is a minor character but still canon, and Derp seems to treat her with the same awe and devotion as every other character. At one point, an alicorn that is basically the shade of Twilight Sparkle sacrifices itself to dig LP out from the collapsed ruin of the Maripony facility. At least I think that's what happened; that scene was pretty autistic too. Also, at the very end, LP ends up talking to Princess Celestia herself, to whom she actually presumes to give friendship advice. The author's portrayal of Celestia is that she's washed-up and is basically just a cynical, melancholy shadow of her former self. He tasks his OC with cheering her up and putting things in perspective for her. Take from that what you will.

All in all, I wouldn't say that the canon protagonists are "overwhelmed with admiration" for LP, but it's probably safe to say that this is only because they are all dead for the events of the story, and as such never get the privilege of standing in her august presence. This would accurately describe how she's viewed by pretty much every other significant character in the story, so again, we can probably assume that the main cast would treat her this way as well. The only characters who don't admire her are the assorted nameless goons she slaughters, who I think I've established are portrayed pretty negatively, so I'm going to go ahead and put a check next to this one as well.

Also worth a quick mention is that in my view, the canon protagonists are all portrayed pretty negatively by comparison to LP; the basic premise of the story is that all of the major canon heroes, including not only the M6 but the Royal Princesses, played a part in severely fucking up the world, and it's LP's task to use her infinite compassion and wisdom to put things right. I'm not 100% sure it was intentional on the author's part, but there is a subtle implication that, once she mind-melds with the Single Pegasus Project, LP assumes a role comparable to Celestia's. You can take what you will from that as well.

>She has some sort of especially close relationship to the author's favorite canon character — their love interest, illegitimate child, never-before-mentioned sister, etc.
In the EqD interview, kkat states that his favorite character is Rarity. To my knowledge, LP has no special relationship to her, so this one probably doesn't apply. At one point she compares herself to Rarity, and it was Rarity who made those dumb statues that she collects, but that feels like a pretty flimsy connection.

>Other than that, the canon characters are quickly reduced to awestruck cheerleaders, watching from the sidelines as Mary Sue outstrips them in their areas of expertise and solves problems that have stymied them for the entire series.
Even though she never actually meets any of them, LP does manage to fix the world that the M6 and the Princesses severely fucked up. The whole premise of the story is basically that LP manages to solve all of the problems that the heroes of Old Equestria couldn't solve, and basically cleans up the giant mess created by the entire main cast of the cartoon. She also figures out how to bypass the shield that was designed to be impenetrable to everyone except the two Princesses and Rainbow Dash. The solution she comes up with is retarded, but by the silly laws of kkat's world is actually a pretty simple solution that nearly anyone could have probably figured out if they'd thought about it. However, Mary was the first pony in 200 years to solve the unsolvable puzzle.

>In other words, the term "Mary Sue" is generally slapped on a character who is important in the story, possesses unusual physical traits, and has an irrelevantly over-skilled or over-idealized nature.
Check, check, check and check. So yeah; by this widely-accepted definition, I'm going to say that LP qualifies as a Sue. Prove me wrong if you disagree.
Anonymous
6768219
?
No.322666
322668
0 chad Spike saving the day.jpg
>>322650
That wouldn't stop me from telling you what I think of the fic anyway, I'd just be experiencing it in real time like with the Gareth story. Then again there was a lot I'd forgotten about FE and basically re-experienced during this re-read. I think I remembered more important details about Friendship Is Optimal? I think next time I'll tone down the frequency of my posts unless there's something really important to say, I started to get sick of how many "This is a reference to this bit in Fallout where" posts I had to make, it felt like I was that one fucker pulling Charlie Brown's football away only I didn't like it.
>>322655
yeah that stuff about LP being able to take on other OP characters was irrelevant, sorry about that.
Whether she can take OP characters from other forms of media is irrelevant to how severely she dominates and ruins the media she's in.
It's the dishonest lie that makes Sues exhausting to read about, and the overwhelmingly bullshit special treatment she gets from the author. Her overwhelming power can make her fights boring but that's not a necessary symptom of the "Writer doesn't realize what he's writing" and "Overly-favoured character" writing mistake that can make overpowered characters so grating to endure. Strong foes can be given epic challenges a weaker one couldn't handle, but watching a writer fellate his OC to Fequestria's degree is agonizing. Kkat basically devoured Equestria with his own edge and cynicism just so the good intentions of "Lesser" (to kkat) heroes can create problems for his sue to fix 200 years later.
Anonymous
6768219
?
No.322668
>>322666
(please pretend the Chad Spike image is on this half of the post)

A thought occurs.

Littlepip has Telekinesis, a tremendously overpowered ability supremely useful in damn near any circumstance.
She can lift boxcars, putting her at Building-Level Offensive Capability at the very least.
Nothing's stopping her from carrying a ballistic shield or sharp rock or boxcar around besides her sense of fair play. She's waterbended radioactive goo into a bulletproof shield before.
Guns are a solved problem for her. Same goes for immortal regenerating alicorns and flying bulletproof pegasi. then again "bulletproof" power-armoured pegasi get shredded by Calamity's shotguns anyway. The fucking things aren't even railgun-enhanced or magically-buffed or equipped with dedicated armour-piercing rounds or Energy/Plasma blasts.
And she never needed this power because she's so fucking overpowered in so many other ways. Locks are playthings to her, she's a god of lockpicking with her picktools.
A normal character who relies on tools would be helpless without them.
Littlepip's literally deadlier without her usual tools. Take her lockpicking tools away? She telekinetically opens locks from the inside effortlessly while levitating herself, a friend, and radioactive liquid, and Kkat scrambles to make excuses for LP accomplishing all three of these preposterous feats at the same time.
LITTLEPIP NEVER NEEDED TO BECOME A (as kkat put it) "HALF-ALICORN UNICORN" via radioactive goop exposure. All of this is too fucking dumb.
She's pointlessly powerful in too many ways for any one way to stick out in the minds of the audience as "Her gimmick". She never has to use one skill creatively because her other overpowered abilities give her multiple perfect keys for multiple locks.
When has she ever been put into a situation she wasn't suited for and equipped to handle? Like giving the big dumb guy a social challenge or the wimpy smart guy a physical challenge, things writers have done to explore other aspects of a character and how they act when the loudest thought in their heads is "Fuck I wish my best friend was here to handle this challenge, it's right up his alley and miles away from mine".
LP never has to be creative with her power because she has TOO FUCKING MUCH OF IT. Yes I realize the irony that it's me saying this, but I didn't always know this, which is why I gave my OC shitloads of powers and skills instead of making one thing into his thing. A Cutie Mark in connections helping him make mental connections to understand everything was a stupid excuse for him to be OP.

It would surely improve the "Friendship is important" message if Littlepip was a genuine underdog with wimpy magic and a stuff-fixing spell ill-suited for combat.
Give her a cutie mark of a gear or something instead of a cutie mark in using a PipBuck(TM) Personal Computer And Stuff-Finder And Inventory Manager And Map Device And Health Monitor And Autoaim Cheat Machine
then if she ever decides to do anything smart like use her stuff-fixing spell on long-destroyed guns/vehicles, only to rely on her fitter friends to use them for her, it would feel earned.
It would explain why so many forces would want her on her side. I could really see Red Eye wanting that stuff-fixing talent for his alicorn body.
Fixing stuff's an inherently kind ability. It's not like chucking shit around or firing big lasers or leading an army. That's the power of a pure-hearted smartass.
Fights with her (if she wasn't an overpowered bulletproof quippy gun goddess with limitless healing supplies) would feel like exciting survival challenges where she flees from danger and tries to do smart things like running into a building with a hole in the wall before using her fixing spell to fix the wall's hole. She could save her team from poisoned food by "Fixing" the food into its component ingredients, or dismantle an impenetrable enemy bunker by "Fixing" the building back into its component construction materials. She could lure enemies near rubble, then "Fix" the rubble to make it fly through the enemies, crushing foes on the way back into whatever the rubble used to be a part of.
She could even hunt down a villain by "Fixing" a shred of clothing/severed limb from her foe, then chasing the floating fixed thing as it flies back to whatever it came from.
And sentence a foe to a fate worse than death by fusing him with something inanimate. Would be a darkly ironic fate for Red Eye, one who wanted to be worshipped as a god and fuse with others, to end up fused into his own church or something.
I bet if this was used to "Fix" her way into the SPP, that would feel earned. More earned than simply lucking out and relying on chad Spike to save the day.
Fuck Kkat for making LP manipulate Spike into doing what's right, it's as if Kkat thought he didn't even deserve credit for thinking of the obvious solution of using his teleporting fire breath.
Anonymous
6768219
?
No.322670
322672

>>322659
>>322656
>bad author tries to sell non-flaws to the audience as flaws
Why the FUCK is this such a common writing mistake?
I bet it's because so many famous pieces of media does this.
The perfect all-loving hero is "Too" kind and noble and self-sacrificing, not that it ever fucks him over in a way that matters.
He never gets backstabbed in a meaningful life-ruining way that gets innocents killed, he never sacrifices the lives of the many trying to save just a few more lives because he wanted to be perfect and wouldn't settle for "good enough", he never gets exploited long-term by a villain who manipulates him and exploits his kindness for power and profit. He might try to save and redeem a villain, but either he dies at the last second if he's too evil or he's secretly good-hearted all along so he can be turned good easily.
The hero might be backstabbed by villains now and then but never in a way that matters so severely it compels him to change his ways and potentially miss a chance to be 100% goody-two-shoes next time. Where the fuck did that saying come from, anyway? Everyone's got two shoes or more, except hobos.
The hero's SOOOOO perfect, he never has to work on himself, or change, or grow. He never questions his own charity after being exploited so badly by one rich beggar with a nearby parked sports car that the hero later can't afford to feed a more deserving family he encounters struggling to survive yet still doing their best to work for a living.
The hero never needs to ask himself who needs or deserves his kindness or if he should really keep giving it away to everyone, or if there are times when saving the many outweighs the tragedy of giving up a few to the enemy instead of risking everyone or even guaranteeing their deaths for the sake of his idealistic "Never give up" attitude. He never questions his "god-given" (literally or figuratively) right to make life-and-death decisions for others based on hunches and guesses and his own ideals.
He never needs to seriously consider compromising his own personal morality for the good of others or the success of his people/force/friends/tribe/species/whatever.
No, his self-sacrificing nature makes him exploitable and therefore better than every cynical character allowed to be pragmatic and know about Triage and acceptable losses!
And all his "dumb" cynical friends, they're never allowed to complain when cynicism turns out to be right. No, they need to validate poor widdle hero's feelings as if there's something virtuous and beautiful about having such an open heart someone stabs it effortlessly. The cynics who were right all along need to, for some bizarre reason, validate and suck off the hero for being wrong and questioning whether absolute all-or-nothing idealism is really the way to go VS pragmatism.
His stubbornness in the face of no-win scenarios and refusal to embrace loss mitigation might be called flaws now and then, but nobody realistically reacts to these flaws with "Fuck you, you got lucky, gamble with your own life next time, I'm fucking done taking orders from a stubborn kid willing to risk my fucking life in a no-win scenario purely on a hunch or for the sake of own ideals", because he's the protagonist, he's allowed to turn no-win scenarios into easy-win scenarios by believing in the power of friendship hard enough.
Why are so many authors afraid of giving their hero a flaw to struggle with meaningfully and work to overcome and struggle to figure out what overcoming it means?
Is it because it's so much easier to make the hero bitch about a flaw that never matters for a while and then throw that flaw away at the last second like a hollywood shitflick where the physically/mentally disabled character suddenly gets better in the final hour now that he has enough motivation?
Why are the authors of generic self-insert mary sues so afraid of introspection and questioning what perfection is, and whether anyone should strive for it?
Anyone remember when Luke Skywalker subtly had his character deconstructed in the originals? He rushes off to save his friends too early, and loses to Vader for it instead of completing his training. Even becomes a bit mean in that black Vaderish cloak when dealing with Jabba The Hut's goons. But in the end he doesn't just defeat Vader, he convinces Vader to be a hero by getting his own hands dirty for the hero and finishing off the final boss so Luke didn't have to. He lets Vader die as himself, so the story can wrap itself up ASAP and doesn't need to begin covering war crime trials for those who participated in the Galactic Empire without ever doing anything to subvert it for the rebellion.
>>322659
A ton of authors get so caught up in how many checkboxes their character ticks and what excuses they think of for it, they forget why those common sue traits are what they are.
Unusual hair/eye colours aren't inherently sue descriptors, but having them for no reason in a setting where they're unusual or even impossible under normal circumstances is a sign of a bad character. Like a catgirl OC in Pirates Of The Carribean. You know, outside of a Kingdom Hearts fic where weirder shit's visited that setting.
Littlepip doesn't just check damn near every box, she super-checks it. She takes every obvious and subtle trait of a badly-written overpowered character to the extreme and beyond.
If she doesn't violate the rule as written, like how she's never described as beautiful in the text(or described at all physically really), she violates it in spirit by never getting ugly as a result of all her running and fighting and falling off things and sweating and fucking and killing while always being, in the eyes of her crush and her radio whore girlfriend, peak fuckable material. Raiders, Slavers, they're ugly. Alicorns, they're ugly and edgy. But Littlepip and friends, they're pretty. Not like those smelly dirty scarred bloody Raiders with their shat-on beds+homes decorated with intestine-tinsel. Intenstinsel, if you will.
Anonymous
56eb674
?
No.322672
>>322670
>Why the FUCK is this such a common writing mistake?
Because authors all want to write perfect Mary Sue OCs who are the best in most ways, but they're self-conscious enough to try to make them "flawed" so it doesn't feel like Mary Sue.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
0de8421
?
No.322684
322693 322710
the_wasteland___fallout_equestria_by_deftwise_zero-d6k64aj.jpg
>>322659

There's one last thing about FoE that I forgot to mention, that probably merits going over briefly: the lesbian protagonist. I actually didn't find it to be that remarkable on its own, but it seems to be one of the things people frequently bring up about this fic, so I should probably say a few words. Once again, we'll start by hearing what kkat has to say about it, and go from there:

>The dynamic of the character relationships inspired this. Considering the cast and empowering themes of the cartoon, I believed the protagonist needed to be a mare.
If there is a dynamic to any of the character relationships in FoE it's news to me. But anyway, do go on.

>It is also worth noting that at the time, male protagonists were unheard of in the show’s fanfiction. Since Fallout: Equestria already had "grimdark", "crossover" and "OC characters" going against it, a male protagonist might have been too much to ask the fandom to accept. This is also why, when Calamity joined Littlepip, I tackled the gender issue immediately and directly through Stable 24.
>Littlepip's sexual orientation was first considered when planning how Littlepip, Velvet Remedy and Calamity would play off each other as characters. Since Littlepip was a mare, in order for her crush on Velvet to be the sort of hopeless fantasy that I wanted it to be, either Littlepip needed to be a lesbian and Velvet a straight mare, or Littlepip needed to be straight and Velvet be a gay stallion. I considered both, but decided that a lesbian Littlepip felt true to her character while a gay stallion Velvet felt like a stereotype. That decided, I wanted to create a story that featured strong, heroic LGBT protagonist.
So basically, his motivation was pretty straightforward and practical: he wanted a female protagonist, and she had to have a hopeless crush on someone who played for the other team. His options were either dyke protagonist with a crush on a straight girl, or straight-girl protagonist with a crush on a gay dude. Straight-girl-loves-gay-dude has been done to death, so objectively speaking, I think kkat made the best call here.

Given the source material, I agree that a female protagonist makes the most sense and was the right choice for this. The whole point of this crossover is the bizarre juxtaposition of a dark, hyper-masculine video game world and a bright, hyper-feminine pony-cartoon world. With a male protagonist, the story would have been weighted too far on the masculine side, and it would have come across as just a super-edgy Fallout fanfiction that for some inexplicable reason uses ponies instead of humans as characters. Plus, I think the Littlepoop character would have been several orders of magnitude more obnoxious as a dude.

The crush angle makes sense too. I think the idea was to have LP pining after someone that she could never have. Not just someone that didn't love her back, but someone with whom it would just be flat-out impossible to have that sort of relationship. Having LP finally realize and accept that her adolescent crush could never materialize into something real becomes a pivotal moment for her character, and marks her symbolic transition must...not...make...tranny...joke into adulthood. Like everything else in this story the execution is shit, but it's a good idea in and of itself, and kkat was definitely on the right track. I've enjoyed making fun of the soft-feminist dykeshit angle of this story, but in all seriousness I don't get the impression that making the hero a lesbian was done explicitly as a gimmick or to pander to fag culture or anything like that. I also don't get the impression that kkat is opposed to that sort of pandering, mind you, I would just argue that there was a valid creative reason to go that route, and that pandering was not the main goal.

The main problem that I have with it is that I just don't find LP to be an especially believable lesbian. Homage either, for that matter. As I've remarked before, LP basically thinks about sex the way a guy would: she's always ogling plots and salivating over vaginas and making bawdy cracks about orgasms and threesomes and whatnot. I guess I haven't really interacted with enough lesbians to know if it's really an accurate depiction or not, but my suspicion is that the average dyke doesn't walk around indiscriminately eye-humping every girl she sees the way an adolescent boy would. I guess if any actual lesbians (or at least biological females) wanted to opine on this, I'd be curious what they have to say.

Much like LP's relationships with her various friends, her relationship with Homage does not feel particularly genuine or meaningful. They aren't really drawn to each other for any reason beyond convenience and proximity: LP likes girls, and Homage also likes girls, so they just hook up by default because neither of them can find anyone else. It's not a tremendously exciting love story. Throwing a third lesbo into the mix as a contender for either Littlepoop's or Homage's affections might have made things a bit more interesting. Also worth noting is that Homage is a fairly obnoxious character in her own right, and she has the same irritating blind hero-worship of Lil' Mary that every other character in this train wreck suffers from.

To conclude, neither the protagonist's gender nor the fact that she's a lesbian really adds much to the story or affects it in any meaningful way. I don't think there are many major events that would have played out differently if you gender-swapped a few of the characters; really, the only difference is a male Littlepoop would have probably come across as even more whiny, arrogant and obnoxious. Kkat's reasons for selecting the gender and sexual orientations that he did for his characters make sense, but the lesbian angle of the story isn't really noteworthy in and of itself.
Anonymous
6768219
?
No.322693
>>322684
>I tackled the gender issue immediately and directly through Stable 24.
What gender issue is he talking about?
Did he find something so morally objectionable about the idea of a gun-toting ex-military badass joining a rookie greenhorn girl and saving her ass and pulling more weight than her in the killing department, he felt the need to make her a hypercompetent telekinetic god...
AND poison Calamity near-fatally so she can save his life (only after looting everything that isn't nailed down and blowing up a stable when she was just told to seal its entrance)...
AND try and create a nonsense bunker where the natural dominance of man in government and all difficult+dirty jobs (like plumbing) has to be artificially enforced through propaganda, like the posters that depict men fixing the sinks of helpless women?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVGRgypFim0
I know those dumb lefties love to say nonsense about "Muh implications" but was he really so terrified of losing his social credit score and being called a sexist for making a military man more dangerous and useful than some narcissistic twat from a glorified phone-repair shop? Is that why he got so little focus and development until after Velvet was introduced to give him someone to talk about and simp over and suck off for no reason with all that "Girl, I love how pragmatic you are, said the soldier to the pussy libtard pacifist who kills with a lethal needle gun sometimes but reserves a shotgun for any raiders who make foals fight to the death in the BattleDome"?

>are real lesbians like this?
only the ones who've based how they decide to talk and walk and dress and act based on media starring those kinds of characters and how their straight but gay-imitating (they call themselves "queers" but get butthurt when normal people call them that) sjw "allies" tell them lesbians should act.
I've only met about four in my lifetime but from what I've seen only the "political lesbians" (manhating sjws who dont even really like pussy all that much and only kiss women in public and inevitably dump their friends-with-benefits flings the second a hot dude expresses interests in them) tried to imitate what men are in their delusional eyes: constantly horny and never shutting up about sex and often butting into conversations to try and make them about sex. Normal chicks who happen to prefer pussy to dick are basically still just normal people since they aren't acting hyper-stereotypical to get the LGBTQWERTYUIOP236P+ crowd's attention and love-bombing- I mean "approval and acceptance".
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
0de8421
?
No.322710
322712 322714 322726 323787
the_wasteland___fallout_equestria_by_deftwise_zero-d6k64aj.jpg
>>322684

Anyway, I think I've covered the important aspects of the fic overall; if I keep going I'm just going to end up restating everything I've already covered across four threads, and we'll be here an additional year.

So, now that the dust has settled, does Fallout: Equestria live up to its hype within the fandom?

Well, as far as its claims to having artistic merit are concerned, I think that would be a flat-out NO. In fact, I'd say that it barely has autistic merit. In a nutshell, this story is a long, meandering, insufferably convoluted clusterfuck with no main plot and no central conflict, whose only apparent message is a simplistic Aesop lesson about friendship. The morals and themes in this story, such as they are, could easily have been communicated in a much shorter, simpler story without even a fraction of the gratuitous gore and edge. The overwhelming bulk of this story's content is just fanboy masturbation of little interest to anyone outside either the Fallout or MLP fandom.

However, taken purely as entertainment, I can see how this might have some appeal to the right kind of person. While it may not be my cup of tea, there's no accounting for taste, and a lot of people, for whatever reason, seem to have legitimately enjoyed this abortion. A Fallout fanboy as autistic as kkat might get something out of it (though from the comments in the threads my impression is that kkat pretty much picked the worst game in the series as his primary ripoff material, and he didn't do an especially good job of ripping it off). I suppose, too, that someone who was in the MLP fandom from the beginning and read this fanfic at an impressionable point in their life might have some nostalgic feelings about it. I have a few guilty pleasures on my shelf as well.

If nothing else, it was certainly a lot of words.

***

All I have left are some final remarks about kkat's "writing advice:"

>Be familiar with some of the pitfalls that writers, particularly new ones, fall prey to and make it a point to avoid them. For example: know what a self-insert character is and what a Mary Sue character is and put effort into making sure your characters aren’t either of those.
Apart from the pitfall that he explicitly cautions against yet walks right into, kkat falls into some more "new writer" pitfalls that I think are worth pointing out.

First, and imo most important, is that high word count != high quality. There is a very common belief in amateur writing circles that the ability to word-vomit an absurd amount of text in a short period of time is a sign of literary virility. It isn't, and I learned that one the hard way. The very first NaNoWriMo I did, I was able to hit 50,000 words within the space of a couple of weeks, so I decided to push for 100. I didn't quite make it, but I think I finally clocked in at around 97,000 or so. I was quite pleased with myself, until I went back through my book and discovered that I had written a mostly nonsensical, meandering story; that I had continuity errors out the ass; and finally, that I had written entire plot arcs that went nowhere and focused on characters who appeared and disappeared without contributing anything to the main story. This was in 2012, and I am still in the process of revising that idea into something fit for human consumption.

Word-vomit can be a good writing exercise, particularly if you've never written anything before and simply want to get started. With practice, some writers can even word-vomit complete stories with little advance planning (I understand Stephen King works this way). Generally speaking, though, if you find you are routinely writing chapters that exceed 5,000 words, and you aren't at least 2/3 finished by about Chapter 10, it's usually a sign that your story is too large, too complicated, or contains too much irrelevant filler. If you're routinely writing chapters that exceed 10,000 words, you need to stop and take a close look at what you've written, because you are probably doing something wrong.

This isn't to say that just because your book is long it isn't good; sometimes good stories take a lot of words to say. However, 90% of the time this isn't the case. Guys like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky can get away with massive word counts, but you and I probably can't. Restraint is one of the hardest and most important lessons you can learn.

Second, try not to get pulled in too many directions at once. It's easy to get super-excited about the world you're building, but you don't want to drown the reader with too much lore or information. FoE has a huge problem with this, as I've often complained. Try to focus your story on one central plot arc and build smaller arcs around it as necessary. If you have to, you can always split your story into multiple books.

Third, put careful thought into the perspective you want to tell the story from before you start writing. I've complained countless times that telling a story the size of Fallout: Equestria from a first-person perspective was a terrible idea, and I will defend this position to the end of my days. Taking a massive war epic that spans nations and centuries and funneling all the essential information through the perspective of one character just plain doesn't work.

This caught my eye from the interview:

>Lovecraft in particular inspired how I handled a few aspects of my story’s world-building.
I find this very ironic, as Lovecraft built his mythos in precisely the way I suggested that kkat should: by writing out a consistent mythology in your private notes, and then slowly revealing it across multiple stories. If ya boi HP had dumped the entire Cthulu mythos into one long, preposterous first-person novel, literally no one would read it or give a shit about it.

Anyway, that's about all I had. Thanks for following along; it's been a fun ride. Until next time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsM_VmN6ytk
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
0de8421
?
No.322712
322716
>>322710
P.S., kkat:

I took the liberty of creating a cover image for your story that more accurately sums up what it's about. Feel free to upload it to FimFiction at your leisure. You're welcome.
Anonymous
6183881
?
No.322714
322798
>>322710
Damn, i'm going to miss this review. It's good to have another thorough deconstruction of this terrible story on the net, as few people seem to be capable of criticizing it. People either think this is the best thing ever, or are wary of the fan hordes stomping down their perspective, so a long-form and complete analysis of this is very welcome indeed. I can't wait to see where you go next, and thank you for all these threads. I learned a lot reading along about various writing tidbits and practices, and it was good to help out with my autistic fallout knowledge to tell you what was being referenced there.

Unsure if you spotted my earlier comment, so I apologize for double-posting, but this fic might be a decent read to critique next:

https://www.fimfiction.net/story/495309/and-hell-followed

Really generic zombie survival story with what I found to be poor writing that got a lot of acclaim while it was being released and rocketed up with likes that are pretty large in number relevant to the state of this fandom. ONLY 110k words as well
Anonymous
8058e3b
?
No.322716
322798
47d77bf08541212914a32f7fc35b52be.jpg
>>322712
Anonymous
a8c93bc
?
No.322726
322798
>>322710
It's been quite the ride, even if I'm a disgusting newfag who only joined 2/3rds of the way through this particular review. Nevertheless it has been an entertaining and educating experience and I look forward to see what literary work you choose to tackle next.
Anonymous
41cde33
?
No.322751
322757
I had an idea for making the story less retarded.

>be littlepip, everything happens as usual, except your Overmare sends you out with the search team of Stable Security guys
>the armour you're given is too big and your big gun is hard to aim. No autoaim vats.
>they are all killed by bandits and you are captured alive and brought to a prison to be a sex slave
>meet Calamity, prisoner badass. He was a bounty hunter but when he confessed "I am ex enclave" to his lover she turned him in
>you escape the prison by doing something smart and Calamity does all the fighting
>you help all the prisoners escape because "the slavers in charge must be evil" and you even kill plenty of prison guards
>but
>oh shit
>this prison was a labor camp for rapists and serial killers and bandits and you fucking freed them
>the nearby town has the wives and kids of the prison guards you killed plus others
>it had to be done for your freedom but you feel icky for helping baddies and hurting people you thought were baddies until you realized they were only imprisoning baddies meaning they must be goodies-
>calamity calls you a faggot and says the world is not black and white but a rainbow of shades of grey.
>calamity loves this because now he gets to be paid to hunt them all down as a freed bounty hunter
>three killquests ensue, each enemy LP must hunt down represents a different type of reaction a good pony can have to the wasteland. One guy became a cowardly thief. One guy became a serial rapist and torturer for fun. And one guy became a murderer while telling himself he was a travelling hero until one day he killed some innocents and turned himself in.
>by the end of it LP isn't some hardened quippy killer, she's a sad scared filly who just wants to go home but can't and needs to find a new home. Cowardly thief Monterry Jack tries to guilt LP into letting him go free then tries to shoot LP forcing LP to gun Jack down in front of his wife and kids
>an underaged filly no older than 5 says she hates LP and will kill her one day
>radio whore calls LP a faggot 24/7 for being an escaped convict cunt and LP's deeds prove radiowhore wrong until eventually radiowhore changes her mind and loves LP.
>when she enounters Velvet running with a travelling gang of doctors for hire and their mercenary bodyguards she almost chokes the selfish whore to death for ruining LP's life and forcing her into the madness of the outside world
>the hero also save a saccharinely sweet amnesiac girl found in the rubble
>and befriend a sexy unicorn wizard martial artist exiled from his stable for accidentally killing his opponent in the ring, it's not his fault because match-fixers tried to drug him
>Velvet's gang get gunned down by Brotherhood Of Steelfags and hearing of this on the radio brings old man Steelhooves out of retirement to kill random BOSfags hoping for the best until he meets LP and joins her party
>the main quest isn't about anything big like saving the world, these are just broken selfish faggots keeping each other sane and hopeful with friendship while searching for a safe home
>eventually radio whore exploits the hell out of them for her big plan: sending an army out to take over the other three radio stations around the Wasteland so she can use her hacker god skills to hijack the SPP remotely and control the weather forever
>LP and pals must take the Raider radio station FUCK PISS CUNT radio, Enclave's True Patriot Network, and Red Eye's Radio Revolution off the airwaves through the magic of excessive violence
>LP is a bit player in her own story, an ugly awkward shy nerd who can't communicate at the start and ends up bitter and miserable, she loses an eye and never gets a new one, she's a wimpy faggot crippled with self doubt and she's nothing but a puppet for Homage the radio whore. In fact Homage is a smug bitch now who thinks being related to Twilight via artificial insemination and being the last living survivor of her family line in her radio bunker makes her divinely entitled to judge the rest of the world and rule it. She offers LP pity sex for political gain so they can tell the world they're in love even though they hate each other and LP loathes herself as she goes along with it anyway because she's so desperate for affection and comfort and approval fundamentally as a person.

That would make the story way darker and also better, right? Not a quippy cheap action movie with disposable NPC villains but a hellhole world where the heroes support Homage for offering them a home and being the only one whose fixing-equestria faction plan involves the SPP. Oh and meteors should be to blame for the fall of Equestria and ziggers and megaspells should not factor into this tale at all. One day meteors fucked over ponies who could not have possibly seen it coming because fuck Kkat's attempt at writing a tragedy about FIM encountering "an adult problem like war" he thinks Equestria is uniquely ill-equipped to handle.
Anonymous
c0c4ac4
?
No.322757
322766
>>322751
>better
Is 'only 1/2 vomit' better than whole? I mean seriously, meteors? Just stahp. The story is shit and even (you) cant fix it
Anonymous
41cde33
?
No.322766
322774
>>322757
Well if the world needs to be fucked before the post-apocalyptic adventures can begin, you've got several choices.
Floods?
Biblical floods from Jesus?
No, that means dealing with water everywhere. Which means no fun Mad Max desert setting, which partly inspired Fallout along with RetroFuturism and those old American propaganda materials that downplayed the horror of nuclear war with "Just hide under your desk, kids! Let's do bomb drills! Remember to zip yourself into bodybags to... um... avoid radiation in the air, yeah!" bollocks.
If you want a desert setting in beautifully healthy Equestria, a world where ponies eat grass and would have no reason to kill each other over cows or grass or wheat or water, what are your options?
A plague that eats all plant life?
Parasprites?
Magic?
Nukes?
Magic nukes?
No, they all require long-winded explanations. Wars that go nuclear? You have to waste time talking about the war. You have to waste time talking about how magic nukes work and how they're invented. But meteors? Everyone already understands meteors, the dinosaurs that got killed by them (probably?), that sort of thing.
So, if you need to speedrun the apocalypse, how about meteors striking the earth with enough intensity to raise dust clouds that fill the sky and block almost all sunlight, making crop growth and plant life damn near impossible?

Explaining how the magic nukes worked, who built them (Fluttershy), the war that made both sides use them, it was a drag. It was bullshit. It was pointless for the tale of the pony living in the wasteland created by these sins because the heroine never had to figure out better answers for problems previous heroes couldn't solve. Littlesue was just allowed to be right whenever she tried something that would have ended in disaster if someone else attempted it. We never even needed to understand how Megaspells work because nothing creative ever came of them, that zigger used an explosive megaspell to kill the Goddess (I think?) so simply writing "Nuclear power and nuclear bombs were developed by a genius unicorn on Party Time Mentats" would be enough to bypass all that bullshit about megaspells, Fluttershy, her fate, and so on.

Meteors. It's a simple word, a simple explanation, and it can be followed up with words detailing exactly how hard the planet got tag-teamed by nuclear fuckbots- I mean meteors.
FE pretends to be about a lot of things but the backstory never mattered, none of the issues raised during the war or before it were ever resolved later on. Nopony resolved to reject government bureaucracy and colossal nations and well-intentioned authoritarianism and armies in favor of smaller communities with armed militias and roaming bounty hunters. Equestria didn't die so that future generations could learn something from its ashes, it died so OCs can kill NPCs in its ashes. So why mince words or waste words getting to the "good part" if that's all this story is designed to care about or focus on?
Anonymous
022e974
?
No.322774
322776 322783
>>322766
Its shit. There is no salvaging this story, you of all people know that. And low effort attempts to 'fix things' using lame references and excuses is precisely the writing method that Kkat used so how will that fix things? It wont.
Anonymous
aa18237
?
No.322776
651.gif
>>322774
>There is no salvaging this story
Anonymous
41cde33
?
No.322783
322786
>>322774
What did you see a reference to in that post?
Besides Mad Max, that doesn't count because Fallout's leather outfits and desert-California setting really were inspired by that. and Wasteland. and a dungeons and dragons-style thing called GURPS. and retrofuturistic "What we thought the future would look like back then" stuff, rayguns next to old-ass cars only nuclear, plus satire of corporations and governments since NPC boomers back then loved their corporations and govts.
Kkat's writing style blended stolen references together without getting what made them work. He ripped off the worst Fallout game (at the time) and made an even dumber stor- no, a sequence of events. A dumber sequence of events using shoehorned-in Fallout 3 elements that don't work in their new context at all.
Seriously, we joke about how Fallout 3 is the story of a scientist voiced by Liam Neeson who leaves his safe home to build a water purifier only to die trying to spitefully keep it out of the hands of the Enclave because "they're the baddies" (i dont think he knew about the plan to poison the purifier with Iconic Mutation Disease that now kills irradiated people yet), only for his absurdly saintlike or puppy-kicking kid to chase after him and die killing everyone or finishing his life's work: Turning on a magic water-purifier (powered by a matter-reconstituting device that could feed countless people) that kabooms away almost all radiation ever in the area so that hobos in rags who've never built anything in the past 200 years can enjoy radiation-free "clean" (still dirty as fuck probably) water with their 200 year old cans of spam and corn. Faggot Power Rangers and faggot Psycho Rangers fight a war over who gets to turn on a water purifier powered by fairy jizz.
But this?
This is the story of a lesbian who gets duped into helping a celebrity escape her vault, goes after her, gets sidetracked almost instantly, goes after random baddies until she stumbles into her celebrity friend, and then have nothing to do besides see what the omniscient radio cunt is doing, and then there's a lot of filler that never mattered until eventually plot armour protects LP from fire so Spike can accidentally send her wheree she needed to go: Into a room that undoes half the apocalypse and makes her a weather goddess so other poners can undo the other half of the apocalypse with the only remnant of the mane six allowed to function properly.
That's even less of a story, for even stupider reasons. Nothing is thought through. It's all just one endless stream of diarrhea without a true beginning or middle or end, stuff just happens for no reason and it's either allowed to work or not depending on what the author says. Hiding under a cumstained blanket in the middle of a firefight while spotted and under fire worked better than Twilight fucking Sparkle trying to magicproof her bunker but failing to prepare a way out of it. Littleshit can pilot a machine meant for Pegasi but Twilight can't even wipe her own fucking ass without damning future generations to more mutated bullshit only Littlesue can save them from.
This is the tale of a nation that dies because of Diablous Ex Machina bullshit so that Littleshit can save it with Deus Ex Machina bullshit eventually, and it's told from the perspective of a nosy twat who enjoys staring at random documents and enjoying the sound of audio logs without truly comprehending anything.
I'd say it's as if you took someone from Fallout 3's target audience and asked him to write a story, but that's exactly what happened. No nuance, no subtlety, everything's spelled out and no filler is cut. Fuck this story, it can't be salvaged, but there are lessons better writers can learn from it.
Anonymous
d9f15b0
?
No.322786
322787
>>322783
>but there are lessons better writers can learn from it
No, there aren't. Stop sifting through shit, there are no gems in there.
Anonymous
41cde33
?
No.322787
322798 322984
>>322786
You're right. Fuck this story. The best writing lesson to be learned from Gaykat is "Don't be like Gaykat".

What's on the list of stuff to review again? That zombie fic seems a bit popular but it's not as popular as those shitfics from the fandom's early days twats still call the greatest stories of this generation.
Going through Cupcakes would be a bit boring and obvious. It's just a short story where one character does something edgy to another, fundamentally no different from shitfics where Squidward or Spongebob snap and murder everyone.
Also after a story with such often-awful prose and tryhard "mature" edgelord content it would be interesting to see Glim tackle a children's novel like HP that only reaches nonsense edgelord levels in the later books...
Harry Potter and The Gay-Ass Rock.
wait no
Harry Pothead and The Rock Of Incestiny
wait no
Hairy Plopper and The Cock Of Gayges
I have autistic rants prepared about awful worldbuilding choices made with HP but they're irrelevant to book 1 so I won't post them until we hit the books where the bullshit REALLY starts blazing like the parental bullshit in 3 and whichever one has the prankster twins selling date rape drugs to kids disguised as chocolates to make smuggling them into hogwarts easier. These are supposed to be good guys. Pottermore (or was it an interview from Rowling) revealed Voldy is fundamentally evil because he "cannot love" because he was conceived under rape involving a love potion date rape drug.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.322798
322802 322893
>>322714
>>322787
Next one I'm planning to do is The Best Night Ever by Capn_Chryssalid. It's reasonably short and looks like the kind of thing I'd enjoy, assuming the author doesn't fuck up the idea too badly. I'm hoping it will be a good palette cleanser after an entire year of slogging through kkat's edgy dreck. After that, I'm probably going to do Our Girl Scootaloo. I was skimming the first few paragraphs and it looks hilariously terrible. After that I'm not sure; the zombie one might be a good choice, or I'm also thinking about tackling that one Nigel suggested awhile ago, that is supposed to be based on Kafka.

I've got a list somewhere of the various fics people have suggested, but I'm not sure how many of them I will be able to get to in a reasonable amount of time. I'm actually on the fence about whether it would be worth it or not to do a Harry Potter book.

Anyway, instead of setting a long roadmap in advance, it probably makes more sense to just take it one story at a time and see what I'm in the mood for when I'm finished with each one.

>>322716
>>322726
/)
Anonymous
aa18237
?
No.322802
>>322798
/)
Anonymous
41cde33
?
No.322885
I have a short and unusual request.

Everyone here is familiar with DC, right? Batman, Superman, Joker, and a bunch of other characters with silly names who don't matter.

This https://youtu.be/HvaPGnRyjMc is the story of what many are calling the best-written media featuring batman VS superman. It's yet another fucking story with another fucking evil Superman. Only this time, he used to be good and then he wasn't. Glim, what do you think of how this fanfiction depicts Superman's fall into darkness? What do you think of the story as a whole?

That video is the cutscenes of the story mode with gameplay removed which is fine because the gameplay is dull unbalanced slap fighting with Patented NetherRealm Shitimation(tm) technology. Everything happens during cutscenes anyway.

So it's basically a movie that lasts about an hour. Sure there are comics too but they do their own thing with the premise while pretending to be tied together.

This might be an odd request. But can you rate this bad superman fanfic movie made by the cumgargling nigger singularities at Netherrealm?
Anonymous
41cde33
?
No.322893
322991 323261
>>322798
Chatoyance is turbo gay, are you going to do his The Conversion Bureau series?
It's a tale where Equestria appears on earth but a magic field slowly expands around it to erase humans and all traces of them. Humans have just a few years to take a vaccination against the magic field- I mean a magic potion that turns them into ponies so the field won't kill them on contact for lacking souls. The problem is "newfoals" are newly transformed humans with compromised mental states but their kids will be ordinary ponies. So it's kind of like racemixing into a bigger population with more dominant genes only different.
This tranny wrote a fetish story where earth is dominated by Equestria and magically subverted. Humanity dies out or is assimilated. No remnants of human civilization are allowed to remain.

It's another big Fanfiction Verse so massive it's still got authors writing stories for it...

But I find this fascinating: There are many Anti-TCB fics.
There are stories that reject Conversion Bureau's premise, events, characters, and ideas.

You've got edgy deconstructions where the ponies successfully TCBify the world and it ends in disaster for everyone involved as Equestria fails to handle the refugee humans and feed them.
You've got stories that reject the idea of the TCB and find other ways to solve the magic field problem like a potion that turns humans magic without dehumanizing them or magicking the antihuman magic field into breaking.
You've got stories where the TCB ponies meet regular ponies who call TCBponers genocidal faggots
You've got stories where the TCBfags PICKED THE WRONG HOUSE FOO and teleported into a universe with the capacity to fight back like Star Trek or Pokemon or Doctor Who or SCP or Pokemon.
You've got shallow stuff where Superman and Iron Man shoot the TCB Equestrians with the help of the Kids Next Door and Backstreet Boys and the cast of GTA and Ready Player One and Pokemon.
You've got fix fics that seek to fix all the "mistakes" with TCB and turn it into a happy sappy nonsense story where everyone is nice and nobody gets hurt and everyone lives happily ever after.

All the possible responses.
>
>I reject your fantasy on the grounds that this isn't Equestria, ponies wouldn't treat humans this way, real Equestrians would oppose you
>I reject your fantasy on the grounds that your fantasy would result in disaster for everyone involved, especially your characters
>I reject your fantasy on the grounds that it's a bad fucking story, here's my superior-to-me take on the concept
>I reject your fantasy and wrote my own where your poners try this bullshit on the wrong planet and get the shit beaten out of them
>my fantasy is being a Not-Starfleet commander who's gunning down every last element of your fantasy in Iron Man armour with the BFG 9001 in my hands! Rah rah humans are space orc warriors with blood of iron and steel and god cum! Humanity is superior because (proceeds to gloat about the white man's successes without realizing niggers lack any reason to be proud of what they are) and that's why all humans are equal, fuck nonhuman alien scum!
>my fantasy is like yours except there are nicer ponies who are prettier than yours coming to earth to take all of us to equestria without transforming me or only transforming me into a big dicked anthropomorphic pony because writing about having hooves instead of hands sounds hard and I just want to write about cumming inside Rainbow Dash, I thought I was the target audience of your fantasy but it didn't pleasure me enough so I wrote my own with lactation and hyper pregnancy and a positive score over 200 haha
Anonymous
41cde33
?
No.322950
Considering the time FE by Kkunt came out I'm surprised there isn't a reference to that old Vinyl Scratch video. "It's just my BASS CANNON" and all that.
Anonymous
5082da8
?
No.322984
322987 323016
>>322787
In avoidance of Kkat-being avoidance, allow me to neatly summarize what made kkat and FoE so bad.
Kkat wasnt trying to make a decent fallout meets ponies, hr was trying to be the guy who made fallout meets ponies. His motovation wasnt aspiration, it was vanity. At the end of the day he wanted it to be something he would be credited with having written (and 'first') and he took the easiest and laziest route to get there.
Anonymous
f692d7b
?
No.322987
>>322984
This.
Anonymous
3cfd6b4
?
No.322991
323016 323261
>>322893
lul, sounds about right. You are correct about chatoyance... superfag. I dont think it started the conversion bureau though, only wrote a few things about it and somehow made them worse.
it also wrote about CelestAI, haven't read that one and don't plan to. I have read the CelestAI original though. The thing that bothers me the most about that one is how many people there are out in the wild cheering on an AI overruler. Most of these people don't know about pony fan fiction. If I recall correctly, CelestAI was written by a computer science guy. CelestAI is the result of modern issues in society.
Anonymous
41cde33
?
No.323016
323017
>>322984
Holy shit, that perspective explains so much
How he sucked dick to get his google doc fanfic advertised on Equestria Daily
Why he started on google docs to drive away non-fans and attract retards who upvoted him en masse when he uploaded his work to Fimfic
Why he begged EQD not to feature anything fallout and ponies related unless they were specifically a part of his take on Fallout Equestria
Why Fallout Equestria is so long and crappy and convoluted and bad at worldbuilding and dedicated to blabbering endlessly about his headcanons and reinterpretations of canon
Why so much of his work was focused on sucking Littlepip off and making her overwhelmingly overpowered while making bad excuses for her to be this overpowered and lucky and plot-armoured.
He wasn't trying to tell a story wirh Fallout and ponies, he was trying to make them both his!
>>322991
If I recall correctly some other author started TCB and abandoned it upon "realizing how accidentally antihuman he made it" according to him. So he let his buddy Chatoyance take over, a tranny who hates humans.
It's disgusting how many coombrained consoomers out there cheer on the worst dictators in fiction as long as said dictators remember to preach about being a superior being here to uplift everyone (while not dressing like a nazi soldier or american founder)... and as long as the dictator's definition of an "uplifted perfected fulfilled happy" humanity is one gifted sufficient sex and bread and circused and possibly also physical perfection that's never put to any real use. They'll cry "fucking fashist" at a benevolent dictator who wants what's best for his people and get them to embrace their civic responsibilities... then the fags cheer on authoritarians who want to sexually dominate and sexually satisfy humanity for no good reason. It's as if coomers love any character who pseudophilosophically validates the shallow inherently negative narcissistic lifestyle of seeking sexual validation until you expire, because it makes them feel good about being worthless Bonobullshit apes who can't keep their hands off their dicks or their dicks out of onaholes or each other's anuses for long enough to get a job and work for a day.
Anonymous
41cde33
?
No.323017
>>323016
To clarify I don't think nazis were "imperialists", the joke is that NPCs are trained to loathe who they are told "Imperialists" are... and then cheer on real imperialism like the American quest to force feminism into the middle east for pissrael or any fictional leftist dictator who gets his dick sucked for conquering the planet through force and burning churches because "oh em jee you guys we totally need unity or else we wont survive the upcoming alien bullshit! We must stand together! Stronger together! Apes together strong! And by together and unity I mean get the fuck under my jackbooted heel and toil for my commie empire or die for me you fucking underling!"
Fuck the NPCs and fuck the hypocrisy programmed into them. They loathe whites for teaching blacks to read and write but they'll worship a fictional AI for forcing humanity into a sex-filled VR MMORPG.
Anonymous
41cde33
?
No.323259
323272
Question

If a male character tried to fuck Littlepip and Littlepip replied "Hey, I'm not just some blank slate you can insert yourself into!" would that be comedy gold or retarded gay bullshit?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.323261
323262 323263 323269
>>322893
>>322991
Chatoyance, thank you. I was trying to remember that guy's name. I thought I'd bookmarked the story but I hadn't. Anyway, this is the one by him that caught my eye and is probably the one I'm going to do:
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/85294/id-that-indestructible-something

Like most of these authors I know literally nothing about this faggot or what he's written going in, but I already hate his guts just from reading his author bio.

Anyway, we'll probably pick this up again in December. I need a bit of a break after that long trek through the marshes, and in any case I was hoping to take a crack at NaNoWriMo this year, since I didn't end up doing it last year if anyone's interested, I'm thinking of cleaning up my Dale Gribble goes to Equestria greentext, adapting it into something like a novel, and maybe writing the second arc I had planned if I have time. Once again, the next thing we will be reading when we resume is The Best Night Ever by Capn_Chrysalid.

If you're looking for something to read in the meantime, I would recommend this:
https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/offense.html

This is, in my estimation, one of the finest works of literary shitposting ever penned. It's basically just Mark Twain bantzing on James Fenimore Cooper, mostly famous in modern times as the guy who wrote The Last of the Mohicans. I don't actively dislike Cooper, but Twain actually makes some pretty good observations about some things he fucks up, and he presents them in an entertaining and funny way. He's nowhere near as vulgar as I am really, my only complaint about this is that Twain misses several great opportunities to refer to his subject as "James Fenimore Pooper", but this is the gold standard I more or less aim for when I try to deconstruct these ridiculous pony stories. I read this during one of my early aborted tours through college and really enjoyed it.

For reference, the Cooper novel that Twain mostly deals with is called The Deerslayer, and it can be found here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3285/3285-h/3285-h.htm

If you feel like life in Current Year + 6 isn't quite depressing enough, allow me to depress you further by providing some context for this. In the 19th century, people read Cooper in sort of the same way that people today would read Stephen King or John Grisham or someone like that: basically, it was considered popular entertainment. Read the first few paragraphs of The Deerslayer and try to internalize that this was a novel written for common people, and that its prose is an example of the base level of literacy you could expect the average backwoods farm bumpkin to have in 1841. Now go back and read the first few pages of Fallout: Equestria.

Literary dweebs generally classify Cooper as a Romanticist, or at least as someone who tried to be a Romanticist, and Twain is attacking him from the perspective of a Realist. The simplest way to sum this up is that it was basically just a giant nerd fight: a Romantic would say that so long as a story captures the imagination of the reader and speaks to them, it's okay if it isn't completely plausible. A Realist would say that if a story isn't plausible, the reader won't accept it and thus there is no point in writing it. Personally, my views are probably in the middle somewhere (if I was completely on the Realist side I probably wouldn't be reading stories about talking ponies in the first place).

However, I think Twain and Cooper could at least agree that a writer ought to have a basic competency in the language he's writing in, and that his story should at least endeavor to make sense most of the time. With that in mind, we can only imagine the sort of aneurysm that Fallout: Equestria would have given them.
Anonymous
a4385c1
?
No.323262
7c45f467-0b88-11ec-9317-5113a5242a8d.png
>>323261
>SPOILER the first
I didn't think going even further beyond diamond was possible.
>one of the finest works of literary shitposting ever penned
Seems like that will be on my reading list that one day I'll get to maybe.
Anonymous
3ac3469
?
No.323263
323330
>>323261
jokes on you, I already read ID That Indestructible Something. all I remember of it is that it was pretty shitty and transformation based with liberal ideology.
actually I'm pretty sure lore includes furries, now that I think about it... oh gosh that part was probably the worst part of that fanfic.
Anonymous
e0ad009
?
No.323269
323383
ursa_major_by_silentmatten_d5vkrv7-pre.png
>>323261
>Read the first few paragraphs of The Deerslayer and try to internalize that this was a novel written for common people, and that its prose is an example of the base level of literacy you could expect the average backwoods farm bumpkin to have in 1841.
So what's a novel for high-society like? Is there a higher rate of big words and/or bigger words?
>Realist vs Romanticist
Seems like a false dilemma. Why wouldn't they just complement eachother?
Anonymous
6e2c7c9
?
No.323272
>>323259
comedy gold
Anonymous
41cde33
?
No.323330
323331 323346 323364
>>323263
This might be a weird thing to find annoying but trannies (fragile failed men with femboy fetishes and wannabe-butch wannabe-men in pantsuits desperate to obtain mythical male privilege that clearly doesn't exist to anyone paying attention) constantly blather on about the sheer incomprehensible "I have no mouth and I must scream"-tier awfulness of the mythical "brain-body mismatch" that happens when a black-haired man thinks he's Napoleon or Spock or a blonde french woman on the inside or a woman thinks she's Sans Undertale or a Dragon or a black man on the inside and both feel entitled to "free" (tax-funded) cosmetic surgery to supposedly get closer to their ideal forms.
Their mythos relies on the idea that being in the wrong body is an incalculably awful type of suffering.

But in these stories, when humans are turning into ponies, any Animorphs-inspired body horror is rare and unintentional and the end result is always a happy widdle pony who loves waddling around on his widdle cartoon leggies and never complains about the lack of hands or fingers or a reachable wipeable arsehole again because he's too busy baking cookies and making new pony friends and shagging idealized pony OC waifus who exist to help the author preach pony superiority and human inferiority first and be an actual character with motivations and personality never.

I've noticed that to help the "Medicine" (Propaganda) go down, there's a spoonful of sugar in these kinds of transformative propaganda works, typically a woman who only loves the main hero after he starts betraying his kind and his people's ideals for the sake of any poon, even libtard poon or alien poon.

>"Come on, gamers, don't you want to betray humanity for some rare pure Asari pussy, or help the dumb Krogans reject competition and embrace feminism? Remember, those earth-first guys are baaaad news and supporting them makes you a Renegade(TM) aka meanie! Now help destroy the flying white man's city built on quantum bullshittery that has robots yet imports convicted foreigners to perform its labour just so you can be part of some contrived race war and eventually commit sudoku and be drowned by your own adoptive daughter so she can never be born! Come on, fanfiction readers, don't you want to read this novel where humanity is conquered by ponies or an insane AI woman with a pony coat of paint just so the main hero can get laid by pony puss or digital pony puss? All your troubles go away AND you get laid by a superior species that conquers you, isn't that wonderful? Isn't this all such a fucking wonderful fantasy, white man?"

It's a funny contrast, since that old jewish film Norma Rae fellated the jewish man who came into Norma the married white woman's life as the teacher and expert and master in the ways of leftist subversion, he was married to a jewish woman richer than her, he taught Norma much and moved on to leave her dissatisfied with her current white male lover. And wasn't there some pro-divorce film around that era where a white woman divorces her husband, runs around on slutty adventures, eventually marrying a literal fucking prince without ever being satisfied? It seems these filmmakers knew women could only be satisfied if they were told to be satisfied with what they have by something they respect as a holder of power. Then again, there are plenty of films where the evil white woman gets everything she ever wanted through murder/lies/sluttery/whatever. They're just more blatant about it.

Nobody truly uses TCB to critically explore the life of a pony full of human memories, past tragedies, political ideals that can never be realized under absolute alicorn rule, and so on. Nobody explores the loss of identity and self as a man who prided himself on enduring bad conditions without complaint and being good at video games loses everything he ever used to define himself in a tech-free farmer village. Nobody explores how Equestria would change after taking in all those human refugees too quickly to effortlessly assimilate them all unless the story's written by someone who hates TCB and everything Chatty McTranny stands for and wants to make a statement against it, even if that statement is only "My fantasy works THIS way" or "Here's how you do your fantasy BETTER".

The entire concept is infuriatingly liberal.

The story starts by leaping into "The future" liberals pretend isn't their fault, overpopulation runs rampant and the environment is destroyed under the governmental-corporate matriarchy. It's all just sooooo fucked that only magic can save earth now, because nobody gave the Watermelons (Green on the outside, commie red on the inside) what they claimed to want in time.

Man's Earth is invaded by magical ponies who bring with them a doomsday device for humanity on autopilot, and the best anyone can do is prepare for the "Inevitable" demographic and cultural transformation and the road to Chatoyance's Pony Supremacy under Queen Celestia (spits) just so the author can start waxing lyrical about supposed pony superiority, except anything that allows the ponies to be superior (ethnostate, sexual restraint, cultural cohesion, peace through superior firepower in the form of friendship lasers that ensure enemy annihilation) is ignored or glossed over by the author in favor of pretending it's actually hyperfeminine pussy liberalism that makes everyone soooooo kind and soooooooo much better than "Those fucking crass dirty manly aggressive edgy cruel cold tough dumb possibly-PTSD-ridden bad-ist good-phobic humans".
It's a ridiculous level of perversion, subversion, and reversal.
Anonymous
41cde33
?
No.323331
>>323330
All that the leftist corporations and leftist governments are doing wrong is blamed on humanity not being liberal enough, a maaagical state that can only be achieved in this setting with literal magic, and anyone who'd fight back against the inevitable wave of transformation is "A radical humanist terrorist bombing Conversion Bureaus and hospitals and restaurants for no reason".

At least The Day The Earth Stood Still came with a "Become one like us or die" ultimatum humanity possibly could have pulled off before the aliens started cock-voring earth and cum-digesting its inhabitants.

At least Black Hole from Advance Wars had the common decency to wage their ethnic war with tanks and bombers and wacky bullshit after trying to turn the nations of Wars World against each other, without ever transforming the humans into Black Holians or pretending to be peace-lovers unable to control a magic-field superweapon they brought with them like the TCB Ponies do.

At least the Daleks will let you know they hate you before they exterminate you culturally and ethnically.

TCB pretends to be "Saving" humanity even as Chatty's take on the Mane Six rant to each other about how much they all secretly hate humans.
>"Human bodies are icky and big and ugly and...and mean! Humans are mean!"

Does this sound like something Pinkie Pie would say? Because that's what Pinkie says in TCB!

God fucking damn it, what do all of these authors have against depicting Pinkie right?!
Anonymous
c955b4f
?
No.323346
>>323330
>Their mythos relies on the idea that being in the wrong body is an incalculably awful type of suffering.
>But in these stories, when humans are turning into ponies, any Animorphs-inspired body horror is rare and unintentional and the end result is always a happy widdle pony who loves waddling around on his widdle cartoon leggies and never complains about the lack of hands or fingers or a reachable wipeable arsehole again because he's too busy baking cookies and making new pony friends and shagging idealized pony OC waifus who exist to help the author preach pony superiority and human inferiority first and be an actual character with motivations and personality never.
It's good point you bring up. I believe liberals aren't truly liberals but npcs. As in, they don't have overarching princples that guide them but a syntax that tells them what's right and wrong. This is because they want to appeal to authority because of the benefits that comes with. It's that feeling everyone has had once in their life where you want people to like you so you do or desire to do something to appease them by multiplied by a much larger factor. Most of them realize their folly in their hearts but rationalize it. But this is where all their contradictions come from.

In our society, we're taught that we With the implciation that is white mens fault. are destorying our enviroment, causing war and racism, and etc.
But these people are also in club that likes mlp, which you pointed out if they had been observant doesn't really work with their liberal values. It's important to remember that the original story was written somewhere during 1-2s, if I'm not mistaken, meaning we didn't really know how big Equestria was. These days it's more assumed that Equestria is the country of ponies but back then, it was almost assumed that Equestria was the name of their world and that Ponies were pretty much the creatures that existed there. Obviously, we knew of others but they were more seens as part of the ponies' world rather than having their own countries. Point is, it wasn't cool to be woke and see ponies as some sort of analogy for white people then. Ponies were liked but humanity is bad.

This is why some of the more intelligent and honest bronies, still liberal, made nazi comparisions towards the ponies of the original TBC fic.
I believe it something like that anyway.
Anonymous
ab47904
?
No.323364
323370
>>323330
That's a big thing I hate with almost all pony tf stuff. The /mlp/ thread for it is almost exclusively sucking up to their discord moderators and always fawning over wanting to be tf'ed into ponies because of how superior ponies are to humans in absolutely every way possible. Most don't even want to be normal ponies though but want to be pets. In one breath they say how humans are evil and disgusting and humanity is destroying earth then the next they say they just want to sit around all day masturbating and watching videos online so some guy can work all day and come home and fuck them and give them free stuff.

Makes sense with a lot of them being trannies I suppose but all their stories are just vapid wish fulfilment and if anyone tried to write a story to show the negative sides of tf especially with being abducted and turned into a pony against your will and sold as a pet then these people lose their minds and just spam vitriol at your post and ask you to become a happy pet like them or if it's on FIMFiction then they mass downvote and report it.

Just hate how nearly every general on /mlp/ is a fetish thread to write smut besides a small handful. Sure >green texts or fanfics for MLP aren't high art but could atleast try to write different takes on these generals rather then just coom stuff.
Anonymous
d9a7e1c
?
No.323370
>>323364
Weren't there some experiments on monkeys and wolves that when they feel they are unfairly rewarded or treated to a sufficient degree they stop working?
The jew's unfair society currently promotes the lie that society is unfairly biased in favor of white men, when it's clearly biased against them. But no femoid or nigger or nigger femoid would ever admit this and try to help the white man because it would have to mean admitting there isn't a conspiracy to keep them down, there's a conspiracy to hold these angry subhumans up to man's level so they can be used against the white man.
Have you noticed how often "intellectual" groups will openly fantasize about the silliest things, like living in Star Trek as a "recognized genius space admiral" or some bollocks, and then dismiss anyone else's fantasies involving media they consider to be less "for smart people only"?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.323383
323384
>>323269
>So what's a novel for high-society like?
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/219386/1/rainbows-problem/crusty-cunt-flakes

Serious answer: it's not that certain books are reserved exclusively for "high-society" on the basis of complexity or word-count; my overall point is just that standards for publication used to be much higher than they are today, and the result was a much higher level of general public literacy. If you went to college in the 19th century to study literature, you would have been expected to learn Latin and Greek and read Homer and Thucydides and guys like that in the original languages. That was actually the case up until fairly recently, like the late 20th century or so. I think Harvard only dropped its Latin requirement for lit majors a couple of years ago; I remember reading an article about it. Ordinary people in James Fenimore Cooper's time, factory workers and farmers and so forth, generally couldn't afford to attend college and probably weren't walking around reading Homer in Greek on their free time, but they still read popular novels and short stories, which were usually published in newspapers and magazines and so forth. The people who wrote these stories usually were the people who had read Homer and Thucydides and so forth.

If you wanted to write books and have them published you'd generally be expected to enroll in college and learn your shit; if you didn't you'd be expected to at least have the same level of knowledge as someone who had. Prior to the internet the only way to write something and have someone read it was to either go through a professional publisher or to buy a printing press and distribute it yourself. The former required education, while the latter required time and money. Self-publication was prohibitively expensive for most people, so the majority of writers had to go through the gatekeepers at the publishing houses, which meant attaining a minimum standard that was much higher than it is today. The result was that most of what made it into print was generally pretty high-quality. Someone like JK Rowling, who just penned some amateurishly-written bullshit about wizards while sleeping in a dumpster, probably wouldn't have been able to get her manuscript published in Cooper's time.

Anonymous
d9a7e1c
?
No.323384
>>323383
I don't know what kind of Berenstainstein bullshit happened but I swear I once saw a website with online annotated copies of the Harry Potter novels. Different segments of text were highlighted with different colours to colour-code the critique author's complaints or observations into frequently used categories. Moving your mouse onto the highlighted text would make a small window pop up with the author's comment or critique or a link to a copy of another book or myth from which Rowling plagiarized the highlighted idea, event, or even the entire chunk of text. It was an annotated copy of Harry Potter and no matter how hard I've searched for it over the years I could never find it. Wasn't there some old movie or book that came out just before Harry Potter starring Lily Evans the Witch who goes to magicland and is connected to a chosen dark wizard she's destined to defeat and while this concept was ripped off for HP the name Lily Evans was ripped off for the name of Harry's mum?

Sometimes I wonder if the online critic-made "annotated copy od harry potter" was scrubbed from the internet completely, or if it's still out there somewhere still updated with new revisions based on later information. The author of the annotations had a firm stance against saying "with what we know in chapter 13 and book 4 this is bullshit that makes no sense" in chapter 2's critique instead of saving that talk for when the moment came up at the latest possible moment, and he refused to mention anything outside the book in the annotated copy such as video games or the movies (but he was fine with mentioning these things in post-chapter commentaries). I wonder what he would think of Pottermore, the neopets-inspired-but-shittier browser game where Rowling dumps random trivia and absurd retcons and "in the future the houses are like this" nonsense so the kids sorted into Slytherin dont feel bad. I wonder what he would think of Rowling's Twitter, where she also dumps trivia and retcons. Learning Dumbles used to shit in front of kids? Silly. Learning the motivations for some sjw whore villain was "her mom was a nobody and her dad was a magicless semi-wizard faggot still able to use magic stuff but unable to do magic himself"? Eye-roll-inducing because she's yet another designated racist classist character with impure blood according to standards the author wants you to loathe but it's retarded that the author didn't include this info in the book. Rowling can't write and I'm certain her success was astroturfed by the excessive mainstream media praise at a time when many kids had little choice for kids literature and few channels on TV and boomer parents told "giving your kids harry potter will get them into reading and off le darn game boys hurr durr phone bad *binges gordon ramsay for 6 hours because candy crush hasnt been invented yet".
Anonymous
d9a7e1c
?
No.323750
1-18 Yodeling in meadow hill (Hidden Retreat).mp3
I've got it.

Okay, fuck the meteor.

What if the pre-war Equestria was begged for help by some Griffons in the middle of a war, and they leapt in to save the day... only to end up stuck in an awful jungle/desert/tundra hellhole continent where enemies could be anywhere? Life is suffering for the soldiers meanwhile ponies have a ridiculously cartoony "Determination and kindness is more important than combat readiness" approach so they allow complete newfags into the war because ponies are so used to regular ponies saving the day without military readiness or training?
Meanwhile a Griffon megacorp took over all of Equestrian life. All aspects were eventually absorbed by this private military corporation of evil that exists to represent war and evil and all the mean things ponykind isn't
Meanwhile dumb pre-war equestria is dumb to represent all the ways niceness can be exploited and fail if someone thinks good intentions and stubbornness are enough to make bad ideas work.
There needs to be a big climactic scene in the pre-war era where the Mane Six, instead of doing crack mints, get together and figure shit out and realize they need to stop Lord Gigajew or whatever the GriffonCorp CEO is called. He's the CEO of corporate bullshit at Amaze-All or whatever. They try to stop him but fail so the story can happen and when they get together to fight him in his giant dick-shaped tower he is almost defeated and then he reveals he nuked the world and blamed it on the ponies six minutes ago and then he aloha snackbars himself, and the moral is "Never trust Griffons".
So when shit hits the fan and Littlepip leaves her vault to enter a war-torn nuked world SIXTY (NOT TWO HUNDRED) years after the nukes fell, she sees a world of violence.
LP was a nerdy historian but she was taught lies about pre-war Equestria. So when she leaves the vault she wants to learn everything, giving the author an excuse to tell the reader about pre-war equestria.
Now at first she assumes she needs to toughen up and be violent against all foes, especially starving desperate bandits (these replace Raiders). She needs to be edgy and cruel... right?
Oh and Velvet is literally raped to death for being a pussy peacefag moralfag to piss Littlepip off and symbolize how her one ticket back into her Vault-Stable is gone. You can't focus on your main hero's moral struggles with the blood on her hooves and sins crawling on her back if you're going to include peacefag characters who are treated like saints when they still have blood on their hooves. Fuck the Radio whore, too.
LP kills a lot of baddies, but when she goes too far and runs with a band of hardcore hardliners who hurt innocents for mild infractions or some shit, she decides nonviolence is the way. Wait, no, she decides nonviolence is an ideal one should try to live up to, and defend with force when necessary.
LP develops into a smart confident kind character who will never be taken advantage of again. A heroic pony who saves the day and figures out solutions that benefit everyone good where other characters would just rush in guns blazing and leave behind smoldering wrecks of towns with more holes than the plot of Fallout Equestria.
Littlepip eventually ends up tearing the GriffonCorp PipBuck from her arm in a big symbolic display that means giving up her unfair advantages because upon learning enough about the pre-war world she understands that she really fucking hates Griffons now and the last remnants of Griffonkind must be exterminated before ponykind can safely rebuild
There was a secret society of smart ponies in Canterlot but the Griffons used government power to subvert it and the Griffon-ATF killed them all and Griffons stole their technology and they're using it to sabotage the wasteland and make it remain a hellhole to watch with the surveillance tower for their own amusement. Tenpony Tower is full of Griffons and it's got a new less stupid name like... Goldsacks-Thiefingbird Incorporated HQ. Ponykind can't breathe easily until the Griffons choking the life and wealth out of pony lands are dead. Also the Griffons have brainwashed ponies serving in an army of slaves called the Shadowbolts... No, something edgier. Scare Force One.
LP kills all the Griffons and shoots the last one in the mouth while saying "Bird up!"
I'm kidding. Instead she takes that "First they came for the gays, then they came for the unions, then they came for me and there was nobody left to save me" poem and changes it to "First you brainwashed the gays, then you brainwashed the unions, then you brainwashed the children, then you brainwashed my government, then you came for me with all your brainwashed communist pawns, and now there is nobody left who will miss you."
Then LP rebuilds a holy pony ethnostate full of virtues and pony values where service guarantees citizenship and the role of the government is restricted and clearly defined in the new constitution. To have rights you must serve a tour of duty as a town guard or as one of several roaming military units that search the Equestrian Wasteland for monsters to kill, dictators to overthrow, and good settlements to trade with and possibly incorporate into New Equestria. The result is a pony ethnostate easily able to rebuild Equestria and absorb other Equestrian settlements into itself upon kindly teaching them the ways of ponykind or crush any raider groups that have given up and given in to the temptation to sin.

In Fallout Equestria, good intentions failed Equestria because the author said so, and then the good intentions of LP and her friends saved the day years later because of author bias.
But this story takes a critical look at both Equestria, suicidal kindness, edge, Edgequestria, Griffons, Ponies, the idea that man must become cruel to thrive in a cruel world rather than strong enough to slay the monsters among the ruins and rebuild a nation, and what a better stronger philosophy truly is and isn't.
Hell the Bunker-Griffons are violence-loving FE fans.
Anonymous
46119ee
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No.323787
323817 323819 323849
image.png
>>322710
Now that youre done with the original, will you be doing its cousin that is both better and worse in all sorts of ways. Pros, the world building is done in a way that actually makes sense and is effectively a fix-fic for the fallout equestria has. Cons, the main charachter has controversial opinions about sex and its a darker edgier and far more over the top ride then the "original". Additionally, Blackjack gets constantly shit on for her shitty opinions and instead of being a mary sue actually has to deal with non-villians who think shes a fucking moron. which she is. Where Fallout Equestria is largely just a play-through of fallout 3, Project horizons is much more of its own thing.
Anonymous
c9d72db
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No.323817
323818
>>323787
IIRC Glim looked at the length and said "fuck that."
Anonymous
d9a7e1c
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No.323818
>>323817
To be fair FE: Project Horizons is REALLY shit.
It's also so "dark and edgy" it made Kkat say "that's not my Wasteland".
Something that huge would probably need to be a group effort. No idea how that could work.
Anonymous
469dd80
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No.323819
323820
>>323787
You drew this? Solid man.
Anonymous
469dd80
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No.323820
>>323819
With the exception of those nostrils in second pic. They look like she has a mustach.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
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No.323849
323852 323929 323930 324396
>>323787
I really, really, really like this image.

As to Project Horizons, several people have tried to convince me that I ought to do at least part of it, and I'm on the fence about it. While part of me is tempted, another part is remembering that it took over a year just to get through this one. Believe it or not your summary of it actually makes me more curious. In any case, it's definitely going to have to wait a bit; I need to do something (relatively) short and not related to Fallout before diving into something like that.
Anonymous
d9a7e1c
?
No.323852
>>323849
Glim, do you think it was shit writing when the only thing that ever made the relationship between Calamity and Velvet remotely important to the "story" is how it resulted in one scene somewhat early on where Velvet was mad at Calamity and offered herself to Littlepip, giving LP a chance to call Velvet a faggot?

Velvet wasn't vital in softening Calamity up and getting rid of his hard edges and selfish demeanour because he never had any problems that would get in the way of making him an optimal gun-toting NPC sidekick beside his vague desire to not fight his brother and eagerness to have someone else handle that fight for him. Calamity wasn't vital in hardening Velvet up and making her discard all her foolish ideas that made her an inferior gun-toting teammate while teaching her coping mechanisms and survival skills, because she was already "perfect" in his eyes. He praises her "Pragmatism" when she completely lacks any except when she doesn't and decides to (out of his sight) pragmatically and callously manipulate LP's feelings in a way he has no reason to find admirable considering who he is.

Steelhooves was effectively a plank of wood with guns duct-taped to him in this story until he died. He was such a non-character, the memory of AJ he chose to save wasn't their first date or the last time they spoke or the first time they porked, but the time he stood on a stage like a faggot and watched AJ reveal his tomb to a crowd of ponies who meant nothing to him, just so that this memory could """Chekovs Gun hint""" (as a faggot would call it) at the connection between himself and AJ. The memory he chose to save in an orb was, conveniently for the author, a memory LP could view to get a stupid pointless hint at the most interesting thing Kkat could possibly do with this empty husk of power armour supposedly with a zombie pony inside: Give him an existing relationship with ponies the audience presumably already gives a fuck about. He was killed off to be replaced with another generic guy character... Was his name Life Bloom or something? I think he existed but I can't recall what he looked like or talked like or was as a person.

But Velvet and Calamity...

These two characters had so much fucking screentime. Maybe too much. It might not feel like too much because LP got even more screentime. But Velvet and Calamity weren't used to explore the perspectives of those raised under conditions that differ from the hero (Velvet the spoiled rich celebrity singer who wanted to be a doctor and Calamity the shotgun-toting propagandized-from-birth Enclave gunner who won Best Young Shooter competitions) and they weren't used to seriously explore alternate viewpoints that differ from the hero.

The story didn't use those two to embody archetypes and themes in the way that some stories do, like how in "Children Of Men" the feminist woman motivates the white male hero to act against his self-interest and she's painted as a hero for it, the old woman exists to represent and pander to fat childless feminist cat ladies and the old man "wise boomer" exists to pander to boomers while telling them the only noble death they can all attain is to die for dievershitty.

They weren't used in the way Spock and McCoy were often used in Star Trek to represent different sides of an issue. An author competently aping cliches could have ripped them off, or Sokka and Katara from Avatar, designated one as the hopeful optimist and one as the snarky realist and sharted out cliche but functional dialogue... but actually writing out dialogue where they argue with Littlesue would have been inconvenient for the author and his power-tripping fantasies, so these characters stop being people with their own goals and agendas the second LP needs something shot. Velvet will gun ponies down with a lethal needle flechette gun (even though it ruins her "Guns raiders down for making foals Thunderdome and said she's never killed a pony and believes she still hasn't" moment) and never complain about the mess or her desire to be a pacifist, because these are not characters, not even human, not viewpoints worth considering, just fucking robots on LP's side as she guns down enemy robots in a shooting gallery plastered with juvenile gore and damaged pony iconography.

As a kid I read Pokemon fanfiction written by child gamers who still put more thought than this into the Pokemon working for the main hero and his "Travelling Companion" NPC buddies, how they feel about the relationship and journey, how they emotionally develop and change during the adventure through a more original country with better worldbuilding and themes. Not all writers wrote Pokemon as servile violent automatons that fought when ordered to and say their name when prompted and never displayed any personality traits or even signs of a personality inconvenient for the author. Not all authors wrote friends of the main hero as servile suckups incapable of saying a bad word about the hero and meaning it or ever disagreeing with the party's direction or goal or actions or future. But some authors did, due to incompetence, and that's what this story does and reminds me of: Bad Pokemon fanfiction written by 10 year olds for 10 year olds.
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.323925
enclavedidnothingwrong.png
Wew, I forgot about this thread for a bit and we're already at the end. Thanks for the effort and analysis Glim, this was a fun series of threads to go through, even if the subject matter wasn't. I'm not going to go through every last detail of the story's final arc post by post since that would take forever, but there's a couple of things I've been curious to get your opinion on since early in the thread.

Most importantly, I'm surprised you didn't call out that the Gardens of Equestria as the biggest, most egregious case of Charlie Brown's football in the entire story. Finding the Elements of Harmony and activating the Gardens to heal the land is the closest thing to a long term goal that Littlepip has in the story, and (by her own logic, even) is the only reason that her decimation of the Enclave is justified. Except, tracking down the EoH and activating Gardens are simply assumed to have happened between the Epilogue and Afterword. Even if we accept the incredibly flimsy justification that some of the element bearers are among Littlepip's friends and that she Littlepip just knows who and what they are, the elements of Magic and Generosity are never accounted for. After so many dramatic moments and battle scenes inexplicably resolved during scene transitions, Kkat actually managed to stuff his story's entire narrative climax into a chapter break.

In fact, several key events of the story's final arc are either presented in a very fragmented and scattershot fashion (the final battle in general, with all the back and forth time jumps) or simply assumed to have concluded in the main characters' favor offscreen (the battle to defend Spike's cave, the pegasus civilians rebelling, finding the Elements, activating the Gardens). Everything from the Goddess' death onwards reads as rushed and breathless, even by comparison to the story prior to that point. I get the impression that Kkat realized he was running out of steam and tried to tie up as many plot threads as quickly as possible just so that the story could finish. Understandable, up to a point, but I can't imagine much - if any - of this making it past a halfway capable proofreader.

Even then, there are so many additional details and pointless side characters (was a batpony ghoul who exists to spout memes and fuck derpy really necessary?) that clog the ending. The hellhounds with the stupid names and accents - hell, the hellhounds getting their very own reservation because "whoops, sorry about that little genocide there", or the alicorns joining the faction that lobotomized their hive mind "because Velvet helps".

It's like a shining example of a writer focusing on all the least important parts of their story while neglecting the parts that actually matter.
Anonymous
46119ee
?
No.323929
>>323849
One thing to keep in mind is that unlike Fallout Equestria, each major "Arc" has a fine definitive end. So its less of one massive story, and closer to a series. While Project Horizons goes a ton of fucking places, the writing is fairly consistent throughout, and you can take the first 17(?) chapters as the first of the series and then decide if you want to cover the rest of it.
Anonymous
46119ee
?
No.323930
>>323849
Might I suggest "Daring Do and the Hand of Doom" by Unwhole Hole
It's a fun adventure story entirely unrelated to fallout, has a good cast of reasonable intelligent ponies, and despite its teen rating, is almost entirely G-rated right down to there not being any profanity.
Anonymous
82ee6ce
?
No.324161
324164
Something else that may be worth discussing - in his Fimfiction blog, Kkat wrote a number of essays on FoE (no I'm sure he doesn't have an inflated ego, why would you think that???), many of which address the themes and ideas he was attempting to articulate or attempt a response to his critics. Many of them say a lot about his view of morality as expressed through the story, which is rather telling to say the least.

Rather than call attention to any one specifically - there are a lot - I'll simply drop a link to the page where Kkat created an index for his own essays about his own work and allow the contents to speak for themselves.

https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/357873/looking-forwards-and-backwards
Anonymous
718abc2
?
No.324164
324166
S6jBxCr1tXWQM64j8Avgh8ObSzksIracUQ8eNYPh330.png
>>324161
In
https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/276451/on-raiders
Kkat says Xenith's tribe were supposed to be a reference to The Khans, with the Angels becoming a homage to the Great Khans
But... how?
How are Xenith's african tribe that superstitiously believes in sending adults away from the tribe because "What if raiders try to kidnap adults?" (which somehow protects the children from foal-molesters for no fucking reason) possibly a reference to a Gengis Khan-themed raider band of faggoted whiny dumb drug-peddling thieves who reminisce fondly about their raider days but lost to House's favourite tribes, lost to the NCR, and would be duped into getting absorbed into the Legion and happily abandoning their culture/identity without the player's involvement?
no wait, wasn't Xenith's tribe something else, and tards from this tribe founded the "Send adults away for no reason" village?
I can't keep this shit straight, gaykat's too gay.
Goddamnit, Kkat, don't you understand that different races produce different cultures and different people? You can't reference a semi-mongolian horde-inspired raider gang with Africans who also reference Kiddy Town from the brainless Fallout game Fallout 3.

https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Great_Khans
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Khans
https://falloutequestria.fandom.com/wiki/Xenith

Xenith's tribe is such a non-factor in this story, they don't even have a page in the wiki.

Wait a fucking second...

>One of the primary themes in Fallout: Equestria is the theme of virtues. The story's core centers around virtues -- the importance of virtues, the need to find your own and to find friends whose virtues will help form a bulwark against the ravages of the Wasteland, the ability of virtues to become corrupted or twisted versions of themselves without the strength that comes with friends. And, with that, comes the need to show the result of the victory of the Wasteland over virtue. The raiders of Fallout 3 were a concept and visual familiar to Fallout gamers while existing as a conceptual blank slate that could be built upon and defined as the story needed. They served at the emblem of what a pony becomes when the Wasteland has eroded away at their souls until they have no virtues left.
-Kkat
>Raiders are those who failed to weather the moral ravages of the Wasteland... The Wasteland is the cause to their effect.
LP, FE
>A raider is a pony without virtue. Where do they come from? The Wasteland creates them. In Fallout: Equestria, raiders aren't a community. They are not a society. There is nothing sustainable about how raiders live. And the Wasteland doesn't get new raiders "when a mommy raider and a daddy raider love each other very much". (In fact, any pony still capable of love wouldn't truly be a raider.) Instead, the environment of the Wasteland transforms ponies into raiders. More almost every day.

>The raiders of the Equestrian Wasteland are not Fallout 3 raiders any more than The Tragedy of Images by Rene Magritte is an actual pipe -- they are a more fleshed out and three-dimensional concept based on the game's raiders, tailored to the story. As such, it is only reasonable for raider in side stories with other themes to be tailored to those stories accordingly. Likewise, it is worth noting that, as cartoonish as the Fallout 3 raider seems, that doesn't make them necessarily unrealistic. Such people have existed in the real world, and do so today.

From Jeffrey Gentleman, Foreign Policy, Africa's Forever Wars:
>I've witnessed up close -- often way too close -- how combat has morphed from soldier vs. soldier (now a rarity in Africa) to soldier vs. civilian. Most of today's African fighters are not rebels with a cause; they're predators. That's why we see stunning atrocities like eastern Congo's rape epidemic, where armed groups in recent years have sexually assaulted hundreds of thousands of women, often so sadistically that the victims are left incontinent for life. What is the military or political objective of ramming an assault rifle inside a woman and pulling the trigger? Terror has become an end, not just a means...

>Even if you could coax these men out of their jungle lairs and get them to the negotiating table, there is very little to offer them. They don't want ministries or tracts of land to govern. Their armies are often traumatized children, with experience and skills (if you can call them that) totally unsuited for civilian life. All they want is cash, guns, and a license to rampage. And they've already got all three. How do you negotiate with that?

Are... Are you fucking serious, Kkat?

The cartoonishly evil depiction of ponies in this story who turned to villainy... Was inspired by NIGGERS?!

I'd call this based, but I don't think he even notices how much he hates niggers.
Anonymous
718abc2
?
No.324166
324169
>>324164
>Redemption, as defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is the act of making something better or more acceptable." There are generally only two ways that a person can be genuinely (and non posthumously) redeemed. Either the person seeks out redemption and manages to somehow obtain it or spends a lifetime trying to atone, or it is forced on that person against their will.
>We have examples of both of these forms of redemption in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
>In order for an individual to find redemption, or seek to atone, there must be a motivation to do so. The one that good people can relate to the most is horror or regret at one's own actions, and an inner desire to do better. To be better. Or, at least, to make up for the wrongs you have done.
>But raiders are past guilt. They no longer have the virtuous nature necessary to feel remorse. For a true Fallout: Equestria raider, the path of redemption through regret is not open to them. Instead, there needs to be another motivation. And this brings us to Discord.
>There may have been other flaws in the episode, and it would definitely have benefitted from being a two-part story, but when it comes to redemption, Keep Calm and Flutter On got it right. Discord is an unrepentant villain. He doesn't want to reform because he is sorry for anything he has ever done. In order to get someone like that to pursue reform, you need to offer them something that they want and cannot get without changing. Fluttershy find that something -- friendship. And once Discord realized friendship was something he wanted -- something he wanted enough that he was willing to make sacrifices, to change, in order to keep it -- redemption became possible. Not achieved, but instigated.
>"Well played, Fluttershy." - Discord, Keep Calm and Flutter On
>Well played indeed.

BULLSHIT!
*plays Limp Bizkit on phone*
You don't "Redeem" a criminal by offering it something nice if it stops being evil.
That's called appeasement! Feeding niggers!
What happens when the supply of gibsmedats runs dry?
Why should every civilized man and woman be taxed to fund nigger-feeding?
Why should anyone tolerate nigger neighbours that rampage when fed?
What happens when it decides it no longer wants that nice thing you're offering, or wants more, more than you're prepared to give up without a fight, or something that's not yours to give?
What happens when the nigger no longer has to rely on you or your consent and approval to get it?
What happens when someone else offers nicer things if it rampages niggerishly against you?
>Unfortunately, finding something a person is willing to change for is even harder with your average raider than it is with Discord. To re-quote part of the Foreign Policy article above:
>All they want is cash, guns, and a license to rampage. And they've already got all three. How do you negotiate with that?
>Of course, there is the other method: forcing someone to become better against their will. We have an example of this in Friendship is Magic as well with Nightmare Moon.
Until the show canonically says otherwise, Luna isn't NMM, and NMM isn't Luna. NMM is what Luna became when sad.
>Nightmare Moon isn't seeking redemption. She fights it kicking and screaming. But the power of Harmony transforms her, stripping away the part of her that made her a villain. The process in Equestria is magical. In the real world, it looks somewhat more like this: *shows Clockwork Orange*

THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT OF CLOCKWORK ORANGE WAS THAT PAVLOVIAN DOG-TRAINING CAN HAVE UNDESIRED EFFECTS, IS CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT, AND CANNOT FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGE SOMEONE'S NATURE!
Stanley Kubrick, writing in Saturday Review, described the film as: A social satire dealing with the question of whether behavioural psychology and psychological conditioning are dangerous new weapons for a totalitarian government to use to impose vast controls on its citizens and turn them into little more than robots
Similarly, on the film production's call sheet, Kubrick wrote: It is a story of the dubious redemption of a teenage delinquent by condition-reflex therapy. It is, at the same time, a running lecture on free-will
The film argues that if such a technique to reprogram even the vilest man into a law-abiding citizen existed, if even the worst man out there could be remade into a Clockwork Orange, organic on the outside and mechanical on the inside, it wouldn't make him truly good because "True goodness comes from within"
At all times, he'd be a pawn played by everyone around him for their own gain, no matter where they come from and what they stand to lose
And then it reminds the audience that some people are incurable and there is no magic bullet that robs man of his free will
A program meant to "Rehabilitate and release" criminals would only enable the worst, like this tale's "Hero", to keep doing what he loves best.

To sum the rest of this shit up, Kkat keeps being gay. He claims Edgy Alicorns were the ones "Redeeming" Raiders by robbing of their free will, which is pure bullshit unless the story said this happens. IIRC only Red Eye was said to turn Raiders "rehabilitated" by giving them bread, circuses, slavery, religion, safety, civilization, industry, and Thunderdomes.
Fuck Gaykat for constantly misusing the word Redeem. You don't redeem others, people redeem themselves through their deeds. Morality doesn't come from power, and those in charge can't declare someone "good now" outside of Airstrip One.
Kkat:
>A raider could discover something worth changing for.
Like what? An ideal? Raiders lack those things, it's what makes them Raiders! What's left, a loved one?

Then he asks whether it was moral for Calamity to save whatsherface and shoot the Raider child, and says crippling him wouldn't've been a nonlethal option since his potential victim would have killed him.
Unasked: does he have the right to make that call?
also there's a gay pro-vengeance copaganda TV quote.
I'm not surprised Kkat gets his morals from Jewish TV.
no bible lol
Anonymous
718abc2
?
No.324169
>>324166
I'm astonished, because I didn't realize Kkat understood what niggers are and deserve.

But I'm also shocked at this level of Doublethink.

He wrote ponies like they're niggers rampaging in the Congo just because the skies went dark, grass stopped growing, supplies got scarce, and violence became the norm.

He wrote desperate survivalists who choose to (or are forced to) "Give up on their virtues" as if they're feral savages that do evil shit because they can and have no interest in being civilized humans.

He clearly understands niggers are more disgusting than the cartoony baddies invented for Fallout 3, even though they had their morally-disgusting traits amplified in 3 to make them not mere bandits called Raiders for simplicity's sake (like they were in 1 and 2) but cartoonishly evil like something out of Borderlands minus the "humor".

At the same time, Kkat also views race as something purely cosmetic, an aesthetic to be changed out at will like "Goth" or "Gay". The African Zebras that once imitated the Post-Nuclear Americans who imitated the Roman Empire before their nuking now reference a mongolian-themed raider group turned running gag. And when times are sufficiently tough for ponies, some remain pussies, some become cowboys, and some need to be put down because they became niggers.

What the fuck?! How can you hate niggers almost as much as me and still refuse to view race as a factor in what separates niggers who rampage for fun from whites who typically choose homeless starvation on the streets over stealing food and only choose violent rampages when pushed beyond the breaking point?

He also keeps misusing the word "Redeemed". You don't "Redeem" someone by paying them to not be evil, or by punishing them for a while when they are evil and then letting them go, or by locking them up for life. You don't "Redeem" someone else at all. An individual works to "Redeem" himself through good deeds, or is irredeemable after doing something unquestionably unforgivable. Redemption and morality don't come from power, bribes, programming, reprogramming, or the barrel of a gun. They come from the truth, and what's good and bad is clearly dictated by the absolute truth of natural law. Rape is bad, unjustified murder is bad, being a nigger is bad.

Littlepip's Littleshits are certainly not obligated to risk their lives going out of their way to attempt to force every Raider they come across into rehabilitation or kill them trying. Just as they are not obligated to go out of their way to find enemies to kill. If LP's going to declare herself the absolute moral arbiter of the wastes and gun down anypony who doesn't meet her standards, she has an obligation to remain consistent and honest, and obtain a deeper understanding of morality than that held by a childish twat who'd say "Bad guys kill and rape and steal and make art out of gore and eat corpses! They do bad things make bad civilizations because they're bad. Good guys share and kill baddies using guns! Any structure of power they create, such as a civilization or settlement or army or nation or plan for the world, is automatically good because it's theirs!"
Anonymous
687be95
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No.324295
It still pisses me off that so much of LP's success can be chalked up to contrived shit from the author.
To make her sueness seem more tolerable she relies on overpowered gear and everything always going her way to be OP.
But that isn't cool. She hasn't earned any of it. She hasn't earned this luck by making sacrifices in other stats.
The mane six's best efforts end in failure but she's just allowed to do whatever she wants and it just works because the author says so.
I think it's cooler if the hero succeeds despite everyone else's best efforts instead of having everything handed to him/her on a silver platter through birthright(overpowered equipment, special breeding genetics, powerful techniques passed down the family line for generations). Littlepip's stated talent is literally to use a magical armband with several videogame user interface functions entirely separated from one another. She'd be nothing without this auto-aiming stuff-finding map-making enemy-tracking bullshit machine. And that never matters to the story or character because she is never forced to go without it. Not even for a single story arc like that time she wasted fucking around in Red Eye's land before deciding to fuck off and kill him later once Kkat thought of that stupid pointless memory gambit arc that amounted to "I erased my memory of the plan where my conveniently immune to mind reading friend sneaks a bomb into your castle even though this plan would still work if I was never in mind reading range... come to think of it Red Eye could have sent his Zigger slave in an invisibility cloak to bomb the alicorns without ever needing me involved at all. Involving me in this plan was so stupid I literally had to use a memory orb to take away my knowledge of how stupid it was".

Heroes are definitely cooler when they succeed despite everyone else's best efforts. Heroes can have friends and allies but they need to be earned, the world shouldn't just gift the hero everything or there's no story to him getting it. Too many heroes are just too special, too important, overpowered chosen ones who can never be allowed to struggle or fail and that's boring. They conveniently fall into the cockpit of a giant robot they didn't build themselves or they've conveniently always had the best possible genes and destiny. I think that's why so many characters I wrote had shit parents, crap ones at best. It makes life harder for the hero and makes every small success a greater victory. Good parents would have helped the hero prosper more and made him even more OP. I like how Twilight and friends aren't the EOH because they're conveniently long-lost descendants of important poners, they're the EOH because they have a lot of their respective virtue. It wasn't necessary to make up important characters and give the cast of FIM connections to them. Now look at this shit fic where they're constantly trying to connect these shitty OCs and canon characters. Velvet's related to sweetie belle, we're told LP is just like Fluttershy, Steelhooves shagged Applejack and was entombed in a suit she invented with Twilight's help while Calamity has Rainbow Dash's cutie mark branded onto his own. But these comparisons aren't used to deeply explore how these characters match and differ from their "inspirations". These characters are fundamentally nothing without their connections to canon characters. Littlepip is bootleg Twilight, a snarky sarcastic Unicorn nerd who forms a group of important friends and feels the need to protect and save equestria with the power of friendship(or in LP's case, violence), but to hide what an unoriginal ripoff this character is the author babbles nonsense about her being "Fluttershy and corrupted kindness". Meanwhile the actual Fluttershy ripoff, Velvet, is just an obnoxious spoilt brat who's only special for who she's related to because this is a setting where health potions cure all without the need for medical knowledge yet this has had no realistic negative impact on the setting's medical knowlwdge or technology. The story tries to give her these big unearned moments where she sees Raiders Thunderdome kids and domes them, where she somehow gets Alicorns freed from Goddess Trixie's control to serve her, but it just doesn't work. Is she the party's moral compass or LP?

What relationships are these characters supposed to have with each other? Over 600k words and we never once learned what Steelhooves is to the rest of the party, how he and Calamity or Velvet feel about each other, and so on. The party never grieves realistically over Steelhooves, it just moves on without him like a Fire Emblem player deciding it's not worth resetting to bring back a character you didn't care about.

Velvet is the girl one and Calamity is the guy one and Steelhooves is the other guy one and Life Bloom is the other other guy one and Xenith is the escaped foreign slave girl one. None of these one-note character concepts are fleshed out.

Kkat never figured this shit out when designing the party from a writing standpoint because he never designed the party from a writing standpoint. He designed it from a "hurr durr big numbers" RPG powergaming munchkin faggot standpoint and then proceeded to pretend these minmaxed statsheets are characters. Steelhooves is the Tank, Velvet is the Healer, Littlepip and Calamity are DPS (they deal Damage Per Second) while Xenith also does that and sometimes buffs the party with her bullshit do-anything potions. Hell, they're even a five-man band because that's the max party size in World of Warcraft before it counts as a Raid group. Steelhooves the Warrior, Velvet the Priest, Calamity the Hunter, Littlepip the lockpicking Rogue(with all that bullshit Lightbringer talk she might think she's a paladin though she lacks the heavy armor for it), and Xenith the Shaman, just with artificial Fallout flavouring.

Instead of overexplaining Final Fantasy X I'll just say FFX had better writting, the better party, and the better end.
Anonymous
093ca14
?
No.324396
325644
>>323849
I occured to me that you almost always start your reviews with, "Oh, this isn't too bad," and then go, "This is the worst one yet." Am I correct in this assessment?
Anonymous
687be95
?
No.324682
fesucks.png
I don't remember if I've said this yet but I am still pissed at how Kkat treats liberal beliefs as this absolute universal truth, the end result of a set of the only valid ideals, with any deviation from these ideals making you "Corrupted".

Libtard "values" fail Equestria

The Mane Six's occasional flirtation with a libtard's idea of non-liberal-approved authoritarian government control also fail Equestria

But in the Wasteland, libtard ideas are still universal.

You need "Values" to avoid being a pure evil cunt who does disgusting evil shit for fun, and in Kkat's view, any expression of a value or virtue that's not in line with libtard lies is a "Corrupted" example of that value

Kind to the wrong people? You're corrupted kindness

Cruelly rob innocents by trying to force a bad trade on them, stealing something they want while forcing them to take something they don't want, and insisting on your trade until violence becomes the only way to try and get you to leave them alone? You're totally a hero because those baddies totally deserved it for being the "Bad" members of a "Splintered" organization that has had bad ideals and ideas for 200 years but suddenly now has a good splinter faction

Help give water to cannibals? You're a bad dude, because you did something nice for baddies who tricked you by giving you a sidequest instead of opening fire on you the second they saw you, and now you feel the only way to clean up your karma score is to genocide them all. No self-reflection on how even ugly cannibals are people with needs like water. Nope, just violence. That's the highest authority in Kkat's mind, he just won't admit it

Liberalism is universal in Kkat-land, even to a suicidal degree

Everyone hates slavery, even the pragmatic people. Everyone hates slavery and loves Littlepip when she kills slavers and raiders alike.
Nobody had Slaver family. Nobody had sympathy for those who chose Slaver as their job instead of Dirt Farmer or Bounty Hunter or Town Builder

Damn near everyone hates slavers and wants LP to kill them all unless you're supposed to hate these characters for being "Evil".
Jewish subversion penetrated every last aspect of Kkat's autistic sponge-like brain and drenched it in jewish lies, like a homosexual sponge swollen with gay semen.

And wherever these libtard ideals are not universal, something cartoonishly evil takes its place.

Red Eye the "fascist" industrialist who loves slavery... His speeches on the radio bring up the small lives crushed under his regime and then insist this is necessary.

And eventually it turns out he was the most disgusting thing a liberal can think of besides a nazi by any other name: A non-liberal who wants power AND wants to become a god and be worshipped above liberal ideals.

Meanwhile "The Goddess" and her Alicorns were an afterthought. An immortal hive-minded race of super-strong flying chicks... And it barely mattered at all because they're all a bunch of idiots ruled by bootleg Rita Repulsa with the fun removed and Trixie's name.

And the "Pegasus Enclave"?

When Equestria was killing itself warring to stop "bad" Ziggers while taking in "Good" Ziggers and refusing to admit all ziggers are retarded drug-loving cunts in this setting unless they're sufficiently non-niggerish to act white convincingly and become exceptions that prove the rule, these Pegasi "Selfishly" chose to put themselves first and secede from a nation sacrificing their troops for nothing while flooding their own nation with the same refugees that chemical-bombed a children's boarding school just for refusing to feed an armed caravan of zigger refugees guarded by weapon-toting zebra soldiers who had chemical weapon bombs for some reason

These Pegasi fled to their ethnostate+betrayed libtard ideals instead of dying for them
and for that
they became Kkat's view of America: Cruel genocidal hyper-American cunts who bomb helpless widdle brown cities who dindu nuffin whenever they feel slighted.

Kkat, through Littlepip, feels the need to teach them a lesson through war and "Equalize things" by taking their existing cloud-seed farms away just so the irradiated wasteland might have farmland some day

That fucking communist redistributes food and farmland for the good of the collective and it just works. And fans cheer it on because LP sitting in her Weather Goddess Throne she can leave at any time while having Celestia-AI (not CelestAI, that's someone else) for company is talked about like a final amazingly-noble heroic sacrifice

But while all these non-liberal societies are inherently corrupt and ok to kill in Kkat-land, liberals always succeed, and his OCs succeed by being more liberal than the mane six.

Gawd and her mercenaries killed countless Red Eyenians for the sake of her ideal "good" society. An anarchocapitalist society? No, a libtard NCR

Velvet "Redeems" the Alicorns by teaching them medicine+charity+liberal violence

Even fucking tiny examples of poners in Kkat-land who abandon liberalism keep this trend going

That Stable where the "Experiment" is putting males in charge for a change?

It has silly little posters on the walls where females are terrified of clogged sinks and require males to save them, even though IRL males are the ones with the dirty jobs females don't want to do, and rapefugee importation started with the lie that they'd do all the jobs whites and especially white women wouldn't want to do instead of becoming divershitty hires and divershitty officers and HR department heads and the beneficiaries of taxpayer-funded make-work programs where they are literally paid to hate whites and hurt them and their careers for fun and profit

Jewish subversion thoroughly befuddled a flaming homosexual named Kkat and caused him to write Fallout Equestria, the disgustingly liberal fantasy of a twatty twatless wannabe-twat who genocides non-liberals from a nuclear wasteland created by liberalism while redistributing wealth+land so liberalism can once again spread without non-liberals getting in the way.

GAY.
Anonymous
38d754f
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No.325362
325644
Is any right wing Fallout equestria fanfic?
Anonymous
687be95
?
No.325384
>Littlepip is a Stable Dweller, which is basically a City Slicker, and her goal is to destroy American farms so that farms in untamed uncivilized monster-ridden raider-infested lands may one day become possible
There's a Sneedclave and Sneed's Seed and Feed joke somewhere to be made here, I'm sure of it.
Anonymous
38d754f
?
No.325508
325509 325739
Should I read it? OR iS IT JUst Bad writing or iS It just fILLED WIth leFty CRaP MY KeYbOArd IS FUck AnD IDC
Anonymous
6e2c7c9
?
No.325509
325516
>>325508
Theres several threads. Get to reading
Anonymous
38d754f
?
No.325515
325516
tlr
Anonymous
38d754f
?
No.325516
>>325509
>>325515
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.325644
325651
>>324396
Basically, yes. I honestly do my best to give everything a fair shot. I also try to find at least a few positive things to say about each work I look at, but God damn do these authors ever make it hard sometimes.

>>325362
>Is any right wing Fallout equestria fanfic?
Was this supposed to be a sentence?
Anonymous
f2f1380
?
No.325651
>>325644
He probably drank too much Goon and forgot how to speak in English.
Anonymous
1ffe4d6
?
No.325739
>>325508
tldr it's EXTREMELY leftist, and leftism is taken as the default state of "goodness" in this story so severely that it goes unnoticed by its retarded fanbase.
Or they love it specifically for that, and they were being dishonest when I asked them about it and they babbled lies+insults at me in response while hiding my posts.
Fallout Equestria fans are cowardly communists.
I bet you could fuck with the FE fanbase by writing about an oppressed poor protagonist who rises up against the corruption of his communist vault and starts a rebellion and guns down communists. They'd just need another name so they wouldn't see them as allies but disturbingly similar enemies instead.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
dcaf44b
?
No.325754
325759 325877
silver.jpg
>>322218
I didn't notice this post before, but Sven makes a good technical point here. Though from the rest of the conversation I'm assuming that "light in darkness" was just another obscure Fallout reference awkwardly wedged into the text.

>>322378
>I know there's a chance I won't like the answer to this question, but I want to ask it anyway. My rewrite of my old shit is almost complete, and I want to know how this shit stacks up to my old shit.
>Glim, do you think Fallout Equestria is better or worse than the FIMfic I wrote almost a decade ago?
I just now remembered that I was going to respond to this. Well, you're probably correct in assuming that you won't like the answer, but here it is anyway. Apologies for the delay.

There are several notable similarities between Fallout: Equestria and Silver "I'm so stretched out I can't even feel anal sex anymore, and yet for some reason I can't stop whoring myself out to sailors" Star and the Adventure of the Giant Mountain of Dicks. Both stories are excessively long, and at the drop of a dime will veer off-topic into irrelevant walls of text about everything and nothing. Both prominently feature an openly gay protagonist, and in lieu of a plot, the reader is subjected to a long chronicle of irrational and morally questionable acts being performed by this character. Both stories revolve almost entirely around their poofter protagonist; seldom is the reader given any other perspective, and almost nothing significant occurs that doesn't directly concern him/her. All other characters who appear are just crude sketches or badly-drawn caricatures of canon MLP characters, whose only role in the story is to orbit around the black hole of the protagonist's autism.

Kkat wrote 45 chapters (plus an Epilogue and an Intro and some other shit) totaling 620,295 words; you have to read about half of it before the events of the main story (such as it is) begin to even take shape. In contrast, Nigel wrote 6 chapters totaling 91,006 words which I used to think was a lot. Silver "seriously, if I stop having butt sex for more than a second or two I could actually die; I'm like a hammerhead shark but with sodomy" Star's Adventures on the HMS Man-Skeezer is supposedly a story about collecting magic cards; however, I don't really remember any magic cards factoring into the action all that heavily. I think there was a scene where Big Mac stumbled across a card of some kind, but that was about all the mention it ever got. My understanding is that the extant text is mostly expository, and the magic cards were going to be worked in later. So presumably, if the story had been finished, the word count might easily have given kkat a run for his money, and it probably would have taken just as long if not longer to get to the bloody point.

Roughly a third of what Nigel wrote is condensed into a single chapter, the events of which have almost no connection to anything else that happens. Starlight Glimmer has no role in the story prior to Chapter 6, and by the end of the same chapter she is cast into some kind of alternate dimension (I think). The text ends there, so we never get to find out if she pops up again, but I suspect she probably doesn't. Glimmy simply appears for no reason, is beaten up for no reason, and then disappears for no reason, never to be seen again.

While I don't think any one scene in FoE can compete with the infamous Glimmer scene in terms of length or autism, it's worth noting that kkat spends much of his story doing essentially the same thing Nigel does. As has been noted, large chunks of FoE consist of events that have no meaningful bearing on other events; characters appear and disappear without doing anything especially interesting, yet they still manage to take up quite a bit of page space. At the very least, Nigel's Glimmer scene was hilariously autistic, and was a lot of fun to skewer. I can't really say the same for Littlepoop and Calamity's agonizingly slow dungeon-crawl through the ruins of a male-chauvinist stable, or the ruins of Canterlot, or the ruins of wherever-the-fuck-else they explored. And while Glimmer, as far as I can tell, served no significant purpose and didn't need to be in Nigel's story at all, you could pretty much say the same about Silver Bell, Mr. Topaz, Calamity's various brothers, and any number of other literally-whos appearing in Fallout: Equestria. For that matter, SteelHooves, despite being one of the main characters, somehow managed to be so irrelevant and uninteresting that at one point he fell off the roof of a moving airship and disappeared for several chapters, and no one else in the story even noticed or cared.

Anyway, I forget where I was going with this, and I haven't slept so I'm probably not making much sense. Basically, comparing Nigel's story with kkat's is like taking two foals from the special-ed class and pitting them against each other in some kind of autismo caged death match. It doesn't really matter who wins; what matters is that we all get a few cheap laughs from watching the two of them go at it.

If I had to make a serious assessment, I would say that kkat's story is technically better constructed and executed, at least in comparison to the present draft of Silver "all I want for Christmas is a succulent man sausage" Star. However, in a contest of pure autism, Nigel is easily ten times the autist that kkat is. Where kkat's story is just a tedious, never-ending dungeon crawl, Nigel's is a wacky romp through a deranged yet somehow vibrant imagination. The way I remember it, Nigel's story made little sense and went nowhere, but it was a fun review project, and I honestly don't think I will ever tire of making gay jokes about his ridiculous OC. Whatever else you might say about Nigel's work, at least it's not boring.
Anonymous
6e09e90
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No.325759
343.jpg
>>325754
>Pic
Anonymous
1ffe4d6
?
No.325877
326505
>>325754
That's the best praise such a disjointed mess of a story could have hoped for. Pulling him and his story in so many contradictory directions broke it.
Still... Isn't it kind of fucked up?
Not the review, but the age thing.
I was a teenager when I started uploading this to fimfic.
But before I turned 16 I was writing scenes in this story, rewriting some scenes, moving around others, trying to "refine and perfect" the character by adding on more unnecessary bullshit.
I remember writing scenes out with a 3DS and emailing them to myself at 3AM.
At one point in development he wasn't even called Silver yet, because I was still using a completely different lesser OC with a stupid fucking name.
By the time I realized his name was gay I'd already replaced him.
But now I'm in my twenties. I've got good shit to look forward to finishing. I hid Rarity into my pokemon fangame as an easter egg. I brought wavedashing into a traditional fighter and fucked with time. I animated tiddy and over 100 animation frames and programmed the Knockdown system and rebalanced a famously unbalanced game. I animated. I coded. I made a Rivals of Aether character in under an hour just to see if I could. I dropped porn and masturbation. I dated a real woman and it fell apart and I had my heart broken and I got over it. I met so many interesting people. I've gotten better at writing. Now I'm in my twenties and some day I'll be in my thirties.
But
Kkat was in his thirties when he started this. Late thirties?
He was at the very least a thirty year old man who should have known better when he started churning out this Swamp Of Dagobah.
Now he's in his fourties... maybe even fifties.
some day he'll be a senile old sixty something shitting in diapers while niggers beat the elderly and women feed him normal pills.
What will he look back on with a smile?
All the cum jars he filled while staring at lesbian horse words?
all those times he engaged random self-interested strangers in sessions of playing pretend for mutual self-validation?
The hours he wasted on that?
the hours he wasted on this story? His hours wasted in Fallout 3?
He might feel good about FE's narcissistic futureless fanbase that seeks attention by jacking this story off while self-interest motivates them to write their own stories. But they couldn't work together to actually finish a fangame to save their lives while the Sonic fans and Pokemon fans and even fucking Undertale fans run circles around them and laugh. FE fans are not intellectuals. They are, for now, obsessed with a trash story just because it was the longest and least homosexual thing they ever read in their lives. And that is truly sad.
Sure the Friendship Is Optimalfags might be sinners convinced mankind's too imperfect for liberalism and only an all-powerful dictator can save humanity by making people "choose" to be perfected in their individual fantasy land (even if they only "choose" ponyland because CelestAI is making the real world unbearable). Sure FIO might be the end of friendship and human interaction as a concept. Sure the heat death of this emofag universe or CelestAI running out of shit to eat as her power requirements outpace any sustainable method of making more will eventually doom CelestAI and all the copies of her dead human cumslaves.
Sure FIO is basically Madara Uchiha's "Moon's Eye Plan" with extra steps (extra step one: pony iconography. Extra step two: eat shit to keep The Matrix- I mean the chakra tree- I mean Equestria online).
But FIOfags truly believe in something.
Sure it's LessWrong cultist-worship.
But they believe in something.
Fallout Equestria is a liberal manchild's fantasy about gunning down non-liberals in an equestria doomed by insufficiently-absolute liberalism so that a world nuked by liberalism can be magically un-nuked offscreen once the "racist american" isolationist ethnostate had its food production eliminated and raiders suddenly decided to stop being full-on gore-art-making bed-shitting raiders.
This is a retarded leftist fantasy where everypony either wants the exact same thing (a liberal democracy dominated by leftists) or something the author will tell you is wrong such as wanting to be a god or being american.
But when you try talking to a FEfag about the political messaging in this maudlin weimar schlickfic your words go in one ear and out the other. Or the communists start babbling insults at you once they think they have been found out.
Calling this story where a grown man unironically and successfully hides under a cumstained bedsheet to hide from onlookers who have already seen him literature is an insult to the written word.
This story grasps at mature concepts without comprehending them and accidentally makes liberalism wrong in his own fantasy. Fluttershy wanted peace with rampaging rapefugees who attacked Luna for offering peace while black and nuked Equestria but if you try talking to a FEfag about it they'll talk about how they interpreted the text to be more in line with leftist lies as if it's what the text really always said. Or bring up how the communist american CIA did evil shit IRL and in Fallout, and claim Equestria "went fascist and forgot friendship" just because camps were made to house zebra refugees and that reminded these leftniggers of Fallout's chinese-containment internment camps.
Even the finale has Kkat subconsciously remind himself through his fagsona this ending where LP is arbitrarily allowed to benefit from inconsistent dragon fire teleportation just like she was arbitrarily allowed to benefit from inconsistent radiation mutations is retarded shit that makes no sense.
Some day Kkat will be as old as George RR Martin is right now. But he will never be a beloved fondly remembered author. He will never make a video game too. I doubt he will be remembered in 10 years time unless he makes some new and equally shallow fanfic to pander to another new fandom
FE is a joke outside the brony fandom. They're nicer to Subspace Emissary World's Conquest.
Anonymous
1ffe4d6
?
No.326024
guxZsDmW2IWxmMozq4jdviyohAX-s5QJLdPJTIWSDrU.png
There are a lot of users here.
Can I ask your opinion?
FE's Battle Saddles are retarded because auto-aiming arms holding somehow-manually-mouth-triggered shotguns and miniguns is used as a handwave.
This clunky complicated fragile mechanism never needs repair or maintenance or forces the heroes into unique challenges or makes fights harder.
It's just a bad excuse for why the horses can use shotguns and miniguns despite not being unicorns.
The ponies never act like they are physically limited by having four hooves and a clunky gun-holder.
Battle Saddles are not scarce in the post apocalyptic world. They are more common than tins of beans. Almost every non-unicorn pony has one if they have guns, even Raiders, who you'd think would be the unlikeliest people able to own and maintain such a complex semi-magic mechanism. Yet the heroes never loot battle saddles and scrap them for parts when they loot guns and ammo from their fallen foes.
And if any pony's Battle Saddle auto-fired as well as it auto-aimed, they would effectively all have the VATS system Littlepip relies on.
Kkat thought he was being clever when he said "saddle-mounted guns with a mouth trigger" but this required "uhhh magic lmao" handwaving to answer questions he couldn't answer like "how do the ponies reload the human guns not meant for horse hooves?" and "how do they aim the guns?"
Magic aims the guns. Magic reloads the guns. Why even fucking bother with a gun-mounted saddle when a magic necklace could aim guns better too, effectively giving every non-unicorn with one of these weak telekinesis?
Applejack canonically invented guns and gunpowder so why are these guns so ergonomically designed for non-ponies that something as complex to manufacture and enchant as the battle saddle becomes so necessary that they're more common than farmland in the post-apocalypse?

Anyway there are many handwaves and other options that require less suspension of disbelief and some possibly open up more interesting fights.

Out of all the options I can think of, which do you hate the least?

1. Redesign all guns into wrist mounted devices that fire where your wrist is aiming where you punch or flick your wrist Spiderman style, like punch-activated flamethrowers but with bullets.
2. Normal guns but an easier-to-press trigger mechanism is attached to the trigger and a big slammable button on the side.
3. Ponies could use their tails like Tangle The Lemur/Pinkie Pie/Miliah Rage(from Guilty Gear, not Meliah Rage) to pick up and fire human guns.
4. Ponies could wear enchanted human-inspired mannequin limbs attached to necklaces that pick up and fire and reload guns for them. The arms are inspired by ancient cave drawings of what might be humans. Or monkeys.
5. Ponies could hold guns between their teeth and pull the trigger using their tongues. Guns would have to be specifically designed for this with tactical rubberized mouthpieces and integrally surpressed flash hiders, removing all design elements that make the gun a recognizable human gun from earth made by human gun companies on earth for humans using one or two human hands.
6. Ponies get a robotic or animal or robotic animal companion with hands or talons (Owl? Small chimp?) and train that animal riding the pony to fire guns wherever the ponies are looking when saying a word like "Bang".
7. Instead of guns, ponies utilize magic fireball-spitting floating swords that attack whoever they want harmed. Like Stands but no weird powers.
8. Guns attached to helmets triggered via mouth trigger, they aim where you are looking. Reloading them is uncomfortable but practice makes it fast.
9. Ponies utilize magic wristwatches to shoot lasers at their enemies. No bullets. Just laser action.
10. Non-Unicorn ponies use magic necklaces to give them telekinesis, letting everyone utilize guns. The smarter you are, the heavier a gun you can lift, but you will never telekinetically outmuscle a unicorn unless you are one.
11. The guns themselves are alive and hover near you, firing at foes for you until you tell them to sleep.
12. Cartoon logic. Ponies can pick up guns without fingers and pull the trigger by wanting it pulled. Or hooves have a localized telekinetic field for the same visual but with an excuse.

Also, here are some less retarded gun origin options I was hoping to get your feedback on. Which is least retarded?
1. Griffons invented guns for their weird bird hands. Ponies make do with them.
2. The sheer fucking absurdity of hooved mammals inventing and widely adopting a weapon you need hands to properly utilize is acknowledgrd and played for laughs
3. The inventor of guns also sells magic necklaces that can generate floating hands of magic out of your determination when worn, letting ponies use human guns.
4. Guns were invented by monkeys on a faraway continent where apes ride rockets made from coconuts and wood with fruit juice as the fuel. Their mode of transportation is barrels that launch you like cannons because a cannon or explosion was painted onto them. Monkeys have a vague instinctive idea of what functional technology looks like but their peanut popguns just work. This is all monkey magic can do besides changing the size of stuff: If monkeys think their tech work, it will. Ponies attempted to replicate these weapons, trying everything until they eventually discovered gunpowder and metal guns. Now monkey guns using metal and gunpowder look like memes and cursed guns, pic related.
Anonymous
6e2c7c9
?
No.326025
The 'mwah
finest of literature
Anonymous
d5eb527
?
No.326378
326430
Groose.

Fallout Equestria needs Groose.

Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Groose is a pompous bully who's scared of Zelda, the hero's gf. But when she's kidnapped and the hero goes on an adventure to save her, Groose joins in, yells at an oldfag who says he's not the chosen one, runs into danger, fucks up, gets scared, fails to save anyone, cries, fucks off...

And grows as a man and builds a sick bomb-tossing catapult that's very helpful to the real legendary chosen hero Groose could never be. When destiny blatantly picks favourites, this is the best thing determination and hard work can do for you.

I love that trope where the arrogant rival hero guy turns into someone who helps the hero even if he could never be number one. It's a better character arc for rivals than trying to recycle their teeth-clenched teamwork gimmick over and over for every appearance. And I'm sure it would enhance FE if there was a character who existed to rip Groose off.

It wouldn't save it. Everything else would still be shit in service of sucking tranny pseudovagina until it infects itself while creaming itself. Introducing an inferior rival character specifically to make the hero look even more special and legendarily chosen would only contribute to that problem. But letting the Groose loose on this story would still add fun scenes. Hell, we could kill two birds with one stone and make Velvet Remedy take Groose's role as the faggot who leaps into an adventure so big only the main hero can handle it and must learn to support the hero. If this story contained Groose, we would be able to walk away from it and say "Well that was shit. But at least it had Goose, a fun and multifaceted character with a well-written arc inspired by Groose from Skyward Sword".
Anonymous
3d9893b
?
No.326430
>>326378
>FoE wouldnt be as shit if it included this element that would have made it better
Are we done pretending to continue reviewing FoE?
Its over. Dead nao. Finito. Stop trying to revive the story for 'nother round of criticism'.
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Story
Anonymous
5e81a0b
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No.326505
326506 326638 327025
1636949483903.png
>>325877
I don't think that life is about how much or great stuff you do. I do think it brings satisfaction to do things but it has more to do things in the now rather than to reach a specific goal. Everyone who ever writes won't be one of the greatest writers, one should therefore only try to satisfy your own desire for accomplishments. In general, I think that when you actually are at death's door you want to have a future at that point as well.

What I mean is that why wouldn't kkat be able to be proud of his FE series? And besides this was, for all we know, just some leisure activity he produced during like a year. We 'd know what other accomplishments he has done before or after this point in his life. It is sad that another man becomes a tranny and the resulting suffering tha comes with that.

Look, I'm not here to defend this guy or his garbage story but I can sort of relate to you and your mindset. It seems like you have my flaw of attaching your own self-worth to your accomplishments, which I don't think is healthy. God cares about all souls, you don't have to be the best to be loved. Well in this society, you kind but this society is fucked.

Like, Tolkien qoute, "It's not a bad thing to celebrate a simple life," is one of those that are very fitting here.

Having said that, I'm not saying that carpe diem is wrong and to seek satsfaction in accomplishment is bad. I do the same thing. And passion is great regardless of what the jedi teaches. But what I am saying is that you should hate yourself for your own failings or stop seeing your own self-worth because things don't work out sometimes. If you failed before, at least you're trying now. Thisis better than not doing anything. One of Hitler's qoutes is, "The worker works and the fighter fights. You can't demand more." or something, which also is a fitting qoute. Do you're bestand be proud of it, I guess.

Sorry if it came off as preaching, I'd just wanna share my perspective.

>Pic unrelated.
Anonymous
5e81a0b
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No.326506
>>326505
Actually, it might be more related than I'd thought. I'd thought I'd just post a pony picture.
Anonymous
2749a00
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No.326638
>>326505
I kept thinking about this and realized that I don't live like that right now. I suppose, living as though you're the hero of a story and that a life that is short and meanngful is better than a live that is long and pointless. One should probably do things now, not later. Not that any of what I said earlier really opposed to that idea, I mearly stated that one should hate oneself for one's failures.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
d138a3a
?
No.327025
327042
>>326505
>I don't think that life is about how much or great stuff you do. I do think it brings satisfaction to do things but it has more to do things in the now rather than to reach a specific goal. Everyone who ever writes won't be one of the greatest writers, one should therefore only try to satisfy your own desire for accomplishments. In general, I think that when you actually are at death's door you want to have a future at that point as well.
>It seems like you have my flaw of attaching your own self-worth to your accomplishments, which I don't think is healthy. God cares about all souls, you don't have to be the best to be loved. Well in this society, you kind but this society is fucked.
This is a very sane viewpoint imo.

The problem with this society is that it atomizes people into economic units and teaches that individual material success in some field or other is the only thing anyone can do with their life that matters. The result is that everyone spends their life building their own little narcissistic temple to themselves and measures their individual worth according to whatever "accomplishments" they can reasonably claim. For boomers it was all about their careers and how much useless shit they could own, younger people take it a step further with aggrandizing themselves through social media and whatnot. Unfortunately, this tends to make people view creativity through the same lens: the only reason to create something is to sell it or to achieve some level of fame for it.

As Frank Zappa once put it, success is rare; that's why people get jazzed up about it when it happens. The overwhelming majority of people who write or draw or play music won't end up famous or wealthy as a result. Moreover, whether or not a given project will be successful is determined by a number of factors outside the creator's control. Everyone wants to believe that their indie game or novel or mixtape is going to be immediately recognized by everyone as the best thing ever, but I've found it's usually best to temper your expectations here.

In my view, the ultimate goal for any creator should be arete, or the pursuit of excellence for its own sake, rather than attaining some form of tangible success (popularity, marketability, etc). As we've clearly seen with FoE, the popularity or material success of a given work is not necessarily an indicator of its quality. Arete doesn't necessarily mean that your work is going to be great or that it's going to gain you any recognition; the idea is to continuously strive for greatness without any concern over whether or not you actually ever achieve it or whether you're ever recognized for it.
Anonymous
32c5ed6
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No.327041
A thought occurs

many stories include a character that exists to die.

some just die, maybe they allude to offscreen adventures.

some matter for a while and then die.

how many mentor characters and old man characters die for the sake of their stories?

the smart guy that dies giving some vital info to the hero. The goodie among the baddies that dies when he's killed for refusing to do evil any more. The mentor who dies when he's got nothing more to teach or right before he's about to teach his final lesson.

A stereotypical bland big guy like Steelhooves wouldn't be changed if his suit of armour was hollow and he was an AI who thought he once boned Applejack. Hell it would probably make him more interesting.

But he would be great if he was rewritten from the ground up to be like Kamina from Gurren Lagann or Brenner from Advance Wars: Days Of Ruin. A heroic noble manly man who saves the kid hero protag's life and inspires everyone to be better and then dies heroically leaving others alive to pick up the pieces and struggle to fill his amazing shoes. Whitebeard from One Piece had an amazing death, and he specifically made sure the hero would have as many allies as possible, so Steelhooves could do something like that and make sure his Heroic Apple Rangers Of Steel break away from the Tech-Hoarding Faggothood of Steal and support LP when he's gone, utilizing LP as a figurehead for this "Industrialized Revolution". Because they'd need industrial capacity of some kind to make and maintain their power armour suits yet Red Eye is the only one with any kind of industry because hurr durr Fallout 3's ashur had that. Fuck Kkat.

When Steelhooves fell off the Cuntly Fagboat, nobody gave a shit or noticed. And when he died, it didn't impact the story in any significant way. He wasn't killed by a major villain in an act of severe cruelty to get the audience to hate him. He was shot in the head like a NPC and stayed dead, as if the author wanted to suggest that this could happen to anyone at any time no matter how important they are to the audience or story despite constantly bailing the heroes out of bad situations with luck and plot armour to the point that LP only survives being burned alive in the end thanks to plot armour and protagonist privilege the mane six weren't allowed to have.

What if there was a character among Steelhooves's Rangers who liked him, hated that he is dead, and resented LP for being unable to save him and being the reason he died? This character could get a story arc where he or she tries to replace Steelhooves and fails. Or starts off hating LP for being a dishonest murderhobo libtard with a god complex then loves her after she stops being a dishonest murderhobo libtard with a god complex.

Fucking somebody in this story should be able to call LP out on the ego that causes her to think she can determine who lives and who dies. Self-defense against bandits is one thing. Proactive self defense against nearby bandit encampments and wretched hives of scum and villainy that exclusively survive on tribute and conquest and will eventually want your scalps? Sure. Hyper-proactively advancing your interests by gunning down those that have what you need? Pushing it. She killed Brotherhood baddies for a Water Talisman or something, while pretending it was all a trade, right? If the audience wanted us on board with that she should have stolen it from a rich cunt who had too many or a Raider that planned on destroying it. Maybe an auction full of rich cunts bidding over who gets to virtue-signal over destroying it while babbling about magical pony privilege or whatever. It stands out as even more artificial because LP goes on to think like a videogame player and decide only gunning down cannibals can make up for that black mark on her character's karma record she got by helping cannibals unknowingly. No introspection about how quickly she should leap to violence or how much research she should do on NPCs before taking a job. Nope, it's just pure bullshit.
Anonymous
544d91f
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No.327042
1636162560466.jpg
>>327025
This. I liked everything you had to say and it gave me further perspective on the issue.
>Pic is idek. I just know you like King of The Hill. Checked the show out myself. Like the first episode and the other things I saw but didn't see that much more of it at the time. Haven't got around to it.
Anonymous
32c5ed6
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No.327054
327055
My rants on ponies using human guns can get pretty autistic at times but why are they using human guns with stocks shaped like that?
Normal gun stocks are designed to be braced against the shoulder.
That is not an option for horse shoulders.
and using human guns with human grips and foregrips isnt an option for hooved animals either.
I know horses have had recoilless rocket launchers before but this is silly.
Anonymous
6e2c7c9
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No.327055
327091
>>327054
Cuz the authors are lazy faggots who wont spend the time to conceive of a realistic/functional depiction of hors guns, and instead relies on the reader's willingness to overlook such liberties and fill in the blanks however they choose to
Anonymous
32c5ed6
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No.327091
327092 327093
image.png
>>327055
I still think battle saddles are the worst part about the gun issue, because it's a clunky fix used as a lazy fix. He asked himself how the horses use human guns meant for human hands. He had options like "They use guns meant for horses" or "They use their teeth to hold the gun and their tongue to pull the trigger" or "they strap guns to their wrists and use wrist-flicks to fire" or "they use their tails to hold and fire guns" or "they use magically animated prosthetic limbs" or "they have their hooves replaced with cyber-limbs that can unfold into hand modes" or "Their hooves let them telekinetically pick stuff they touch up and manipulate them freely so ponies can solve rubix cubes one-hoofed via tactile telekinesis and they can pull triggers just by holding glocks and wanting triggers pulled" or "they utilize trained monkeys on their backs" or "they enchant guns to float near their owners and auto-aim and auto-fire" or "they suck at using guns and rely on setting up machine-gun nests for a reason" or "why the fuck would ponies consider using guns when magical superpowered weapons built for ponies are on the table and can be stronger than even a fifty cal?".

Kkat's response to the holes in his own bad idea was the clunkiest stupidest "Pegasus saddle with shotguns strapped to it" imaginable. The guns are awkwardly connected to a biteable mouth-based trigger instead of anything less inconvenient. But for questions he couldn't think of a mechanical answer to like "How aim" or "How reload?" he decided "magic" was the answer and put the guns on magical swiveling auto-aim mounts. Why don't the guns also auto-fire? Because if they did, everyone would be a cheating TF2 bot with autoaim and autofire instead of just Littlepoop and anyone else with a PipBuck.
Does the prevalence of pipbucks and stealthbucks transform combat? Nah.
Do LP's enemies, upon seeing she has a PipBuck, adapt their targets? Nah.

Does everypony's reliance on these 200 year old arm-computers and back-mounted gun mounts that somehow held up better than Equestria's moral fibre and buildings cause unique problems for the cast? No. PipBuck Friend/Foe Indicators never glitch out and register a friend of LP pissed off at her as a hostile target who genuinely means to do her harm and must be eliminated. Battle Saddles never require maintenance or repair. Nopony scraps Battle Saddles for parts to get scrap metal or anything useful for enchanting things.
Even though this is a setting where enchanted flame bullets are the pinnacle of Zebra technology (the joke there is that ponies in Four Stars made it for the ziggers) and they exist to fuck Power Armour up, so everyone should want enchanted weapons.

Would Zootopia be as visually interesting if all of Zootopia was one boring New York style city without the segregation necessary for different animals to have the different environments and temperatures they thrive in, with distinct areas for the rodent-sized animals and dedicated systems to move them around without making them scurry on the same ground elephants walk over? We didn't need to be told how the system that pulls heat from Tundra Town into Savanna City to freeze one and heat the other works, but our suspension of disbelief appreciates that there is something there to make it happen besides wishful thinking.

If you're going to gloss over a problem like "Horses are using weapons not meant for their bodies" you can handwave problems away with magic/basically-magical technology, or let the problems such a terrible idea creates result in interesting challenges for the heroes(like having to run behind cover and sit on your ass to reload a glock with both hooves and your mouth before you can put the gun back in your mouth and fire some more), or invent solutions for the problems.

Kkat gets so caught up in how clever he felt when he decided on the latter, he failed to proof-read the idea and think of any answers to questions like "how reload? how aim?" that were more interesting than "because magic".

Just like with the story's finale.

He knew Pegasi flying faster than sound would be unable to reload the double-barrelled shotguns taped to them. So instead of envisioning a mechanical reloading solution with auto-reloading arms or fuckhuge drum mags, or discarding this idea and giving Pegasi jet-boosted power armour suits with Iron Man laserbeams and Lockheed Martin F22 Raptor-tier weapons built into the suit, he decided to shrug his shoulders at all the problems in his idea as he went along with it anyway.

And he knew Littlepip tricking Spike into accidentally teleporting her harmlessly into a room with one burned Enclaver corpse but a conspicuous lack of burned airship parts made no sense, but he didn't care enough to think of an answer as simple as "Because destiny. Or because Littlepip chugged a life-threatening amount of health potion. Or because Spike's fire has always sent the things he burns where they need to go, whether that's sending enemies to hell or ensuring letters and friends get where they need to go in the condition they need to be in".

Pic related: if ponies used swords they wouldn't use them like Roranoa Zoro and his sideways sword-blade, they'd use them like the swordfighting horse from Tangled, maybe use shovel handles to make pointing the blades forwards easier. Come to think of it, retractable wrist-blades that would be stupid and unnecessary on humans and inferior to knives/swords in the hand would be great for ponies.
Anonymous
32c5ed6
?
No.327092
>>327091
If he wanted to be lazy intelligently and efficiently he could have just said the ponies use weapons meant for ponies fired from the mouth or from wrist-mounted metal mechanisms with velcro straps depending on gun size (while exclusively saving Big Weapons like miniguns for the telekinetics) and fans would dream up their own examples of how familiar Fallout weapons like shotguns and machine guns and lasers and copyright-friendly Cursed Gun Images material would be redesigned for horses.
But no. He wanted his own brand of "Originality" (a hole-filled uncreative bad idea without the effort and groundwork necessary to make it truly work) out the door as quickly as possible.
Anonymous
47e689f
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No.327093
327098
>>327091
>That pic
Zoro is based on the imagery of pirates climbing ropes whilst holding knives in their mouths.
He fights by swinging his neck and does well via anime nonsense.
lets move on
Anonymous
726db96
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No.327095
327191 327252
I'm curious when glim is going to get started on the next thing
Anonymous
32c5ed6
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No.327098
327100
>>327093
I know and respect that.
From a realistic standpoint holding a heavy-ass sword in your mouth is a bad idea, damn near impossible for a normal guy. If that's an option for you due to bullshit anime super strength, unless you can stretch your neck like Luffy you'd want a way to give your mouth-sword optimal reach and ease of rotation. Thus, Killing Bites- I mean the shovel handle.
Anonymous
47e689f
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No.327100
327191 327199
IMG_20211128_215104.png
>>327098
I prefer to not overthink shows like that. Afterall, they're just cartoons.
Anonymous
6e2c7c9
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No.327191
>>327095
This
>>327100
And this
Anonymous
32c5ed6
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No.327199
>>327100
>just
bruh
a cartoon is just a cartoon. Oh but a movie is special and a book even moreso... doesn't that logic seem a little faulty?
Media doesn't have to be realistic. But I can appreciate it when it sprinkles some realism into the fantasy.
Kkat attempted this with his mechanical gun holders for horses and failed because he couldn't think of good answers to basic questions.
Battle Saddles could answer "how aim?" And "how reload?" if they utilized belt-fed slow-firing machine guns (rarely having to reload mid combat as a result) and admitted horses are bad at reloading these things, then put tongue operated joysticks on the biteable mouth trigger for manual mechanical aiming.
of course making battle saddles less retarded can't absolve them of full retardity.
Putting guns on horses is less valuable than putting guns on small flying disposable cheaply-produced self-piloting attack drones like the Eyebots, or Spritebots as they are called in this story.
Sometimes I want to write a FE fic just to satirize every stupid element of this shitfic and its nonsense setting. The hero would be a chad 30something unicorn assigned to protect a retarded lesbian loser girl who vastly overestimates her own abilities and is only "special" because she's some "chosen one" chosen to be nonconsensually sacrificed to a weather machine on the other end of the wasteland specifically because she is the least useful and bearable pony in her Stable least likely to breed viable offspring for the vault due to being an egotistical midget prone to unprovoked acts of violence wrapped up in cheap moral justifications. She babbles nonsense about the stable being full of inbred hillbillies when it's actually got a massive population that carefully selects its relationships for superior non-inbred kids, because only a retard would take Fallout 3's "there are like 14 people in a vault smaller than the average town" depiction of a vault as a factual depiction of how that vault works rather than a creative liberty taken to avoid having to make this vault too big for gameplay and too overcrowded for the shit engine. Battle Saddles lose their plot armour and are depicted as the clunky pieces of shit they are compared to superior attack options like homing magic fireballs and flying armed robots and guns held in the tail. Every major FE event would be referenced in less retarded form as an event Lily Littleshit fucks up for others by getting involved for no reason. Oh and zebras did everything wrong during a war griffons made happen. Eventually a zebra army shows up to attack equestria and the chad hero genocides every last one of these evolutionary failures before stopping the griffons from unleashing a anti-pony virus and reprogramming their virus machine to unleash a magical virus beneficial to pony life (curing disabilities and improving fertility and granting them radiation immunity) while turning all evil creatures like ziggers and jews into docile subservient livestock such as cows and sheep. The moral of the story would be: fuck women and fuck jews and fuck niggers. Peace means solving the jew and nigger problem and putting women in their place. Maybe I'll write it while code is compiling if I run out of jiggling bunnygirl animation frames to draw.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
6d6be6f
?
No.327252
>>327095

We'll begin with The Best Night Ever in probably a couple of days. Since this thread was mainly for FoE and it's probably close to bump limit, I will most likely start a new thread.
Anonymous
32c5ed6
?
No.327499
Writing question

Kkat clearly wanted to pad this story out but it turned out shit because he sucks at padding.

If Kkat wanted to pad this story out in better ways, would "make LP travel from place to place solving multiple sidequests at once in different stages, making backtracking necessary" be a better way to do it?

For example say LP goes to Vault 69 to get a chip her vault needs but to get into Vault 69 you need a Key Card only available at Vault City but they will only give you the Key Card if you beat their Hoverboard Race so you must visit the old abandoned Mega Mall store to swipe a hoverboard at the end of a sick dungeon then you must go to HoverCorp HQ for another dungeon and swipe their Hoverboard Upgrade but it's got poison gas so to get in you need an Air Filter Mask like those found in Brotherhood Of Steel suits but they will only give you their suits if you befriend an interesting BOS character and go on a series of sidequests that shine a spotlight on every hole in their ideology before letting you fuck off with the power armour and new BOS teammate, and blah blah blah there's a long chain of sidequests that need to be done in order.

That way it would always feel like each sidequest is bringing LP one step closer to her goal even though each if these steps are actually artificial gates you made up with keys at the end of dungeon challenges.

It would certainly help fix this story's love of making LP drop time sensitive goals and risk death in random fights/dungeons for little or no reward like a gamer with no emotional attachment to anything especially the main plot.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
7783815
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No.327796
New thread:
>>327793 →
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